CLIENT CASE STUDY — HEALTHCARE / CALL CENTER
AO IT Consulting | Portland, Oregon | aoitconsulting.com
How AO IT built a fully scalable IT infrastructure for a medical call center that grows to 400 seats during open enrollment — and only pays for what it uses.
|
Industry Healthcare / Call Center |
Staff Range 70 to 400 Employees |
Peak Season Open Enrollment (3 months) |
Model Dynamic Scaling + Monthly Licensing |
The Challenge: Massive Seasonal Swings
For most businesses, staffing fluctuates modestly from season to season. For this medical call center, the swings were dramatic. For nine months of the year they operated with around 70 employees. Then open enrollment hit — and their headcount exploded to nearly 400.
The IT challenge was significant: how do you build an infrastructure that can handle 400 simultaneous users at peak — with full functionality, full security, and full performance — without locking the organization into paying for 400 seats of everything for all twelve months of the year?
The wrong answer was expensive. The right answer required creative engineering.
|
9 Months ~70 Employees Standard operations |
3 Months Up to 400 Employees Open enrollment surge |
The AO IT Solution: Scale Up, Scale Down, Pay for What You Use
AO IT designed a fully flexible infrastructure built around the reality of the client’s business cycle — not a one-size-fits-all model that would have cost far more than necessary.
|
🖥️ The Technical Architecture • Remote Desktop servers with terminal emulators — allowing hundreds of users to work from any device without requiring individual software installations on each machine • Dynamically scaled server infrastructure — capacity expands automatically when enrollment season begins and contracts when it ends • Monthly licensing model — the organization pays for 70 seats for 9 months and only adds licensing for the additional users during the 3-month peak season |
Full Features at Every Scale
Scaling down in cost never meant scaling down in capability. Whether the call center was running 70 agents or 400, every employee had access to a complete, enterprise-grade toolkit:
- VoIP phone solution — fully integrated call center telephony for every agent
- Email — professional communications across the entire organization
- Office suite — full productivity software available to every user on the platform
- Security services — endpoint protection, access controls, and monitoring across all users and sessions
When open enrollment arrived and 330 additional agents came online, they had access to exactly the same tools and environment as the year-round staff. No degraded experience. No compromises. Full capacity, full features, on demand.
|
“We needed to go from 70 to 400 employees without breaking the budget or the infrastructure. AO IT built us a system that scales exactly when we need it and costs exactly what it should — nothing more.” — Operations Director, Medical Call Center |
The Financial Impact
The difference between a traditional fixed-cost IT model and the dynamic approach AO IT built is significant. A standard deployment sized for 400 users would have required 400 seats of every service, every month, all year — even during the nine months when most of those seats sat empty.
|
Traditional Model 400 seats × 12 months Paying for capacity you don’t use |
AO IT Dynamic Model 70 seats × 9 months + 400 seats × 3 months Pay for what you actually use |
By the Numbers
|
70→40 Seamless scale from 70 to 400 employees during open enrollment |
9 + 3 Months at base cost, peak cost only during the 3-month enrollment season |
5 Full enterprise services: VoIP, email, office suite, RDS, and security |
0 Disruption during scale-up or scale-down transitions |
|
💡 The AO IT Philosophy Good IT doesn’t just solve technical problems — it solves business problems. For this client, the business problem wasn’t ‘how do we support 400 users.’ It was ‘how do we support 400 users without paying for 400 users all year.’ AO IT designed a solution that answered both questions at once. |
Does Your Business Have Seasonal or Variable IT Demands?
If your staffing, locations, or workloads fluctuate throughout the year, you shouldn’t be paying for peak capacity twelve months a year. AO IT Consulting designs flexible, scalable infrastructure that grows and contracts with your business — so your IT costs reflect your actual needs, not your worst-case scenario.
|
🌐 aoitconsulting.com |
📞 (503) 257-3332 |
✉️ aoit@aoitconsulting.com |
Serving Portland and the Pacific Northwest since 2003 | Managed IT • Cloud Services • Cybersecurity • Network Infrastructure