When a department or agency of the U.S. government wants to modernize its operations, that organization will often turn to NCI Information Systems. NCI is a leading provider of advanced IT solutions—including the company’s own proprietary artificial intelligence technology—to defense and civilian agencies across the federal government.
In 2020 and 2021, NCI has been awarded several contracts to help modernize federal IT systems leveraging NCI’s Empower™ Artificial-Intelligence-as-a-Service (AIaaS) platform.
In fact, for years this top government contractor has been so focused on delivering outstanding IT solutions to its clients that NCI outgrew one aspect of its own IT infrastructure—specifically its phone system.
An on-premises phone system that could no longer meet the company’s needs
For any organization that rapidly adds staff and locations in new geographic regions, keeping the growing team connected and operating efficiently can be a challenge with a traditional business phone system. But NCI CIO Vasili Ikonomidis explained that NCI’s unique circumstances made this even more difficult.
“As a government contractor, we have regulatory and security factors requiring us to maintain two separate networks to serve different categories of clients—and that also means two completely different call centers,” he said. “We tried to manage this with our on-premises phone system, but that system was no longer sophisticated enough to support the type of operations we needed from it.”
Ikonomidis noted that NCI had been adding new locations to support its clients’ missions in different parts of the country. Each of those facility build-outs only added complexity and costs to the company’s telephony infrastructure.
“Everything was decentralized,” he said.
RingCentral helps improve operations—and cut telephony costs
When they migrated to RingCentral’s cloud-based communications solution, NCI solved these and other operational issues. The RingCentral Engage customer-service platform, for example, enabled the company to run its call center operations more efficiently.
Another key operational improvement was being able to host online meetings for as many people as the company needed.
“RingCentral Video has worked well because we’re able to invite as many people as we want to these calls, and we haven’t had capacity or quality issues,” Ikonomidis said.
But perhaps the biggest change has been to NCI’s bottom line. Ikonomidis stressed that the company is realizing cost savings in several ways.
”As we consolidate these services around the country for phone, video conferencing, online fax, team messaging, and our call center into a single solution with one vendor, we’re significantly lowering our telephony costs, which helps our company and our clients.”
Originally published Jul 29, 2021, updated Sep 02, 2021