Grail Research is a newly formed startup research business with operations in Cambridge, MA, New Delhi, India, and Beijing, China. Grail maintains a staff of approximately 10 people in the US and currently has approximately 200 employees in the India office and 20 employees in the Beijing office. Founded in the beginning of 2006, Grail has grown organically from its original staff of 2 to its current size.

During this time, LightWire has designed, architected, and implemented all IT systems for the company, including network design for the India office to implementation and management of all of the servers and desktop resources. Additionally, Grail leverages LightWire’s datacenter for email and website hosting, VPN services, and Anti-Spam services.

Recently, LightWire has assisted in the hiring an on-site senior IT management and desktop support staff in the Delhi office - these staff report to Ian Findlay who functions as the head of IT for the organization.

Grail’s network consists of 11 network servers – 7 are located in India, and 4 are located in LightWire’s datacenter – these systems are connected by a redundant VPN connection. The network is Windows 2003 with 2 Exchange 2007 servers, and Windows XP desktops. All of the desktops use VoIP softphone clients for telephony connected to an open-source VoIP telephone system, which in turn leverages a VoIP calling system to reduce the cost of the office’s telephone calling activities. LightWire's approach to designing and implementing these systems is consistent with our philosophy for all clients, but can be especially powerful for startup companies - we looked to deploy very powerful, cost effective solutions that would allow Grail to function as if it were a large organization while minimizing the cost of doing so - the deployment of the VoIP PBX in conjunction with 'softphones' is a good example - almost no money was required to deploy a fully functioning, highly sophisticated PBX to 200 people - typically a company would be required to pay for the PBX as well as the physical telephones. At $300 per telephone, just the savings on the phone for 200 people is significant.

• LightWire Network Monitoring Platform
• LightWire Anti-Spam Platform
• LightWire Hosted Web Services
• Microsoft Windows 2003 Server R2 32-bit
• Microsoft Windows 2003 Server R2 64-bit
• BlackBerry Enterprise Server
• Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
• Open-Source Asterisk-based VoIP PBX
• VoIP Telephone Handsets
• VoIP Softphone Handset Software with USB Handsets
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional
• Microsoft Office 2003 Professional
• Centralized AntiVirus with Automated updates and reporting
• Remote User VPN Access
• Site To Site VPN Connectivity
• SSL VPN