siptel wins five year support contract for prestigious London hospital

A well-known, private hospital in the heart of London has chosen siptel for its communications needs. This independent, charitable hospital, registered with the Healthcare Commission and recognised by Investors in People, offers the highest standards of medical excellence, the most modern equipment and facilities combined with impeccable standards of care. The aim of the hospital is to provide the highest standards of patient services based on a commitment to total quality care: the hospital’s telecommunications fall within that remit.

Historically, the hospital had a 20 year old telecoms solution in place which spanned four separate sites, all around London. All of these sites were using disparate telecoms systems, which was far from ideal, so the objective was to unify and integrate these legacy systems into one converged IT solution.

The hospital went out to tender and siptel, an independent voice and data solutions provider, responded to the brief. siptel was short-listed and ultimately selected to plan, design and implement the challenging project.

siptel chose the Avaya Aura™ Communication Manager, a relatively new solution which uses standards-based virtualisation technology for real-time communications. Virtualisation is the use of software to allow a single piece of hardware to run multiple applications at the same time. It can therefore deliver the security, scalability and resilience which the hospital needed for their mission-critical communications. Other major benefits of this solution include: up to 75% reduction in hardware, power, cooling and maintenance requirements, for a low total cost of ownership and a more environmentally friendly approach; simplified installation and ongoing management with integrated services for administrators; powerful wizards and self-use administration; and high resilience with built-in remote monitoring, no single point of failure and an optional backup server for redundancy, running on a Cisco LAN infrastructure. siptel integrated the sites with networks services using WES (Wide Area Network Extension Services), to create more resilience with a common, centralised platform, and to reduce overall support and business costs.

In addition, siptel installed Modular Messaging, connected to MS Exchange, for voicemail, email and fax to desktop and a mobility package. As a safety measure, siptel split the solution across multiple data centres, providing the hospital with 5 9s reliability and making security a priority.

The stage was set up four weeks prior to implementation, with an impressive one-hour downtime between switch over when legacy systems were still in place. Emergency lines and crash calls were still able to operate without interruption.

Following the successful installation, siptel has been given a 24/7, five year support contract with the hospital. It is unusual for any business to sign up for a full five year contract, which is testament to the hospital’s belief and trust in siptel.

The hospital’s IT Manager has been very impressed with the seamless delivery, commenting, “I am delighted with the outcome of this project. I set siptel a tough challenge: to completely change the legacy IT systems and integrate the new system whilst ensuring that there was minimal downtime between one system being switched off and the new one being activated. This is particularly critical in a hospital when people’s lives are at stake and emergency lines need to remain operational 24/7”. They further added, “Judging by siptel’s high level of service throughout the design and implementation phase, I have every confidence that they will continue to do a sterling job whilst supporting this system”.

Steve Rasmussen, Sales Director of siptel commented, “My engineers were not phased by the multi-site implementation as we have many years’ experience working with hospitals, and in the healthcare sector generally“. Rasmussen continued, “The key to successful IT projects is meticulous planning and good organisation, to ensure a solution is installed as seamlessly as possible”.

Click here to contact us.

December, 2009