Prudential Preferred Realtors
Headquartered in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Prudential Preferred, REALTORS of Michigan provides realty, relocation, mortgage, and property management services throughout North, West, and Southwestern Michigan.

Situation

With 21 locations throughout Michigan, Prudential Preferred, REALTORS of Michigan (PPRMI) in early 2009 was seeking to pool network and communications resources in its headquarters to reduce branch-offce costs for its 9 Western Michigan offces. The company’s existing, traditional network connecting branches back to collocations and then to the Internet was ineffcient and unreliable. PPRMI’s current carrier was presenting a solution that would obligate them to a fve-year contract for a new Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) network, which would have saved the organization little over its current network spend. Additionally, PPRMI didn’t want to be tied into a long-term contract with technology that could soon become obsolete.

With goals of implementing a reliable, scalable, and affordable communications infrastructure, PPRMI turned to ISI for an advanced Cisco core network. Founded in 2002, the Grand Rapids, Michigan-headquartered Cisco Premier Certifed Partner with 12 employees offered the experience and expertise PPRMI sought.

"When we initially began offering server and support consultation to PPRMI, we realized there were opportunities for them to upgrade their network and cut costs," says Rob Rowe, sales manager, ISI. "We proposed rebalancing their telecom expenses by leveraging Cisco’s Integrated Services technology and a new carrier-grade MPLS wide area network (WAN)."

Solution

In PPRMI’s colocation, ISI implemented a Cisco Integrated Services Router (ISR) that intelligently embeds data, security, voice, and wireless in a single platform for fast, scalable delivery of mission-critical business applications.

ISI also confgured the Cisco IOS frewall to add additional security to each and every node in the network.

PPRMI now has a reliable MPLS solution for enterprise data, voice, and public Internet. Should an unlikely failure occur with their MPLS WAN, a secondary VPN connection sustains data, voice, and video traffc without any impact on productivity. This keeps people busy and proftable while keeping customers happy and satisfed.

Results

Following a smooth implementation, PPRMI is realizing the advantages of its ISI-implemented Cisco core networking solutions. "PPRMI now has a reliable MPLS solution for enterprise data, voice, public Internet, and virtual private network (VPN) failover," says Rowe. "If for any reason their MPLS goes down, they have a VPN connection back to their collocation. This dual redundancy reduces the negative impact of an outage for the entire organization.

"Equally important, the new solution will improve cash-fow for the next fve years while improving network and communications quality and reliability."

"PPRMI now has a solid foundation to drive its evolving business needs. We’re proud to facilitate the partnership between PPRMI and Cisco Systems. We will do whatever we can to continue supporting their networking and business needs down the road. "We appreciate the fact that ISI worked with us to identify how technology could help improve our day to day operations" says James Fase, lead broker and CIO for PPRMI. "They were able to deliver a robust solution while meeting our requirements for a short return on investment timeline."