Hosted Case Study: Mercator Capital Mercator Capital is a boutique investment bank focused on Mergers & Acquisitions, Private Placements, and Strategic Advisory Services. Industry sectors include Communications, Technology and Life Sciences Primarily focused on M&A transactions; have acted as advisors for buyers and sellers for deals within the VoIP sector Publish a monthly IP Communications newsletter to over 10,000 subscribers User of hosted service for 12 months --8 users; 10+ seats --2 offices

“Hosted VoIP solution paid for itself in about 10-11 months;
currently saving about $600 per month over previous system.”

Pre-VoIP, Summer 2005

US Office (Reston, Virginia)		Israel Office (Tel Aviv)
Voice: – AT&T T1, Local, and LD – Nitsuko (NEC) TDM PBX – 10 phones, 1 fax Internet: – Comcast Business (10 Mbps) – SonicWall firewall – Desktops, laptops, wireless		Voice: – Bezeq (Incumbent) POTS Internet: – CLEC DSL (1.5 Mbps) – Single user with laptop

Key Driving Factors

(1) US office move planned       --Moving old PBX would require costs, outsourced support       --Do we really want to pay to move 8 year old antiquated system? (2) Economics       --Monthly AT&T bill $1600-$1800; much of LD between US-Israel offices       --Hosted VoIP estimates were $600-800 per month; lower overall TCO (3) Features       --Old PBX was not user friendly; no support for advanced features such as Outlook           integration, remote office, softphone, etc. (4) Technical support       --Old PBX required outsourced support to PBX dealer; hosted service managed          through web portal and more user friendly (5) “Practice what you preach”       --Mercator Capital has published IP Communications Newsletter for 3 years and          represented numerous VoIP clients, so it was important for us to also use VoIP          technology

Unexpected Results

Voice quality as good or better than TDM network --Especially on calls to Israel, where Skype was used for some informal office-to-office    conversations Education required at all levels -- Lower TCO estimates for CapEx and OpEx may not take into account learning curve     and debugging during first few months of operation --Non-technical users blame everything on “new phone system” when things don’t work    as planned Now 4-digit dialing between offices included in plan; no need for Skype

Expected Results

Users love new features that they didn’t have before --Outlook integration (i.e. click to dial) --Voicemail delivery via email --Long distance (international) dialing through voice portal --Remote office feature --Softphone capability for travel Learning curve to new technology took some time --Both technical and non-technical users had some learning curve to use features and    experience all the benefits of new system Monthly OpEx lower than before; TCO has also decreased --Currently saving about $600 per month versus $1000 estimate

"Now that users have hosted VoIP, they wouldn’t go back!"

The Report Card

System Reliability   B
Sound Quality   A
Features   A+

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