Company

Calix
 Industry

Communication Equipment
 Headquarters

California, USA
 Geography

United States
No. of Employees

[To be confirmed]
 Annual Revenue

$350 Million
 No. of Offices

[To be confirmed]
 Engagement Type

CRM Transformation / Salesforce

CLIENT PROFILE

A Communications Company Running Customer Service on Systems Built for Another Era

Calix is a California-based communications equipment company with $350 million in annual revenue. The company serves a network of customers who rely on it for both product and ongoing service support, making the quality of its customer-facing systems a direct factor in customer retention and satisfaction.

The customer service infrastructure Calix was running had not kept pace with the scale and expectations of the business. On-premise CRM systems, a legacy Oracle iSupport deployment, and a set of internally built service request interfaces had grown difficult to maintain, slow to update, and disconnected from the broader commercial systems the business depended on. The IT burden of sustaining these systems was increasing while the service experience they delivered was not improving.

BUSINESS CHALLENGES

Legacy Systems Holding the Customer Experience in Place

The challenges Calix faced were the predictable consequences of deferring a platform decision for too long. Each challenge was compounding the others.

  • On-Premise CRM Constraints: The existing on-premise CRM environment offered no mobile support, limited scalability, and growing maintenance overhead. It could not be updated quickly enough to keep pace with the features and experience customers expected from a modern service operation.
  • Poor Customer Self-Service: Customers lacked a credible self-service experience. Without an integrated knowledge base and intuitive service request interface, support volume was higher than it needed to be and customer satisfaction was paying the price.
  • Fragmented Collaboration: Service agents and internal teams had no shared collaboration layer. Requests moved through email and manual handoffs, slowing resolution times and making it difficult to maintain context across complex or ongoing support cases.
  • Legacy System Decommission Backlog: Oracle iSupport and a set of homegrown service request interfaces were still in production, carrying maintenance cost and technical debt that the IT team could not sustainably absorb alongside forward-looking development work.
  • Disconnected Sales and Service Data: Sales and service operated from separate systems with no shared customer view. Support agents lacked the context they needed to deliver informed, personalised service, and leadership had no consolidated picture of customer health across both functions.

The business needed a modern, cloud-native CRM platform that could unify customer data, enable self-service, support agent collaboration, and connect directly to the Oracle EBS environment driving back-office operations, all without a multi-year implementation.

Technologies & Methodologies Deployed:

  • Salesforce Service Cloud
  • Informatica ETL
  • Oracle EBS
  • Calix Customer Portal
  • Operational Data Store (Shareplex)

TRUGLOBAL SOLUTION

A Five-Month Path From Legacy to Cloud-Native

TRUGlobal led the engagement with a blended onsite and offshore delivery model, taking the project from requirements to go-live in five months. The approach was structured around Salesforce Service Cloud as the core platform, with a focused integration architecture connecting it to Oracle EBS, the Calix customer portal, and the operational data infrastructure needed to support a live Customer 360 view.

The scope covered not just the Salesforce implementation but the full decommission of Oracle iSupport and the homegrown service request interfaces, retiring the legacy technical debt alongside deploying the replacement capability.

Core Technologies: Salesforce Service Cloud | Informatica ETL | Oracle EBS | Calix Customer Portal | Operational Data Store (Shareplex)

SALESFORCE SERVICE CLOUD Core service platform deployed to enable self-service case management, agent-managed support queues, and structured service request workflows, replacing Oracle iSupport and the homegrown request interfaces with a single, maintainable cloud-native platform. CUSTOMER SELF-SERVICE Integrated knowledge base and self-service portal configured to allow customers to log, track, and resolve service requests independently, reducing inbound support volume and improving the experience for customers who previously had no effective self-service option.
CHATTER COLLABORATION Salesforce Chatter implemented to provide service agents and internal teams with a shared, contextual collaboration layer, enabling real-time communication on cases without reliance on email chains and manual status tracking. CUSTOMER SATISFACTION SURVEYS Survey functionality implemented to capture post-interaction customer satisfaction data systematically, giving Calix a structured mechanism to track service quality and identify areas for ongoing improvement across the support organisation.
ORACLE EBS INTEGRATION Custom web services built against a replicated Oracle EBS environment to feed Salesforce with live Customer 360 data, and RMA-related requests interfaced to Oracle EBS for back-office processing with status updates looped back into Salesforce. PORTAL AND DATA INTEGRATION Account and contact data integrated between Salesforce and the Calix customer portal via Informatica ETL and an Operational Data Store fed by Shareplex, ensuring consistent customer records across all customer-facing systems.

The five-month delivery timeline was achieved through a disciplined requirements-to-go-live methodology, with onsite consultants managing client engagement and offshore resources driving implementation velocity across the Salesforce configuration, integration development, and data migration workstreams.

BUSINESS OUTCOMES

A Unified Customer Experience and a Leaner IT Operation

The engagement delivered measurable improvements across customer experience, operational efficiency, and IT sustainability.

Outcome Area Business Value Delivered Measured Result
Customer Satisfaction Self-service capability, agent collaboration through Chatter, and structured post-interaction surveys created a materially better service experience, tracked and validated through ongoing satisfaction measurement. Improved customer satisfaction
Operational Efficiency Unified case management, automated service request workflows, and RMA processing integration eliminated the manual handoffs and status-chasing that had slowed resolution times and consumed agent capacity. Improved operational efficiency
Sales and Service Alignment Custom Oracle EBS integration brought live Customer 360 data into Salesforce, connecting the commercial and service views of each customer for the first time and enabling informed, context-aware interactions across both functions. Sales and service CRM connected
IT Burden Reduction Decommission of Oracle iSupport and the homegrown service request interfaces removed a significant maintenance overhead from the Calix IT team, freeing capacity for forward-looking development rather than legacy system support. Legacy systems decommissioned
Deployment Agility Migration to Salesforce Service Cloud replaced a slow, change-constrained on-premise environment with a platform capable of rapid, agile feature deployment, reducing the time and cost of delivering service improvements. Faster agile feature deployment
Delivery Timeline Requirements to go-live completed in five months, delivered by a blended onsite and offshore team operating to a structured engagement model that maintained quality and scope throughout the programme. 5-month requirements-to-go-live delivery

COST EFFICIENCY

The Compounding Cost of Holding On to Legacy CRM

Legacy CRM maintenance carries a cost that is easy to underestimate because it accumulates gradually. Licence fees for platforms no longer being actively developed, IT resource time spent on custom code that cannot be extended, and the opportunity cost of features that cannot be shipped because the underlying system cannot support them. For Calix, this was the operational reality before the engagement.

The decommission of Oracle iSupport and the homegrown interfaces was not just a technical milestone. It was a structural cost reduction. Removing those systems from the maintenance backlog freed IT capacity that had been consistently absorbed by legacy support. The shift to Salesforce Service Cloud replaced a high-maintenance, low-agility environment with a platform where new capabilities can be deployed in days rather than months.

Organisations that migrate from on-premise CRM to cloud-native platforms typically report 20 to 35% reductions in total CRM operating cost over three years, driven by lower infrastructure overhead, reduced customisation maintenance, and faster time-to-value on new features. For a $350 million business where customer service is a direct factor in retention and revenue, the compounding return on that investment is material.

Legacy systems do not just hold technology back. They hold the business back.

TRUGlobal moved Calix forward in five months.

Legacy systems do not just hold technology back. They hold the business back.
TRUGlobal moved Calix forward in five months.

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