Doosan Digital Innovation of America (DDIA) powers Teams Direct Routing with Bandwidth

Future-proofing employee and customer experiences

Since 1896, Doosan Group has built up an impressive list of achievements. From running the world’s first near-zero-waste fuel cell power plant to leading the development of Bobcat, the global organization takes an intentional, urgent approach to driving change for the planet. In fact, you’ve probably encountered one of Doosan’s brands and not even realized it.

Part of Doosan’s global reach comes from Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A). As a result, their unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) strategy was composed of legacy on-prem equipment, regional carriers, and a series of disjointed Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solutions.

That’s when Doosan’s security and information technology (IT) partner, Doosan Digital Innovation of America (DDIA), began looking for a simpler, scalable way to power communications and E911 across the organization.

With over 16 organizations across the Americas, Asia-Pacific (APAC), and Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), Doosan’s communications landscape quickly became a user experience that was expensive and complex to manage. Their employees had multiple phone numbers, apps, and devices to send and receive calls, and DDIA had to manage each provider separately.“

Ready to leave the telecomplexity of Doosan’s existing communications setup in the dust, DDIA’s Managing Director, Joe Jaszkowiak, and Ryan Kurpiers, the Infrastructure Operations Manager, began exploring cloud-based unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) solutions to support their global organization.

Learn about some of the brands DDIA manages IT and communications for:

Migrating DDIA’s telephony for future-ready communications

Digital transformation has swept every corner of the world, and enterprise telecommunications is no different. Following a shift to remote working capacity in early 2020, 39% of businesses are looking to invest in cloud communications and collaboration software throughout 2021.

Following the retirement of Skype for Business, Joe knew DDIA needed to consolidate and migrate their current communications to a more modern collaboration hub for an optimized user experience. To do this, he set his gaze on Microsoft Teams as their UCaaS platform of choice due to its end-to-end capabilities and dynamic E911 compatibility.

Before turning to Microsoft Teams, the employees at Doosan were faced with a disjointed communications experience that led to underutilized tools and lost efficiency. Although headquartered in Georgia, USA, Doosan’s employees are located across the Americas  — requiring many telecom contracts plugging into various on-premise and local Private Branch Exchanges (PBX).

DDIA had two options to power their global enterprise communications on Microsoft Teams: Connect to the PSTN with Microsoft Teams’ built-in calling plans, or unbundle their telecom through a Direct Routing partner for direct-to-carrier PSTN access.

“We knew we wanted to consolidate and simplify our tech stack, modernize the user experience of our employees, and migrate telecommunications fully to the cloud. At Doosan’s scale, the Microsoft Teams calling plans were expensive. I wanted to keep the functionality of their calling plans without the cost or complexity of building out a custom solution to fit our needs,” Joe explained.

With a focus on simplicity and modernization, the DDIA team began searching for a way to lower their costs and unlock scalability for their future in the cloud.

Solving for Direct Routing with global SIP and E911

Knowing the Microsoft Teams’ international and domestic calling plans were too expensive for DDIA’s scale, Joe and Ryan began the search for a Direct Routing partner to bring enterprise-grade carrier control into Microsoft Teams.

They considered building a custom communications solution out of local telecom providers, yet decided to explore other avenues due to complexity and scope.

“Part of our focus was to simplify and reduce what we need to manage [internally] across our telephony. We started to look for a single unified provider that could power our voice needs on Microsoft Teams, while also delivering telephony to other communications and contact center solutions,” Joe recalled.

But consolidating telecommunications was just one hoop DDIA needed to jump through — Joe and Ryan also needed to connect his workforce to emergency services like 911 for both employee safety and regulatory compliance.

With regulations like RAY BAUM’S Act and Kari’s Law in the U.S., DDIA needed to offer precise employee location information at the time of a 911 call. In turn, this makes migrating away from on-prem to cloud-based UCaaS solutions in a distributed workforce even more complicated.

After exploring their Direct Routing and emergency service options, DDIA’s leaders chose to move forward with the industry’s only complete solution for Direct Routing and E911 available from a carrier: Bandwidth’s Direct Routing for Microsoft Teams.

Direct for Teams’ software-driven SIP fully integrates with dynamic E911 for Teams to give Joe and Ryan the power to migrate Doosan’s enterprise telecom to the cloud, ensure employee safety, and stay compliant with ever-evolving regulatory requirements.

