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siptel helps Fund Management company achieve unprecedented availability
siptel was approached by a team of fund managers who manage diversified portfolios of investments in UK and international equities, government bonds and corporate bonds. The motivation behind a technology change was their office relocation, as well as a need to reinforce their key business requirement - resilience.
The fund management company, based in London, has a staggering annual turnover in excess of £10 billion. They have one main office and a Disaster Recovery (DR) centre, only to be used in the event of any major unplanned outages. This form of redundancy, critical for a company dealing with so much money and data on a daily basis, allows secondary data or system resources to be put into service at short notice, should primary resources fail or otherwise become unavailable.
The brief required full service availability at all times, meaning 99.999% reliability from their main office to the DR centre and back again, 24/7. They put out a tender to three companies and siptel won the bid. siptel provided an Avaya (Avaya Communications, using ‘S’ series servers) and Extreme (manufacturer of LAN switches) solution. The different components of the solution included: ISDN30s at the main office and DR centre, dual parenting which supplies the same numbers at both sites if one line fails, dual LES 100 between sites, making network failure a virtual impossibility, dedicated 2 MB internet connection and dedicated private wires with direct links to trading bureaus. They also required VoIP between sites to transfer any communication over the dual LES 100, with any calls at the DR site coming through to the main site and vice versa.
Some of the more technical components of the solution were: Extreme data Summit 300 LAN switches with Power over Ethernet (POE) devices, also duplicated at both sites, Witness Contact Store voice recording, to record calls for clients, complying with FSA regulations (integration between Avaya and Witness is tight and is also backed up at the DR centre) and integrated voice messaging with the desk top, providing ease of communication. Finally, EC500 (Extension to Cellular Connect) mobility was suggested by siptel and deployed, allowing employees to be contacted anywhere whilst away from their desk. The landline phone runs in parallel with the mobile so if one rings, the other also rings.
This complex solution was carefully designed and methodically deployed, having been specifically tailored to guarantee full resilience - a critical feature for the trading business as they deal with hundreds of millions of pounds every day. siptel created a project team for the technology relocation and upgrade, consisting of a project manager and two dedicated engineers. siptel’s project manager liaised closely with the business and co-ordinated full and detailed training on the new system, prior to installation, during go live and also after the event. siptel has put in place an ongoing training package, maintenance and support contract. Return on technology investment should be achieved within twelve months.
The Head of Finance and Compliance Officer for the company, commented, “siptel have reassured me the whole way that they would provide us with the best communications solution for our very specific needs. Resilience is everything in our industry and siptel painstakingly researched all the options and came up with a solution that ticked all the boxes. They were great to work with, highly efficient and professional and made both the move and the upgrade appear seamless.”
