CHASSasia

CHASSasia is a systems integrator and turnkey solution developer with a well-established track record in delivering premier IT solutions to customers in Singapore and the rest of Asia. Its areas of expertise include consulting as well as architecting, building, deploying and managing enterprise infrastructure and line-of-business solutions. With 120 employees spread across Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and China, CHASSasia is well aware of the need for a good communication system to enhance collaboration amongst its employees and to engage with its customers more effectively, while ensuring that communication costs remain under control. "Our business is in providing solutions to the customer, and this calls for frequent interactions between employees in various functions," said Mr Kelvin Tan, Infrastructure Business Manager, CHASSasia. "With our business spanning four countries, we also have to maintain consistency in our operations." In order to achieve real and effective collaboration, CHASSasia needed a communication system that could integrate closely with its business applications such as Sharepoint 2007 for knowledge and document sharing, Business Intelligence for real-time financial statistics and Microsoft Exchange 2007 for a single contact directory. CHASSasia realised that voice telephony alone was not good enough. The company was using an old third-party Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) system that required users to remember multiple telephone extensions, making it difficult to use for those who did not have immediate access to a telephone directory. Furthermore, users were unable to detect if the contact party was available, resulting in communications being a hit-or-miss affair or limited to a select few. This limited the scope for collaboration, since domain knowledge could potentially come from anyone with different areas of expertise.