Category: Case Studies

Like PB&J, some things just go better together, and Frogfoot and Fibre are two of them. Over 15 years of telecoms and connectivity experience combine to create a brand renowned for technical excellence- one at the forefront of Fibre to the Home and Business growth throughout South Africa.

Frogfoot is at the heart of Fibre innovation and plays a leading role in understanding, improving and operating said networks throughout the country. However, the brands involvement doesn’t begin and end at simply providing their product, but rather expands to mastering it, which places them at the pinnacle of their market sector and then some.

The Challenge:

Lockdown saw Frogfoot as a whole growing from strength to strength, and with this expansion came a need for improved communications solutions which syncronised with an existing brand identity. For many years, the organisation found themselves limited by an outdated PBX system which performed its functions yet was never tested to a critical threshold. However, with the impact of Covid-19 came the looming threat of these limits being pushed, and this in turn created a need for an effective, non-intrusive communications upgrade.

Frogfoot required an off-the-shelf product which aligned with their business model, particularly one with the measurability their current product lacked.

Enter 3CX…

The Solution:

3CX presented a natural, seamless solution, as the software doesn’t require any invasive changes on behalf of its users.

The system was agile enough to accommodate for all the business needs of Frogfoot, yet still allowed for the brands capacity to conduct its own hosting.

In choosing 3CX, Frogfoot saw a multitude of key focus areas which required immediate attention addressed- namely measurability, reporting, enhanced functions, and reduced call-waiting times. The software allowed for a transition so effortless it entirely eradicated the need to say, “please bear with us, we’re changing systems”. Instead, it allowed for an easy, effective switch with no negative impact on performance.

The Implementation:

With the rollout of 3CX came a simple implementation and, with servers already being hosted internally, this was minimally invasive, allowing for immediate continuation of everyday work. If anything, the software allowed the brand more time to focus on what matters, as time consuming metrics such as facilitating the transition of numerous employees from hard desks to soft home locations could be facilitated in hours.

With a year-long remuneration option, costs were settled upfront, meaning to balancing of accounts and having to run from pillar to post assembling monthly invoices. Single sign-on capabilities also allowed for seamless integration with Office365, which resulted in an implementation process best described as “perfect”.

The Benefits:

Most importantly, however, are the benefits of this switch, which Frogfoot are happy to report can be found in abundance.

First off, one of the key features included a softphone compatible with both iPhone and Android systems. The idea presented to Frogfoot was essentially “here’s a product, but you can still transfer any existing resources you require” which meant eliminating the need for desk phones and hard locations entirely.

In fact, this softphone feature in particular stands out for field tech agents, as the benefits are immense. Calls can be monitored, spend can be evaluated or controlled, and there’s no need to claim back airtime or incur logistical hassle at a later stage- everything is centralised and catered for via the system.

It allows for transitioning to the new as conventional handsets are replaced and, in the event of staff increases, the process is up and running in next to no time. Zero admin, no deviating logistics- the brand is free to focus on actual work instead of diverting company resources.

The lack of hidden costs or license structures is an additional benefit, as is the concept of Data storage and boardroom capability. With the latter feature, a singular platform allows each individual user to host or attend private meetings as they need. No more worrying about cross platform headaches, with one caller on Zoom and another on Teams, as all it takes is a link and you’re good to go.

Call-flow designers allow for custom calls, analogue compatibility means configuration is not extensive, reporting functions cater for full performance breakdowns and metrics including who’s doing what, how well they’re performing and when they’re doing it, and, of course, the solution as a whole is essentially “tech made easy and accessible”.

We’ll close off with the words of Frogfoot IS Manager, Enzio Von Diest:

‘By selecting 3CX as our voice platform, Frogfoot has been able to accelerate its transition to a modern, feature packed and agile communications platform to facilitate the business to focus on its strategic objectives and pursuit of service excellence.’

Vox’s customisable business solutions and skilled customer management help to keep Jacaranda FM on top of their game in an ever-changing media landscape.

The Industry

The commercial broadcast radio industry has come a long way since Jacaranda FM first went private in 1997. Relying on a single medium – like radio – to reach your audience is no longer enough if you want to remain relevant in the 21^st century. In addition to broadcast radio, Jacaranda FM also forms part of South Africa’s burgeoning multi-channel media industry, streaming nationally via DStv, offering audiences everything from music to podcasts and online shopping through its various portals, while competing for attention with TV, video-on-demand and streaming services.