Now, whenever a DDIA employee connected to a provisioned network element makes a 911 call through Microsoft Teams, Bandwidth’s dynamic location routing (DLR) identifies the user’s network location and provides the current caller location for fast and accurate emergency responses.

Going direct-to-carrier to lower costs and improve control

Rather than dealing with fragmented network providers across the country, DDIA now has access to a global IP network and APIs — giving Doosan direct PSTN access, enterprise-grade control, and direct-to-carrier pricing.

This gives Joe and Ryan more control and transparency into their telephony by working directly with their telecom carrier, helping them pool usage across users and easily resolve challenges.

“The migration from on-premise to cloud telecommunications was straightforward and painless. Our team and your engineers worked together to refine the best possible solution on our side as customers, and for future Direct Routing for Microsoft Teams users.”

Joe Jaszkowiak, DDIA’s Managing Director

Happy porting without disruptions or downtime

As the head of Infrastructure Operations, Ryan Kurpiers led their cloud migration with Bandwidth’s engineers and worked closely with both teams to migrate away from their on-prem equipment.

Throughout the number porting process, Ryan and his team could prevent painful disruptions — even when porting from multiple losing carriers around the country. By using Bandwidth’s recommended no-interruption porting process, they plugged in Bandwidth SIP trunks in parallel to their existing telecom infrastructure, ported their numbers to Bandwidth, and then migrated to their Microsoft Teams platform with more control and less risk (with rollback capabilities). That way, Joe and Ryan could ensure there was no downtime, no matter where they were porting numbers from or to.

“Bandwidth has given us more flexibility over the future of our telephony with Bring Your Own Carrier (BYOC) via Direct Routing for Microsoft Teams because we’re not locked into specific carriers at specific locations,” Ryan said. “We also have a lot more granularity with our numbers. We can manage number changes by ourselves, with one unified dashboard to manage porting and migration.”

Ryan Kurpiers, Infrastructure Operations Manager

With a global cloud-native carrier powering their Microsoft Teams phone system, DDIA’s communications are cost-effective and scalable with the flexibility to expand into new markets, bring carrier access to their other communications platforms (such as contact centers), and deliver compliant emergency services.

Slashing telephony costs and optimizing DDIA’s user experience

DDIA’s relationship with Bandwidth has delivered more than just enterprise communications. Joe, Ryan, and the rest of DDIA have decommissioned their legacy Session Border Controllers (SBCs) and reduced the need for on-premise equipment to achieve more centralized visibility into networks from the cloud.

By doing this, Joe and Ryan lowered Doosan’s telephony spend by nearly 50%: “Using Direct Routing for Microsoft Teams to power our calling plans meant reducing our PSTN services and on-prem equipment.”

Aside from consolidating telecommunication vendors, Joe and Ryan have spearheaded the transformation of DDIA’s calling experience. In fact, the DDIA team has begun to see company-wide shifts in how they experience calling.

“Our employees stopped using their mobile devices for general calling and moved towards one unified platform. From a user experience standpoint, consolidating everything into teams has been a big win. Since the migration, our employees have told us they really like the unified calling experience,” Joe recalled.

Driving the next wave of digital transformation for people and the planet

Joe and Ryan can continue providing innovative solutions and empowering experiences for their employees and users with a comprehensive set of communications resources designed for the global enterprise.“

“A lot of the wins of working with you are on the user experience side, ” explained Ryan. “The phone number management dashboard is so easy to use, and it’s reduced the amount of time I spend managing telephony across our employees and numbers. Your support is unmatched and everyone is super easy to work with. From initial support tickets to questions I had during our migration, your team helped make the process easy.”

From real human customer support to transformative technology, Joe and Ryan have a true partner in innovation with Bandwidth—from product development to porting and beyond.

“Your technical approach to powering telephony was exciting to us. We had everything up and running and could begin calling within the week. Your engineering team was instrumental in deploying our telephony because it’s such a new approach.”

Joe Jaszkowiak, DDIA’s Managing Director

Looking ahead, Joe and Ryan are focused on their digital transformation across DDIA’s operations and their suite of industrial brands.

“You can help us reach DDIA’s goals by integrating your capabilities as a carrier and a software provider into our telecom platforms,” said Joe. “It’s been a great experience on our side. Whenever we fell, you’d pick us right back up and set us back on our paths. You delivered on your promises and hit the mark every single time.”