Cooke Aquaculture is a family firm that breeds salmon and cod in the USA and Canada. In 2006, the company replaced a Centrex service from its telecom provider with IP phones for its 1,500 employees, with cost savings coming from reducing long-distance bills and internal hosting of voicemail.

However the biggest advantage to the firm is coming from the development of custom phone applications such as those bringing weather and market conditions straight to employee phones. Data on water temperature and wind speeds at fisheries in Newfoundland and New Brunswick used to be sent daily by email. Now the data is collected and relayed every 30 minutes to IP phones used by fishery managers and other executives, enabling them to make commercial decisions much more rapidly than was previously possible. Another application tracks daily salmon market prices and sends updates to salespeople twice a week, again pushing XML data through Cisco CallManager to phones. This allows them to quote customers more accurately.

All this and the company hasn’t yet installed even some fairly basic UC features on its IP phone system – such as voice-conferencing.

Cooke’s next steps are to invest in MeetingPlace Express audioconferencing and then Cisco Unified Personal Communicator. The company currently spends about $30,000 with telecom carriers for voice-conferencing, and adding the IP audioconferencing will reduce this with a smaller software maintenance fee. They plan to rollout more IP phone applications to display Key Performance Indictors, and the  Cisco UPC client will also open up additional collaboration options such as presence and videoconferencing.

But all that’s not going to happen for a year or two. For now, Cooke has bigger fish to fry: consolidating and virtualising its data centers.

Total value of the contract? Your guess is as good as mine… but right now this customer is extremely happy, largely due to the benefits they are seeing from their IP Phone applications.

If it can be done for Fisheries, why not for any industry? Its all about working with your customers to understand their communications needs and opportunities, and helping them understand the best ways in which to address these.

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