EPK

EPK (www.epkgroup.ru) is a leading manufacturer of bearings of all types used in a range of industries. The company has offices across the Russian Federation and abroad. EPK were assisted in this project by Softline (http://softline.ru/contact/msk), a major international company specializing in software licensing and providing a full range of IT services including technical assistance, IT outsourcing, training, legal support, consulting, and cloud programming solutions. Softline is a long-standing system integration partner of AudioCodes.

With its offices widely spread across Russia, EPK had never developed a uniform communications infrastructure. This meant that the company was running a wide variety of communications platforms at its various offices, some of which had been running since the 1970s. The mixture of legacy PBXs, IP-PBXs and unified communications platforms was resulting in spiraling maintenance and support costs. Furthermore, growing numbers of calls between EPK’s offices and to customers and suppliers both inside Russia and abroad was leaving EPK with very high communications costs.

The company decided that it was time to move ahead and introduce a single communications platform that would serve all its offices and offer employees a state-of-the-art communications experience. The diverse nature of EPK’s existing setup meant that this was not something that could take place overnight. The selected solution would have to be able to support a gradual migration enabling EPK to move its users across to the new system at a manageable pace and in a fully controlled fashion.

EPK had already begun using Microsoft Lync for instant messaging, presence and conferencing. Lync’s ease-of-use and rich unified communications functionality made it a perfect solution for EPK. However, to expand its use throughout the company at all its sites would require a connectivity solution with full interoperability with both Lync and all the existing IP and TDM platforms that EPK was already using.