Facilities management giant adopts unified communications

The firm is constantly looking for ways to improve its IT provision and drive down costs and has been tracking the progress of unified communications for years.

But it was only in late 2010 that ICT director Jenny Sener concluded the research had reached the sufficient level of maturity and pricing to merit signing a £5m, three year deal with managed communications services provider Azzurri to install and maintain fixed and mobile connectivity on its behalf.

The time you had leased lines

"Back at the time you had leased lines and ISDN backup and you signed up for three to five years and that was it. However you can deploy UC as part of a WAN contract and you get DSL, Ethernet in the First Mile and a whole raft of more flexible technologies at far better price points."

In the short term, the contract is focused on procuring fixed and mobile voice and data services from a single supplier, covering voice over IP, landlines, contact centre services and wide area network or broadband connectivity to multiple OCS offices around the UK.

"One of the core concepts of the contract is role-based telecommunications deployment because in the past we have had a much more simplistic approach based around the research itself," says Sener.

Mobile access to key business applications like SAP and a bespoke contract, billing and service deployment application called Lynx that lets clients sign off jobs electronically on mobile devices are such as vital as email.

Single managed contract

Azzurri is responsible for consolidating previous services from multiple network connectivity providers into a single managed contract, switching OCS’s previous deal with Vodafone to Telefonica O2, and taking over the fixed line telephony and broadband provision itself, adding hosted VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) service based on Avaya equipment.

"We’re looking to Azzurri to advise us on best-of-breed research, and we fully expect them to map in different suppliers to achieve better performance or lower costs over the lifetime of the contract."

To date 2,500 mobile accounts have been switched to O2, with the replacement of OCS’s analogue private branch exchange equipment with an Avaya VoIP core expected in the first quarter of 2011.

The duration of the three year contract

OCS expects to shave up to 30 per cent of its forecast communications spend over the duration of the three year contract, savings which will come primarily from reducing its headcount, however also from lower internal management costs.

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