Businessmen packing cardboard boxes in office

IT teams need help when moving or opening new offices. An office move or cloud migration can be quite complex. It’s not like moving your home or apartment. Although that is difficult, moving an office is a concerted effort that makes a personal move pale in comparison. Leveraging your support is imperative. IT teams are the greatest resource companies have today in order to support the office move because moving furniture is easy… Moving tech services is a whole new ball game.

Some of the items to consider are your ISP and phone provider. Using a cloud based UCaaS system makes life easier than a traditional PBX regardless if that’s using SIP, PRI, or even POTS to get to the PSTN for dial tone. PRIs, SIP, and POTS are similar to the problem many customers face with their ISP during a move… They still need to get the wire into your office.

ISPs are not available everywhere. Each has its own unique footprint even down to the floor in the building. Recently, we had two carriers with a site on their LIT building lists that wasn’t actually LIT. Many times providers are only lit to a floor in what we call a homerun shot, leaving them unable to provide service to customers on other floors or offices without a completely new build. What makes this most frustrating for a company during a move is that many times you won’t know this ahead of time. Unfortunately, carriers don’t always keep good records of where their facilities are located. Hence the need for physical site surveys.

There have been countless situations where a company orders from an ISP only to find out weeks later that their order is ‘on hold’. Not every ISP will take an order they can’t fulfil but most will, leaving IT departments with no answer for their C-Level folks when it comes time to explain why their move date won’t be met. When working at ISPs I’ve seen countless situations where sales people struggling to make quota will take an order and have it sit in the system until they can find other companies to sell to in order to get facilities built out. I’ve never met a customer that was happy to be in this situation.

In today’s environment, ISPs are crucial to a business… especially when moving offices. Without internet access employees are stuck twiddling their thumbs and there is little to no productivity. Access to cloud based applications like Salesforce.com or other CRMs, VoIP, and VDI are unavailable without bandwidth. That said, leveraging expertise to ensure a timely and successful move project can be the difference between meeting your date and being in the precarious position of asking a former landlord to extend a lease to an office that, 9 times out of 20, has already been rented to another tenant.

Our value add is a project management system that ties in directly with our carrier’s processes. Whether that’s order entry, credit, IP approval, etc. we know when these items need to be checked off and start moving to the next milestone. Their system’s don’t always follow logic and that which could take place simultaneously only happens sequentially. As savvy as your IT team is, and as much as you may move your office, you don’t do it as often as a company like CloudOgre whose specialty it is to take the heavy lifting out of the IT piece of your move. We will coordinate your ISP, Voice, and Data Center move to allow your IT team to focus on your core business applications and managing users.