(For those new to the column, Forward Migration is our term for companies moving from Wintel machines to Macs — or at least adding or increasing the number of Macs they use. A Forward Migration Kit is an overview of Mac OS products for a particular occupation, such as photography, optometry, etc.)
Renaissance, “The Tax People,” is a national network marketing company that specializes in offering tax services and a home-based business to the “average Joe.” And the company is filled with Mac fans.
“We did not realize at the time we came up with this product how popular it would be,” Robert Cooper, IS technician, told MacCentral. “We quickly grew from a few thousand to over 50,000 customers nationwide. In order to handle this explosive growth we had to construct a new 40,000 square foot call/distribution center. Half of the building is the call center — the rest is for distribution. Naturally, since we are Macintosh lovers here, we have stayed Macintosh through out the development process of this facility.”
Renaissance uses Macs for most tasks throughout the company. The only exceptions are for chores where Virtual PC just couldn’t pull it off. But the occasional Wintel and UNIX box is the exception to the rule.
“We even have our Macintosh systems interfacing with our Lucent Definity Call Center phone switch,” Cooper said.
Renaissance arranged a tour of an Apple call center in California to see how they use the Mac to program their phone switches. They also wanted to see how the call center managers use the Lucent reporting functions via Virtual PC on their Macs.
“We have a very professional high level network using both Windows, Unix, Macintosh, and Mac OS X all working nicely with each other,” Cooper said.