The Company

Broadcasting at 94.2 FM from Midrand, Gauteng, with a staff of about 65 employees, Jacaranda FM has the only bilingual commercial radio licence in the country – broadcasting in English and Afrikaans across Gauteng, the North West province, Limpopo and Mpumalanga to approximately 1.3 million listeners per week. With an additional audience of almost two million consuming the brand’s audio streams, podcasts, videos, social media and online posts per week.

The Challenge

As Jacaranda FM’s technical and IT manager, Andrew Pike, explains, to keep pace in a highly competitive multi-channel media market, Jacaranda FM requires high levels of uptime.

“Our online presence is critically important, so we need a stable data connection. Being taken seriously as a mid-size business has also been a challenge. We previously used a larger IT services provider, but we felt their solutions were tailored to large business and were inflexible.”

The Solution

“Not only is Vox a large enough player in the industry to be trustworthy and relevant, they also offer solutions that exactly or closely match our needs and budget. Having a dedicated Vox customer manager who took the time to understand our business helped immensely,” says Pike, before adding, “The Vox Fibre to the Business (FTTB) line has proven extremely reliable, with a very small unavailability percentage.”

Employees at Jacaranda FM were also able to make a near seamless transition to a work from home (WFH) environment last year thanks to Vox’s Access Point Name (APN).  As Pike reveals, “The APN SIM cards provide many of our WFH staff with a reliable Internet connection while out and about, or if their home Internet connection is non-existent or down. The management of these cards and the setting-up and updating of data limits is a simple process via the Vox portal.”

Additional Benefits

WFH is made even easier for Jacaranda’s staff thanks to Vox’s Uncapped Voice solution and Hardware as a Service (HaaS) offering. As Pike reveals, “Vox uncapped Voice and HaaS were introduced to me by our customer manager even though I wasn’t looking for solutions in those fields. The fact that we decided to adopt them both is testimony to Vox’s commitment to introducing new and relevant services based on their customer knowledge.”

Says Pike, “We tried Vox HaaS as an experiment, renting five Windows laptops for some of our office staff. The process was very simple, the hardware is of a good standard and swap-outs when repairs are needed are very prompt.”

Overall Experience with Vox

Ultimately, Pike couldn’t be happier with Vox’s customised business solutions and prompt service. “I’d describe our relationship with Vox as good-to-excellent,” he says, before adding, “Thanks to the advanced Service Level Agreement (SLA), I always get a response to a ticket within the hour, and most tickets have been resolved the same day. When escalation has been necessary, I’m usually kept in the loop and well-informed.”

Infinidat, a global leader in enterprise petabyte scale data storage solutions, has revolutionised both the storage platform and Customer Experience (CX) for Vox. The cost-effective, high performance, high capacity and 100% availability InfiniBox enterprise storage solution from Infinidat plays a central role in supporting the entire Vox offering. It has improved the performance of all services across the business.

The challenge

At the start of 2019, Vox faced two significant difficulties around its existing storage platform. Firstly, the five-year maintenance period was coming to an end, and secondly, the company was running out of capacity much faster than anticipated. Adding to these issues, Vox was unable to utilise the full capacity of its existing storage solution, as some 40TB needed to remain ‘unused’ for the system to function.

“We reached the capacity limit of the system faster than anticipated. Coupled with the prohibitively expensive maintenance extension option, we made the decision to perform a technology refresh and replace the platform with a completely new solution,” explained Keith Laaks, Executive Head for Technology, at Vox.

The solution

Vox needed a cost-effective, high-performance storage array for its hosting environment in order to assist the business to meet customer demands and rampant data growth. An agile partner, who would be able to deliver quickly, was also a necessity. After evaluating 12 different storage arrays on criteria such as performance, Inputs/Outputs Per Second (IOPS), storage efficiencies, compression, deduplication and redundancy, Vox selected the InfiniBox solution from Infinidat, supplied by local partner and solutions integrator, Datacentrix.

“Datacentrix prides itself on operating within the top three tiers for all its technology partners and provides Tier 1 partner services for Infinidat in the South African market. Our formal customer engagement approach is underpinned by our technical expertise and business advisory services, ensuring best-fit solutions for our clients. As the technical delivery partner throughout the InfiniBox implementation, we delivered all the pre-sales requirements, including workshop sessions with Vox and Infinidat representatives as well as ongoing support,” said Schalk Gouws, Account Manager at Datacentrix.

