How a global liquefied natural gas shipping company migrated to Microsoft Teams and implemented cloud telephony across the business with LoopUp
GasLog is the leading global provider of liquefied natural gas (LNG) shipping services. The company is the owner, operator and manager of LNG carriers and provides support to international energy companies as part of their LNG logistics chain. GasLog’s fleet consists of 35 LNG vessels and the company has offices in Greece, London, New York and Singapore. With over 1,800 onshore and offshore staff, reliable, flexible technology for internal and external communication is critical to Gaslog.
GasLog moves to on-premises Skype for Business with LoopUp in 2015
Stelios Sabanis is Head of Information Communication Technology (ICT). He is responsible for implementing and maintaining communications solutions across Gaslog’s international offices and their vessels. Back in 2015, GasLog was using different telephony providers in each of its offices. This was causing operational complexity and driving up costs. Stelios decided to implement a global unified communications solution that would move all staff onto a consistent platform.
Stelios realized that a project of this scale would require an experienced partner to manage the deployment. “We started our search in Greece, which is where our IT headquarters are, but we couldn’t find the expertise there,” said Stelios. “We decided to expand our search for the best possible partner. We researched different companies on LinkedIn and asked our local and UK Microsoft Representatives for recommendations. LoopUp was one of the providers that was recommended”.
Stelios met with LoopUp’s project management team in London for a consultation. LoopUp advised GasLog on the different UC technologies available and suggested Skype for Business was the most suitable to their needs. GasLog selected LoopUp as their partner and Skype for Business as their UC tool. “We were convinced that LoopUp had the best knowledge and infrastructure to support us,” explained Stelios.
LoopUp deployed on-premises Skype for Business across all of GasLog’s worldwide offices and vessels. “We had great success with LoopUp”, said Stelios. “We were able to replace all our voice providers with a single managed service”.
GasLog migrates to Microsoft Teams with LoopUp in 2020
After five years of using on-premises Skype for Business, GasLog decided they wanted to move their telephony to the cloud. They were also looking for a tool that could offer them more collaboration functionality such as document sharing and group messaging. GasLog employees already had Teams available as part of their Office 365 license and small pockets of users had begun experimenting with the tool for internal chat or file sharing. “We spoke with the LoopUp team and they were confident that Teams was a perfect fit for us,” said Stelios.
Microsoft’s Phone System turns Teams into a full enterprise telephony solution. Users can make and receive external calls directly from Teams on any device from anywhere in the world. Teams also offers a more diverse feature-set than Skype for Business. This includes group messaging, document sharing, file storage and app integration in addition to voice calling, video conferencing, and IM functionality.
“Adding cloud telephony to Teams would allow our staff to make and receive calls directly from Teams wherever they are in the world,” said Stelios. “This is very important for our offshore staff as they are often travelling for months at a time. They need to be in constant communication with our offices and their families back home, wherever they may be”. Although Microsoft offer their own Calling Plans, Stelios decided to use Direct Routing with LoopUp a