Exeter is a top 10 UK University, which combines world-leading research at campuses in Exeter, Devon, and near Falmouth in Cornwall. The University has recently begun an ambitious investment programme worth £270 million. This includes a £48 million new student services building, a £25 million investment in the Business School and a further £18 million for Biosciences.
As part of its ongoing investment strategy, many parts of the campus have been refurbished along with several new buildings. This programme has also included a major migration of the University’s communication infrastructure including a convergence of voice and data over a single IP network.
Even with over 3,500 telephone ports, the University was quickly running out of capacity. Alongside the widespread upheaval at the campus during the refurbishment and expansion programme, managing the moves, adds and changes for staff across multiple sites was proving a challenge for the IT department while dealing with day-to-day IT issues and major new projects. As Roger Snelling, Head of Networks for the University explained, “Dealing with staff requests in a timely fashion is essential for both the running of the university and to ensure that the billing charged to each school or department is correct.”
The IT department individually bills each group for calls and services, which is then used to fund the IT infrastructure. Without accurate billing, funding would be misaligned which would cause major operational issues. With the IT department already working flat out, the amount of administration time required to handle moves, adds, changes and billing for 2800 staff across 200 departments was daunting.
“We have used Tiger2020 software for several years and moving it onto a managed service offered us many advantages,” explains Snelling.
The first was a much faster response in dealing with telephony related requests which the IT help desk passed on immediately to the Tiger Managed Services Operations team who carried out and tested any reconfiguration required to either the university's legacy or new Nortel CS1000 telephony systems. Tiger then updated the billing data and liased with the end user directly to ensure the request was successful.
The other major advantage was the removal of the upgrade and maintenance of the servers required to run the University’s old in-house Tiger2020 installation.
“I am increasingly challenged to reduce staff resource, so when staff retire they are unlikely to be replaced,” explains Snelling, “Using the managed service to supplement reduced staffing levels provides a 50% saving on our operational costs, while delivering an extremely good level of service that can expand to meet any future requirements as our university expands.”
The Tiger Communications MS solution eliminates the need for onsite servers and staff to run the call logger. No upfront capital investment means customers only have to budget for a fixed monthly fee. Accurate, timely reports are produced and delivered to key staff in any number of popular formats. A dedicated team of Tiger specialists handles all configuration, moves, changes, upgrades/updates, faults and queries.
“By removing the time consuming and mundane elements of our telephony provision to a much more cost effective model, it is allowing us to concentrate on the critical projects,” Snelling explains “Overall, the Tiger managed service has lived up to our expectations and as our University grows we expect it to deliver more benefits and cost savings.”