What is our primary use case?
We wanted to outsource our phone system and not have to manage it in-house. That's why we turned to CDW. We're using the service solely for our Cisco phone system. It's hosted and managed by CDW and they have an interface portal that we use to do some internal management. We can do some basic user changes and updates, but we can also put in a request to CDW for any management changes.
How has it helped my organization?
CDW Managed Collaboration provides us with reliability and it has really simplified scalability for us. For example, we're constantly adding, moving, and closing locations. Their service has really simplified that process for us, making it very easy for us to add phone service to a new location or to move it. That has probably been the biggest win.
In addition, we have been able to support the expansion of the scope of our phone system—it has grown about threefold—with the same number of people. We spend less time on the day-to-day care and feeding of the system. CDW has definitely saved us both time and the need to have more in-depth technical support staff available in-house. We don't have to have a deep technical bench to support the system. It has mitigated the need to increase our internal staff, even though the scope has grown.
What is most valuable?
One of the valuable features of CDW Managed Collaboration is having a deeper level of technical support available for troubleshooting and monitoring. We can rely on that technical support to do a lot of the heavy lifting in supporting the system.
It is important to us to still have ownership in the day-to-day management of our UCaaS operations in addition to having Managed Collaboration. CDW has struck the right balance in this regard. What I like about it is that the tools we have from them allow us to self-manage our phone system as much as we want. If we want to be heavily involved, we can be. And if we don't want to be involved, we can go that route as well.
It's also very important that Managed Collaboration provides us with one place to call for support of the whole solution. There is a specific team for the system that we're on, and issues generally go directly to that team. We don't usually get transferred around. They actually manage our phone service provider as well, so even if there are issues with the phone service provider, we can just call CDW and they will work with them on our behalf.
What needs improvement?
There is a little bit of a downside when you go through a provider for UCaaS, the downside being that you no longer have direct access to the system itself. That is something we had when we had it on-prem. There's a learning curve to using the CDW portal. Originally, the interface they provided to manage the solution was poor. However, they have upgraded that and the new solution is much better and much more powerful. It's a slight negative that you don't have direct access to the system, but the new management system probably provides enough support.
Other than that, the only complaint I have is regarding their mean time to resolution for some non-critical issues. We're a little more involved in managing the system because the people we have are technically proficient enough to do it. CDW does struggle with getting some of those lower-priority tasks done in a time that is acceptable to us. Sometimes, it's just easier to do things ourselves because we can get them completed quicker.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using CDW Managed Collaboration for about five years.
How are customer service and support?
From a project management standpoint, CDW has been pretty good. We usually get a dedicated project manager when we have a larger-scale project, such as the implementation of a large site. That's done outside of what's included in the standard service we use, but that has worked fine. For smaller projects, there isn't a dedicated project person; it's just ad hoc work.
Overall, our expectations have been met in terms of services delivered on time, on budget, and on spec.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
This is the first service we've used of this kind. Previously, we had the phone system on-prem and we had a third party that we leveraged for support, but they weren't hosting and managing the system.
How was the initial setup?
We were under pressure due to some external projects at the time we signed up with CDW, so we got the system up and running with them in about two months. It was expedited and faster than normal.
On our end we had to provide information like who was going to get what type of phone, a list of users and their numbers; customer-specific information. It was pretty straightforward. There were some complexities around adapting to a production/manufacturing environment, but they weren't terrible.
The phone system is in about 60 percent of our organization but the number of people who interact with CDW is very small. It's just a handful of people on our internal support team. On the network side, we have four people involved, and there are a couple of people on our help desk team who interact directly with CDW, but that's pretty rare.
What was our ROI?
CDW Managed Collaboration has definitely reduced our costs. It's a subscription model, so the costs are higher, on paper, than having an in-house solution and the cost of the hardware for that. But overall, it has reduced our costs.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did evaluate the third-party provider that was supporting our on-prem system, but they were quite a bit smaller as a company and that was the deciding factor in why we went with CDW.
What other advice do I have?
My advice is that you should expect that you're still going to need to be involved in interfacing, but that's a general comment that applies to all external providers. You can't expect that you're just going to be able to outsource a phone system and not have anybody internally who understands the business requirements. You need someone who is able to relay that kind of information to the service provider. They manage a lot of different companies and they're not going to understand what the requirements of your particular business are.
You always lose some efficiency when you have to go to an external partner. You have to interface with them because they don't necessarily understand your business. That efficiency loss would probably be there with any partner. We don't have the internal employee base to support our system in the same way, so CDW's service has made us more efficient because we would have had to go to an outside partner no matter what, to support the large system we have. It gives us agility and ease in managing changes in our system.
The fact that Managed Collaboration is a partner that can manage a hybrid environment with multiple vendor platforms is not something we need to leverage right now. That could change though. We would like to look at using Microsoft Teams for unified communications and would leverage them for that, down the road.
*Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
