Vyaire
How the World’s Top Respiratory Device Maker Is Helping to Fight the Global Pandemic — with an Assist from RingCentral
RingCentral truly helped us make the transition to pandemic-mode work. Most other providers just didn’t have the capability to help a company as large and widely distributed as ours transition to a remote workforce.
Martin Kastner
Director of Global IT Infrastructure, Vyaire Medical
It would be hard to think of a time when respiratory care played a more important role in society’s health. And few companies have contributed more to this effort over the years than Vyaire Medical.
Although its latest corporate iteration was formed just a few years ago, the global company known today as Vyaire Medical has a decades-long track record of delivering groundbreaking medical solutions that have literally changed the field of respiratory care around the world.
For example, founders of earlier iterations of the company are credited with inventing the medical ventilator and creating the first fully operational laboratory for pulmonary-function testing and diagnostics. Today, the company’s 5,000 employees, working across 5 continents, manufacture and market more than 27,000 unique products to support the diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring of respiratory conditions.
So, with the world facing a pandemic caused by a virus that attacks the respiratory system, Vyaire suddenly found its products and expertise in urgent demand all over the globe. But at that same time, the lockdowns forced the organization to quickly transition thousands of employees to remote-working arrangements. Fortunately, the company had the cloud communications platform in place to handle this massive workforce migration without disrupting its vital work.
INDUSTRY
Healthcare
HQ
Mettawa, IL
YEAR FOUNDED
2016
EMPLOYEES
5000
The global company outgrew its on-prem phone system
There were several catalysts that prompted Vyaire to retire its on-prem phone infrastructure in favor of a cloud solution. For example, the legacy system had technical difficulties, such as poor audio quality and frequently dropped calls. Also, the company’s telecom provider wasn’t able to effectively create a seamless communications experience between the company’s locations across The Americas, Europe, Asia, The Middle East, and Australia.
But the real driver behind Vyaire’s move to RingCentral’s cloud communications was a separation from its previous corporate parent. When that parent organization sold its respiratory line of business, the new standalone company — Vyaire Medical — needed to establish its own IT infrastructure, including a new communications solution.
Martin Kastner, Vyaire’s Senior Director of Global IT Infrastructure, recalls that the sale happened quickly and the business needed to transition its staff to a new communications solution quickly. After initially trying a hybrid communications environment — part on-prem, part cloud—Martin’s team knew they needed to go full cloud.
RingCentral made it easy for us to migrate our employees to working from home, because we didn’t have to configure a whole new tech environment to support them. The RingCentral apps did most of the work for us.
Martin Kastner
Senior Director of Global IT Infrastructure, Vyaire Medical
Cloud communications truly proves its value during the lockdowns
Although Vyaire had begun using RingCentral’s all-in-one solution prior to the pandemic as its phone, audio and video conferencing, and Contact Center system, the company truly saw the value of the solution when their staff was forced to vacate their offices all over the world and start working from home.
“The transition itself was very successful,” says Martin. “If we didn’t have RingCentral, if we still had our old on-prem system, we would’ve run into so many problems trying to migrate thousands of employees to remote work for the first time.”
Alexander Roth, the company’s Lead Engineer for Global Telecom, points out that because RingCentral was so intuitive and easy to use, it helped to make the remote-work transition less stressful—for both the IT team and the company’s employees. “I heard from a lot of people that the system was great and easy to use right from the start, and this was a real relief for all of us.”
And as they began using RingCentral for all of their business communications during the lockdown period, Vyaire’s employees also began discovering highly useful services that they hadn’t realized they had.
As Martin explains, “Employees who were used to dialing phone numbers manually, and having to be at their desks to do so, began seeing the benefits of the softphone capabilities. Now they could plug a headset into their computer, bring up the RingCentral app, and auto-dial a colleague or customer with a single click.”
Vyaire’s staff is also getting tremendous value from the built-in video conferencing service RingCentral Meetings. “We’re using it all the time to stay connected as a company,” says Martin, “and even to host medical-device training webinars for our customers.”
He adds: “At a time like this, when everyone is locked down, it’s invaluable to be able to continue offering video-based training to healthcare providers on how to use our life-saving respiratory products.”