Case Studies

NEW YORK MEDIA

Click here to download this study.

Background
New York Media, the multiple award-winning publisher of New York Magazine and nymag.com, guides the activities, style and opinions of resident New Yorkers, visitors and far-flung readers. In 2007, the company relocated from its long-time office location on New York’s Madison Avenue to Varick Street in downtown New York’s rising media corridor, Hudson Square.

“It isn’t often that you have the opportunity to build the communication system you want,” said Albert Lee, Director of Information Technology for New York Media. “We were focused on internal mobility. We wanted to be smarter about the way we worked as an organization and deploy the tools we needed to respond to major events outside our control.”

Challenge
The relocation of NY Magazine’s corporate headquarters presented an opportunity to upgrade their legacy telephony system, and offered the company an ideal forum to introduce new technologies to support internal mobility, redundancy and future technology upgrades. Technical requirements included integration with the existing Cisco data infrastructure and compatibility with OpenFire, the company’s Jabber-based enterprise instant messaging. Extensive new cabling and wiring was required to support the demands of both an IP telephony system and a heavily utilized publishing system network. The company required uninterrupted service throughout the phased relocation of its equipment, systems and employees.

Consultedge’s Solution
Consultedge proposed a solution that addressed each specific need expressed by New York Media. According to Lee, “We read proposals from different vendors. Many vendors ignored the business requirements in our RFP and proposed solutions that were inappropriate for our needs. Consultedge focused on how they could achieve our performance goals within our stated infrastructure and budget requirements. We chose Consultedge’s solution.”

Consultedge designed and deployed a cohesive system with the following elements:

• Upgrade from legacy Avaya Definity G3 to Communication Manager and S8710 media server, which provides inherent redundancy;
• Avaya EC500 to support full mobility of all employees within the facility, minimize user training requirements, and support future extension to off-site sales personnel;
• Avaya Intuity for voice mail, email and fax messaging;
• Integration of existing Cisco data infrastructure with new system;
• VPN phones for satellite offices, and to provide added flexibility;
• Cabling to support current operational capacity and accommodate future high-bandwidth voice and data applications;
• All post-warranty maintenance for new systems and legacy systems.

Results

“Our overriding goal was a system that allowed for smarter use of people’s time,” said Lee. “Internal mobility is the cornerstone of that effort. It minimizes the time-consuming voicemail and email pileup by allowing employees to connect to their incoming calls from any phone in the facility. We’ve created a system that supports productivity and communication while drastically reducing the time people are inaccessible. “