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AMIDEAST improves globalworkgroup collaboration, cutstravel-related communicationscosts, with OpenScape
Effective communication on a global scaleis critical to America-Mideast Educationaland Training Services Inc. (AMIDEAST), aprivate, nonprofit organization that workstoestablish mutual understanding andcooperation between Americans andpeople of the Middle East and North Africa.Each year, the Washington, D.C.-basedorganization provides English languageskills training, educational advising, andtesting services to hundreds of thousandsof students and professionals in the MiddleEast and North Africa. AMIDEAST alsosupports many institutional developmentprojects in those regions and administerseducational exchange programs.The group operates a network of fieldoffices scattered among a dozen countries.Managersand staff in those offices andthe Washington headquarters frequentlyneed tobe in touchwitheach other.
Provide efficient communicationsand collaboration tools amonggeographically dispersed facilities andemployees while keeping costs down
Many of AMIDEAST’s facilities andemployees are located overseas. As aresult, the organization has had to copewithheavy long-distance calling expenses.To provide services to customers andconduct other operations, employees inthe U.S. frequently need to communicatewithcounterparts in other countries.Managers and staff spend many hours onaudio and Web conferences every monthto collaborate on training projects anddiscuss issues related to their Web-basedtraining model.But the high cost of international callinghad become a burden to the organization.“Most of the time people avoided makinginternational calls entirely because of thecost,” says Ugur Usumi, Director of IT atAMIDEAST. “When people did try to calleach other, because of the time zonedifferences they often wasted time andmoney in failed attempts to contact teammembers overseas when they were notavailable.”Obstacles related to time-zone differencesare especially challenging for AMIDEASTbecause many of its field offices are incountries that begin weekends onThursdays and Fridays. Consequently,Saturdays and Sundays are work days inthose countries, but not so for U.S.-basedstaff.The problem of high long-distance costswas especiallyapparent when AMIDEASTemployees made calls from hotels in othercountries. Typically, these calls cost aminimum of $4 to $5 per minute and insome cases as much as $9 per minute,Usumi says. AMIDEAST needed to find acost-effective way to keep its employeesconnected.
OpenScape delivers presence-basedconferencing and collaboration toolthat helps users easily determine themosteffective way to reach colleagues
The group explored solutions from a varietyof vendors, and selected OpenScape fromSiemens, a presence-aware, real-timecommunications software suite. With
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