Redstone Cuts Tower Hamlets College Bill With IP Telephony Upgrade
MSP rolls out Cisco UCM telephony system at the East London college at reduced cost
Tower Hamlets College has implemented an IP telephony system and managed to reduce the bill by over £70,000 in savin.
The Redstone implementation, based on Cisco’s Unified Communications Manager (UCM) system, replaces its existing IP telephony infrastructure, which had been in place for eight years and was nearing the end of its life.
Ringing the changes
In addition to enhanced functionality and features, the system proposed by Redstone included the ability for Tower Hamlets to re-use 600 existing handsets – saving the College over £70,000 compared to the cost of an entirely new system.
The company was awarded the deal following a competitive tender process involving a number of other providers and vendor technologies. Redstone said there was a “compelling financial case”, alongside the College’s familiarity with Cisco technology, that were key factors in the decision as was the College’s strong relationship with the company as an existing supplier.
Cisco Unified Communications Manager went live in April and is one of the first examples of a Redstone IP telephony deployment on a virtual server that is maintained by the customer. The system is supported and maintained by Redstone under a five-year maintenance agreement, which includes a proactive managed service.
Georgina Creighton, head of IT support at Tower Hamlets College, said Redstone understood understood that this project had clear financial and technological goals, and “put forward a technical solution that would meet them all. They were also prepared to go the extra mile to ensure the smooth implementation of the new system so that there was minimum disruption to our daily operations.”
Fraser Fisher, managing director at Redstone, said that budgets for IT projects are coming under increasing financial pressure but organisations “can’t afford to let this push them behind the technology curve”. He added that the firm was looking at ways to work with customers to “identify smarter ways to finance projects that will offer them the service and productivity benefits they need to stay competitive”.