siptel is finalist in two categories at the European IT Excellence Awards 2010

siptel was chosen as a finalist for the European IT Excellence Awards in two separate categories. The European IT Excellence Awards recognise best practices in customer solutions by IT channels across Europe and encourage channel partnerships and relationships across IT, convergence and Internet industries. The ISV categories are for software-based solutions and the Solution Provider categories are for complete solutions that include hardware, software, communications and services. The entries detailed the sales and marketing activities undertaken in partnership with the supplier and showed the results as far as new business development and market penetration. Each entry also had to be supported by a client endorsement. siptel entered two categories in the Solution Providers categories: Unified Communications and Vertical Market.

In the Unified Communications category, the judges were looking for solutions 'beyond convergence', where the solution provider integrated a whole range of unified communications technologies to deliver a really innovative business application. siptel chose to highlight TUI Travel, a very successful leisure travel group operating in approximately 180 countries worldwide for more than 30 million customers.

One of TUI’s prominent UK sites in Luton has over 2,000 users, consisting of 300 call centre agents and 1,700 back office staff. TUI’s main drivers for change were reducing operational costs and enhancing functionality. siptel listened carefully to TUI’s issues and re-engineered the existing infrastructure to support converged technology, by implementing the Avaya Communications Manager, integrated to an Avaya SIP server, whilst still using the existing Cisco handsets. siptel’s integrated solution has saved TUI an incredible £500,000 in existing Cisco phones and ongoing annual savings of £175,000 on support. siptel have now also won a multi-year 24/7 maintenance contract for TUI across all main UK sites.

The Vertical category is designed to recognise excellence in the development and deployment of a solution that addresses and meets the specific business needs of a particular market sector. siptel chose King Edward VII’s Hospital, a well-known, charitable hospital in the heart of London.

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 with Unified Messaging, whilst increasing the network resilience. They were also aiming to cut costs as well as reduce supplier management.

siptel chose the Avaya ‘Aura™ Communication Manager’ for the King Edward VII’s hospital, 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 King Edward VII’s Hospital needed for their mission-critical communications. siptel has provided King Edward VII’s Hospital with an extremely resilient IT solution. The hospital now has a fully integrated network with remote monitoring and comprehensive SLAs in place, as well as crucial cost savings. siptel has also been given a 24/7, five year support contract with King Edward VII’s Hospital, testament to the hospital’s belief in them.

Speaking about the finalist entries, Alan Norman, Managing Director of IT Europa, stated, "The quality of entries was extremely high and demonstrated the depth of talent in the channel community across Europe". John Chapman, Editorial Director at IT Europa, added: "The judges were impressed with the quality of all the entries and the obvious work that had gone into preparing them. What was so exciting and uplifting was the real skill and ingenuity shown by the channel in many of the solutions. Our judges have a lot of experience in the IT industry and of sitting on such judging panels, so to have such comments as ‘I was blown away with what that company has achieved' and ‘fantastic solution' from them was incredible to hear."

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February, 2010