The team however was not as knowledgeableabout design specific details of the technologiesrequired for network implementation. The CIOand the team decided to partner with a technologyvendor to create the technology design forthe network upgrade. The team ended up focusingon the identification and development ofbusiness and IT requirements of the company,as well as the development of basic design fornetwork upgrade, and handed these off to technologyvendors to complete the technical design.Interviews were conducted with various networktechnology suppliers to assess their capabilities.The team ultimately selected Cisco as its partnernot only because Cisco was a well established and internationally known telecommunication products manufacturing company, but also because itwas very cooperative and willing to collaboratein efforts to evaluate the capabilities of router,switch and other network technology required forNet II implementation. The ABC’s team and itsimplementation partner Cisco together went overthe network analysis and design. Following a topdown network design approach (Oppenheimer,1999), they started with analyzing company’sgoal and customer’s needs and conducted logical/physical network design, testing, optimizing, anddocumentation. This collaboration helped determinespecific features, functions, and networkinghardware early on to optimize the network. Thisenabled ABC to successfully implement enhancednetwork features shown below unavailable to thecompany’s competitors, in addition to renderinga large amount of cost savings.
• Single protocol technology TCP/IP
• 100% Switched network, no hubs
• Reliable and functional Voice over IP
• Frame relay connections to store sites (nomore leased lines)
• ISDN Backup