SN Power

SN Power AS (www.snpower.com) invests in clean, renewable energy on a commercial basis in emerging markets. The company focuses on investments in hydroelectricity and has several running plants in the Philippines, Zambia and Panama. The company operates in Southeast Asia, Africa and Central America and has established offices in Oslo, Netherlands, Singapore, Philippines, Zambia and Panama. The company is a joint venture between Statkraft and Norfund, both owned by the Government of Norway.

With its headquarters in Oslo, many offices located around the world and a growing number of mobile workers, efficient and reliable communications were becoming increasingly more important for SN Power. The company had been using hosted Microsoft Lync unified communications (UC) services from an Application Service Provider, with additional VoIP services from a leading telecommunication company for its Norwegian users. While the service delivered much of the UC functionality one would expect from Lync, the fact that it was hosted by the service provider meant that it had certain limitations. For example, it did not allow SN Power to create its own customized dial plan. In addition, outgoing calls made through the system were charged at the telecommunication company’s mobile call rates meaning that SN Power was not making any real cost savings using Lync.

Another area that SN Power was looking to improve was dial-in conferencing. With a highly mobile workforce dispersed across many different countries around the world, the company needed a solution which would enable its employees to join conferences simply and efficiently from wherever they were. SN Power was already using Microsoft Skype for Business unified communications via Office 365 in the cloud and the most logical solution was to expand that capability to include enterprise voice for its global employees.

The new solution needed to be fully integrated with the existing Office 365 setup, offer the capability of easily hooking up with cost-effective SIP trunking services and be easy to maintain and configure.