First National Bank

McConnelsville, OH - Tim Scholl was surfing his favorite search engine for Voice Over IP solutions. It was late fall 2002 as Tim, the Vice President of Information Services at First National Bank sought ways to save the bank money on long distance by exploiting their existing point to point T-1 data connections between the home office and its remote branches.

One particular website that caught his attention was www.vodavi.com. The website was giving Scholl some good ideas for the bank; he clicked on the "dealer locator" section and found the nearest dealer to be Pataskala / Reynoldsburg based Echo 24.

Upon meeting with Echo 24 president Tony Gunter, Scholl learned that First National Bank could not only cut a lot of long distance with a Vodavi VoIP solution, but could network all five of their sites allowing them to benefit in the following ways

• Single attendant for all sites with busy lamp field / direct station select showing all stations throughout the network
• Centralized voice mail for all sites saving the cost of purchasing five separate voice mail systems
• Paging between the sites
• Ability to transfer clients from branches to the home office and vice versa with the touch of a single button allowing the bank to make it easier for their clients to do business with First National Bank.
• By adding, least cost routing (LCR) to the VoIP connections, the bank would be able to access remote trunks and save more than merely the cost of calling the other branches. They could call a client of the Athens branch from McConnelsville without making a long distance call!
• Fax machines and time clocks could be installed into the system to create even greater savings through 4-digit dialing single line devices over the IP connections.

Scholl was sold. He knew however, that he would have to convince the board. Perhaps the best way to make it happen would be to implement in phases. The bank was in the process of building it's new branch in Carroll, OH and would need a new phone system at that site.

What better way to test the dealer and at the same time get first hand experience with the Vodavi system. Echo 24 was hired to install the first rack mounted Vodavi XTS IP enabled system at the Carroll branch in the spring of 2003. The bank was delighted and quickly hired Echo 24 to replace their dying phone system in Stockport, OH with the same Vodavi system.

The next site was another new construction site in Athens, OH. This was a new market for the bank. Gunter convinced Scholl to let Echo 24 install the cabling and the phones at this site. The installation went very smooth, and business at the new branch was booming by the summer of 2004. Scholl was ready to start the process of replacing their AT&T / Lucent / Avaya Merlin Legend at the home office.

There was more than the need for new phones at McConnelsville; part of the home office was being remodeled and Gunter was invited to look at cabling and talk about telephones.

In surveying both the remodel area, and the existing cabling, it was apparent that the bank had a few generations of legacy cabling. Scholl liked the rack mount capability of the Vodavi XTS and preferred to administer not only data, but voice by the use of patch panels as opposed to punch blocks. This was going to require that not only the remodel area be cabled, but that all of the basement and half of the first floor would have to be re-cabled.

The other half of the first floor and the second floor had been cabled in the recent past and it was determined that no new cabling would be required in this area. The hub system (Vodavi XTS) would be installed in the 2nd floor tech room and connect to the basement IDF through a new patch panel based backbone to be installed by Echo 24.

On the evening of October 26th, Echo 24 cut over the home office with customer education to begin promptly at 7am the following morning. Echo 24 had 8 phones set up in the upstairs board room to accommodate training for the home office employees. By 11am, Echo 24 had trained the home offices fifty or so employees. All the preparation and hard work had made the cutover a smashing success. All that would remain would be to install the last remaining branch in Junction City, OH and to implement the least cost routing for all five sites. By early November 2004, a full two years from the time Scholl began his internet search, Junction City had been installed and a 252 port VoIP Networked deployment had been complete.