Real Estate
Emaar Properties is one of the region’s most recognizable real estate developers, with a portfolio spanning residential communities, commercial towers, retail destinations, and hospitality projects across the UAE. As the organization grew, so did the complexity of keeping every project office, sales center, and corporate department connected on a single, reliable communications backbone.
This case study looks at how Zen partnered with Emaar’s IT team to replace a decade of accumulated telephony infrastructure with a single unified platform, why that project mattered beyond the immediate cost savings, and what it took to deliver the migration without interrupting a single day of customer-facing sales activity across fifteen active locations.
Before this engagement, Emaar’s telephony environment had grown organically over more than a decade, resulting in a patchwork of legacy PBX systems, disconnected mobile plans, and inconsistent call routing between the company’s 15 office locations across Dubai and the wider UAE. Sales teams at different project sites had no reliable way to transfer a customer call to a colleague in another building without dropping the line or routing through an external mobile number.
Meanwhile, the internal IT team was spending a disproportionate share of its time maintaining aging on-premises hardware that had reached end of vendor support, with replacement parts becoming harder to source every year. Every additional office meant another isolated phone system to configure, patch, and eventually replace, with no shared visibility across the portfolio.
Beyond the day-to-day operational headaches, the legacy setup was simply expensive to run. Each location carried its own set of local lines, maintenance contracts, and support agreements, with little insight into usage patterns or opportunities to consolidate spend. Response times for customer inquiries suffered whenever a call needed to be routed between departments, and there was no unified way to monitor uptime or call quality across the network.
Zen worked closely with Emaar’s IT leadership to design and deploy a unified communications platform that could scale across all 15 locations without requiring a wholesale hardware replacement at every site. The solution centered on a cloud-hosted PBX layer, consolidated SIP trunking, and centrally managed call routing, allowing every office to operate as part of one logical phone system rather than 15 separate ones.
The rollout included four key components. First, existing extensions were migrated to a centrally managed dial plan so any employee, at any site, could reach any colleague using a short internal number. Second, SIP trunks replaced legacy analog and ISDN lines, cutting monthly carrier costs while improving call quality. Third, automated failover was built in so that if a local internet circuit at any office experienced an outage, calls would reroute through a backup path instead of dropping entirely. Fourth, a real-time reporting dashboard gave the IT team visibility into call volumes, uptime, and quality metrics from a single console, replacing the fragmented, office-by-office monitoring that existed before.
Because Emaar’s offices are fully operational sales and project environments, the rollout could not disrupt day-to-day business. Zen’s implementation team worked location by location, scheduling migrations outside of peak customer-facing hours and running each site in parallel with its legacy system for a short overlap period before fully cutting over. Every migration was preceded by a network readiness survey and followed by a validation window, during which call quality and routing were monitored closely before the old hardware was decommissioned.
Training was kept deliberately lightweight. Rather than asking staff to learn an entirely new phone system, the platform was configured to preserve familiar dialing habits and extension numbers wherever possible, with newer features like call transfer across sites, voicemail-to-email, and shared presence status introduced gradually through short refresher sessions rather than a single disruptive rollout.
Within the first two full quarters after completion, Emaar’s telephony costs across the 15 locations dropped by 40%, driven primarily by consolidating carrier contracts and eliminating redundant local maintenance agreements. Uptime across the unified platform reached 99.9%, a meaningful improvement over the fragmented visibility the IT team previously had into any single office’s phone system, and one made possible by the automated failover built into the new architecture.
Just as importantly, customer response times improved. With every office now part of one logical phone system, calls could be transferred instantly to the right person regardless of which building they were sitting in, removing the friction that previously caused dropped transfers and repeated hold times for customers trying to reach a specific project team.
Emaar’s IT leadership evaluated several regional integrators before selecting Zen, citing three deciding factors: a track record delivering multi-site unified communications projects of comparable scale, the ability to phase the rollout without requiring downtime windows across an entire portfolio at once, and a support model that kept a single point of contact accountable for the whole project rather than handing pieces off between subcontractors. Zen’s team also proposed a phased cutover plan from the outset, rather than a single high-risk migration weekend, which matched Emaar’s own risk tolerance for systems that customer-facing sales staff rely on every day.
With the unified communications foundation in place, Emaar’s IT team now has the flexibility to bring new office locations onto the network without repeating a full infrastructure build-out each time, and the centralized reporting dashboard gives leadership ongoing visibility into how the platform is performing across every site. Zen continues to support the environment with proactive monitoring and periodic reviews to ensure the platform scales alongside Emaar’s expanding portfolio of projects.
“Consolidating fifteen separate phone systems into one platform sounds simple on paper, but the real win was doing it without a single day of disruption to our sales teams. The cost savings were welcome, but the reliability is what our teams notice every day.” — Head of IT Infrastructure, Emaar Properties