The Lukoil Oil Company implements a large-scale implementation project of corporate cloud telephony

The Lukoil-Inform company with the assistance of Nvision Group system integrator implements a difficult task: the system of telephone communication for several hundred divisions of the Lukoil oil company in Europe and Russia is constructed.

Task

Lukoil-Inform fundamentally approached questions of the choice of the contractor and the solution. For a start all potential contractors received technical specifications according to which they deployed proposed solutions in test zones. By the standards of the industry tested systems long – about half a year.

Main goal of the project the customer announced providing a reliable communication for all subscribers of the company, a broad spectrum of communication services and also connectivities of any equipment presented at the market. Proceeding from it the main requirements to the implementable platform are defined. First of all, it is openness and support of the fundamental industrial standards. The high capacity of automatic telephone exchange – to 50 thousand numbers with a possibility of expansion is necessary. To provide reliability and disaster tolerance, the platform should have geographical reservation on three alternative platforms. It is also necessary to provide support of the IP telephony in the available corporate network connecting all divisions of Lukoil. Besides, the customer set a number of conditions on corporate settings and integration with internal information systems.

Solution

The Nvision Group system integrator which offered own development of NVoiceG Switch as a basis took part in the solution of a task. In 2011 the companies through joint efforts brought the unified communication framework into operation. At the moment more than 3 thousand subscribers are connected to a system, and thanks to ample opportunities of scaling over time all staff of Lukoil will be able to become users of the solution.

Dmitry Novikov, director of a division of work with corporate clients of NVision Group:

• Our solution on set of characteristics as much as possible met the requirements of technical specifications. The platform developed by us provides communication services not just on corporate, and at the operator level. I think, experience of the previous projects implemented for telecom operators in Russia and the CIS helped to win the tender to us. Especially professional examination according to voice solutions was useful.

Summing up the testing results, the customer considered first of all the potential power of solutions. Contestants generally offered systems implemented on office and production automatic telephone exchanges (UPATS) which use the closed protocols and have restrictions on scalability (increase in number of subscribers) and fault tolerance.

Project implementation stages

Preparatory stage. Specialists of NVision Group simulated standard segments of future automatic telephone exchange at the laboratory stand and tested a number of solutions on integration. Testing for compliance to standard requirements took place Lukoil-Inform on information security successfully. "On start there were some difficulties, but we quickly corrected the most part of errors, and further everything got better", – Dmitry Novikov noted.

Nikolay Grushetsky, associate director, chief engineer Lukoil-Inform:

• When choosing the contractor we were guided by his competence and experience of successful implementations. Besides, the solution of NVision Group meets all our requirements, has necessary functionality and allows to add new features, for example multimedia services. Already at the first stage of the project we received the consolidated solution which helped to lower maintenance overheads of telephony and increased efficiency of its use.

The first results and perspectives

The program of upgrade of a communication framework is expected several years, and expansion of opportunities of the constructed automatic telephone exchange will be defined by growth of requirements of Lukoil. In process of opening of new offices the company will be able to increase number capacity, just adding the next servers to DPC.

Evgeny Novikov, chief of the control center (CC) Lukoil-Inform:

• The project objective is achieved – the highly reliable unified telephone network with a wide range of possibilities is built. Among them – short numbers for calls between offices, flexible readdressing, multipoint conferences. Also subscribers can make and accept calls from the computer and the mobile phone, receive by e-mail of the notification about the passed calls, etc. All this will make use of corporate telephony more convenient.