Two InfiniBox F4304 arrays were deployed, one at each of Vox’s data centres in Johannesburg within the production and Disaster Recovery (DR) environments respectively.  For workloads with low Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO), Vox makes use of VMware’s vSphere replication feature.

“These arrays primarily service our virtual servers, database and voice infrastructure, and also play a key role in our data protection strategy. The solution allows seamless integration with our data protection vendor,” said Selby Maake, Cloud Storage and Virtualisation Engineer at Vox Telecom.

“Each array delivers 1.7 Petabytes (PB) of virtual capacity with the actual available capacity variable depending on the compression ratio. This gives us far more storage for an extremely cost-effective rate per terabyte.”

The implementation

Implementation of the solution began in September 2019 and took one month to complete. Local Infinidat partner, Datacentrix, worked closely with Vox on the installation, helping Vox take the project from racking, stacking and initialisation, through to switching, provisioning, testing, and finally into the production environment. Infinidat also provided certified administration training through Datacentrix, flying in experts from its head office in Israel to South Africa. This was to ensure the data migration was seamless.

“Thanks to excellent relationships, solid teams and effective planning from the outset, the implementation went smoothly and no challenges were experienced. The training and support provided by Infinidat throughout the journey ensured we got it right the first time. The proof of our success came from our customers’ users, who noticed performance improvements without being aware that a storage upgrade had been performed,” said Laaks.

The benefits

As a hosting provider, Vox must meet customer demand for capacity. The InfiniBox arrays were ideal due to their flexibility when it comes to scale and ease-of-use for critical workloads. Also, they deliver superior performance with a low total cost of ownership (TCO) without compromising the CX. The InfiniBox ultimately empowered Vox with a data-driven competitive advantage at petabyte scale.

“One of the key benefits we have realised results from the low-touch configuration and administration of the InfiniBox arrays. This has allowed us to provision new services and solutions seamlessly and with minimum manual interaction. Our previous solution was laborious to configure, taking up to an hour with multiple steps, increased complexity and room for error. The Infinidat solution takes less than a minute, improving our customer service, whilst freeing up time for our teams to attend to other business needs,” Maake added.

Redundancy is another critical feature of Vox’s operations. Previously, the company experienced some issues with failures so a robust solution was required. InfiniBox’s triple redundancy controllers guarantee uptime, ensuring Vox can always deliver uninterrupted service to both internal and external customers.

Hayden Sadler, Infinidat Country Manager for South Africa added, “With the InfiniBox arrays, Vox currently experiences below one millisecond latencies across the infrastructure and a minimum cache hit ratio of 95%. Vox now benefits from an array capable of significant IOPS and throughput, whereas the previous solution delivered just 40,000 IOPS between 10 and 20 milliseconds. Both of these aspects are extremely valuable for providing superior performance.”

“Aside from our connectivity, broadband access and voice solutions, our cloud offering is a growing element of our business, with impressive market penetration figures. We needed the right platform to support our growth goals and storage is the key ingredient. The InfiniBox solution supports our requirements by delivering the right blend of cost-effective storage and high performance, coupled with the ability to slot seamlessly into our existing infrastructure,” said Laaks.

“Infinidat also provides excellent proactive monitoring and local support through Datacentrix to ensure constant uptime and availability. This is critical to Vox from an operations perspective. Based on our forecasts, we will require additional capacity by the end of 2021. We are extremely happy with the platform and will likely expand our storage with additional InfiniBox arrays, when the time comes,” he concluded.

About the Company

STK Advisory Connect was launched in 2016, “I started my career in financial planning forty years ago,” says company director, Nevathee Moodley. “That is when I realised that the idea of starting my own business would be a captivating concept.”

The Cape Town based business provides technology support services to portfolio managers and financial planning businesses. It first opened its doors at Regus co-working space in the city, before moving to its own premises at Century City in 2017.

“We have the distinct edge in that we recruit young graduates offering training to groom them for the real world. Our vision is to employ graduates who intend on entering the financial service industry or considering it as a career, ideally become suited to this environment.

“This forms a platform to apply and extend their knowledge base from tertiary level to that of the real world.  Our team of 10 individuals who are driven and passionate about making a change to the lives of the people we interact with, says Nevathee “Including myself, Tisha (Head of Operations) and Keagan Moodley (Head of IT).”

