Supporting growth with flexible and scalable network and communications solutions

Company

Ascribe Ltd, is a leading supplier of consultancy and clinically focused IT solutions in Healthcare, with customers in the UK, Republic of Ireland, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Australia & New Zealand.

Ascribe’s solutions directly improve patient care by reducing risk and making relevant information available to clinicians at 'the point of care'. As a market leader in Clinical Information systems, the company has built a robust product portfolio from a number of complementary acquisitions.

Exponential growth

With offices and a customer base that spans the globe, reliable connectivity is vitally important to Ascribe. So, after a period of rapid growth, the company decided to replace its network and phone system.

“In the five years that I’d been at Ascribe, it had grown exponentially and our infrastructure was insufficient,” says Gareth Evans, Group ICT Manager, Ascribe. “As a result, we were experiencing bandwidth and connectivity issues both internally and from remote sites. We were also getting customer complaints about our phone system.”

With a strategy based on both organic growth and acquisition, Ascribe needed a flexible and scalable network and communications infrastructure to support it. Having carefully detailed its requirements, the company put out a tender. One of the respondents was Scalable.

Close match

“Scalable gave us some really good online demonstrations of various parts of the technology, such as Juniper’s firewalls and the monitoring platforms,” says Evans. “Scalable also took us to the Mitel demonstration suite in London, where we could see the products in use and had some good demonstrations of how we could use our existing hardware more effectively.”

After careful consideration of all the tender responses, Ascribe chose Scalable to implement a new network and improve its phone system. “From seven respondents we whittled it down to two and then selected Scalable,” explains Evans. “Scalable’s solution was more flexible and its tender response matched our needs more closely.”

The solution Scalable proposed for Ascribe’s Wide Area Network (WAN) is based on VPLS technology from Exponential-e. At the two main data centres, Scalable proposed increasing the bandwidth connectivity to 100Mb, with all other sites having 2Mb bandwidth over 10Mb bearers. To support business critical applications and meet Ascribe’s goals of providing an improved client facing service, Scalable installed LAN switches from Extreme Networks at the two data centres.

For the remote, international locations Scalable recommended secure Internet VPN solutions using Juniper firewalls at the core and remote sites. Ascribe also invested in the Juniper Unified Threat Management (UTM) system, enabling it to combine an extensive range of threat management services into a single appliance.

At the same time as the WAN was implemented Ascribe decided to move to a Central Group N3 connection. “Because this connection is essentially a direct link to the NHS, it has to meet strict compliance criteria,” explains Evans. “The solution that we put forward based on Juniper’s products met the criteria first time and we were authorised to have the link installed.”

Great engineers

Scalable also implemented the solution for Ascribe. “We found Scalable’s integration and configuration of our systems to be first rate,” says Evans. “The project management was excellent from start to finish. We had some really great engineers working on site with us and their technical expertise was really fantastic. We switched over from the old MPLS network to the new VLPS network in one evening with no reports of any issues the following day. To wrap up, the project couldn’t have gone better.

Increased performance

Since the network has gone live Ascribe has seen significant increases in performance. “We’ve experienced almost zero downtime since the Extreme switches were installed,” says Evans. “In part it’s because of the automatic routing which the switches use. In the event of a failure we always have a second link ready to failover in a matter of milliseconds. Also, with Extreme switches at both our primary and disaster recovery data centres, replication between the two has been 100%.”

The VPLS technology has also brought benefits. “The VPLS technology has helped us to reduce latency and increase bandwidth to all of our UK and international sites,” Evans continues. “Also, all our network links are now resilient, as they are backed up by ADSL connections that provide another route to the core network. The benefits are that user satisfaction has increased and we can roll out more applications that require a Wide Area Network.”

Improved connectivity

Following the implementation of the Juniper VPN, connectivity with Ascribe’s home workers has been improved. “We have home workers in Australia, New Zealand, Nairobi and the UK and use them to provide an on-call facility,” says Karen Fielding, Customer Services Manager, Ascribe. “The connectivity has been great, especially with the recent UK freak weather conditions, when none of our staff could get into the office. The Juniper VPN enabled continued connectivity and support for our customers with no downtime.”

“The Juniper firewalls have also enables us to drastically reduce the amount of spam and virus traffic getting on to our internal network,” adds Evans. “They also provide a single, central management portal, where we can log on and see what’s happening.”

Better communications

But Scalable’s proposal didn’t only include overhauling Ascribe’s network. There was also the question of the problems the company was experiencing with its Mitel phone system. “We’d been working on an Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) project with another supplier for about 18 months,” says Evans. “But it wasn’t working properly and we were getting customer complaints. We also wanted to introduce Audio Web-Conferencing (AWC).”

After discussions with Scalable, it was decided to revisit the existing ACD structure and simplify it. Scalable carried out the work, as well as installing the AWC and providing a new billing package. Since then, there have been no customer complaints.

“Customer satisfaction has improved considerably,” says Fielding. “In the UK, Scalable’s work has enabled us to ensure that all calls are answered and no call’s are lost. It’s also enabled us to complete our ‘follow-the-sun’ support in Australia, ensuring that all out-of-hours calls are transferred to our help desk in Australia and answered 24x7.”

“Since we migrated to the Scalable lines and minutes billing platform we’ve seen around a 22% reduction in our call charges and about an 8% reduction in our line fees,” adds Evans. “For a support company that’s a significant reduction.”

The new AWC service has also brought significant benefits. “Since we implemented the Mitel AWC platform, our staff no longer need to use third party web and audio conferencing services,” says Evans. “It has saved us in the region of £6,000 to £7,000 per month, which means it paid for itself within the first quarter of implementation.”

First-rate support

With both the network and communications solutions in and running, Scalable is now providing Ascribe with support for both, including proactively monitoring and managing the network.

“The support is absolutely first rate,” says Evans. “We receive regular notifications of events which might affect our network and we have a quarterly review with our Customer Service Manager. The knowledge of Scalable’s support staff is very, very good and we’ve yet to find a problem they can’t solve for us. Scalable is also coming up with proactive ideas about how we can take our network and phone system forward.”

Simon Rogers, Group Network Administrator, Ascribe agrees. “Every time I’ve rung Scalable its support staff have responded well and knowledgeably,” he says. “They’ve also been fantastic when they’ve come on site. They understand the gravity of the problems we raise and the impact on our business. I can’t fault the service they provide.”

“One of the key benefits of working with Scalable is that we have one supplier for our network, phone system and lines and minutes,” concludes Evans. “I would have no hesitation recommending Scalable to anyone looking to implement a project like ours. They delivered everything they promised.”