 

About the Industry

Conventional consulting has been fundamentally changed by technology-driven disruption, according to Research and Markets.  This has prompted advisory firms to incorporate digital tools to remain competitive. However, technological advances also present various opportunities to the sector.

“We have to embrace this age of technology and use it to our fullest advantage, especially in terms of understanding trends and competing with global markets,” says Nevathee.

Related: Sound regulations promote access to essential connectivity during SA lockdown

The Business Challenge

“Our biggest concern was securing client data, and we needed a holistic service for all our needs,”

Upon launching in 2016, STK Advisory immediately chose to partner with Vox as its infrastructure provider. “The nature of our business requires us to have systems that can protect the sensitive client information that we deal with daily,” says Nevathee.

“Fibre, networking, managed IT, voice and hardware are all critical elements in our business, and we needed to ensure that we had one vendor we could rely on for all the services and infrastructure required to run a company like ours.”

Related: Work from home simply, with managed desktop services

The Business Solution

STK Advisory’s corporate clients require risk assessments they can rely on, the confidence that their information is secure and the assurance that they’re getting the best service. Vox has ensured that STK Advisory’s software is always running at 100% and continuously online, says Nevathee. “We’ve been able to onboard so many new clients even during COVID-19!”

Vox WiFi for guests and clients takes our business to the next level, she adds. “They’re impressed by the security around our password protection.”

In addition to making their clients’ lives easier, the company’s staff have been able to successfully conduct business from anywhere using Vox Vobi and Cloud PBX.

Related: Fibre helps drive SA economy during COVID-19 pandemic

Overall experience with Vox

“Partnering with a trusted name in the IT industry like Vox inspires confidence from our clients,” says Keagan. “We didn’t do a vendor search when we started the business, because Keagan felt Vox was at the forefront and we didn’t need to compare providers.”

Keagan adds that partnering with Vox, like all relationships, has had its ups and downs, but his business has never considered switching because, “It just works for us. They’re the best for us and the commitment is still there because they understand the infrastructure we need in our business and we on this journey together as we grow.

About the Company
A local publishing house, launched in 2002, Jacana Media publishes a wide range of trade books and manages custom publishing projects for companies and clients.

The Joburg-based independent publisher’s list includes political biographies, current affairs, memoirs, natural history, cookery, business, local literary fiction and children’s illustrated books in all South African languages.

Jacana was the Sunday Independent’s publisher of the year in 2006.

Jacana Media employs 12 full-time staff and a host of freelancers for the production of their books.

The Business Challenge
Connectivity, telephone down time and bandwidth were some of the issues Jacana Media faced in the past, making it difficult to run smooth daily operations like communicating with customers and stakeholders.

The production department struggled with down time for large file downloads, posing a challenge for productivity. “We had issues sending print-ready files to print and receiving files from freelancers and other co-publishers,” says Jonathan Dhlomo, of Jacana’s accounts department.

The publishing house also needed remote and managed IT support to provide seamless communication across the business.

The Business Solution
When seeking out a suitable service provider to check all the boxes on their list of challenges, Dhlomo says they wanted a reliable service, but affordability was a key factor as well. Enter Vox.

Vox is like our outsourced IT guy. They handle everything, from our Internet connection, to all our communication and digital needs

In 2017 Jacana Media enlisted the services of Vox to speed up business processes across all departments.

“Vox Verto Supreme is very reliable and worth every penny. It has been value for money. Telephone downtime is a thing of the past. We have control over our communications bill, and we have offsite and onsite support all the time,” says Dhlomo. “And thanks to Vox Fibre, we can now send and receive large files quickly without hiccups!”

During COVID-19 and the necessary move to implement working from home, Vox has benefited the business immensely, says Bridget Impey, managing director at Jacana Media.

“The superior equipment and telephony provided by Vox has facilitated ease of working from home as calls can be answered directly on cell phones from Vox dedicated lines,” says Impey.

“Support Desk have attended to all queries and fixes timeously allowing for minimal interruption and offsite access to our server as arranged by Vox has been a blessing especially in these COVID-19 times.”

Overall experience with Vox
Impressed by the impact of Vox’s services on Jacana Media’s operations, the company has also implemented more Vox products including, Everlytic digital marketing services, desktop and server support, and Vobi voice service over the last few years.

“All our departments have been positively impacted by Vox services,” concludes Jacana Media co-owner Maggie Davey.