Scalable Communications
We have been really pleased with the solution Scalable have delivered for us, already we are seeing increased performance and receiving positive feedback from our users on the speed of application responsiveness.
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SCALABLE COMMUNICATIONS DELIVERS CONVERGED VOICE AND DATA SOLUTION TO ASCRIBE |
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Ascribe, market leaders in Clinical Information systems, have engaged with Scalable Communications to improve its Wide Area Network (WAN) Infrastructure. |
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| 01/02/2010 |
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February 1st 2010 – Scalable Communications, the leading independent provider of secure, best of breed converged solutions, have implemented a wide area connectivity solution between Ascribe’s seven sites in the UK and have converged multiple services over a single, unified platform. Highly secure high-speed connectivity now joins Ascribe’s business locations and interconnects to N3 – the private broadband network dedicated to the NHS and its services. Founded by healthcare professionals, Ascribe Ltd is a leading supplier of clinically focused IT solutions in Healthcare, with customers in the UK, Republic of Ireland, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Australia & New Zealand. As the market leaders Ascribe have been able to build a robust product portfolio from a number of complementary acquisitions. Their solutions directly improve patient care by making relevant information available to clinicians at the ‘point of care’. This is assisted by Ascribe’s core technology linking to the NHS ‘Spine’, which is part of the NHS Care Records Service, that is creating an electronic care record for all England's 50 million plus patients. Ascribe’s strategy to build on its position in the medicines management market is to deliver organic growth and consider acquisitions that bring complementary healthcare IT systems to customers. In 2005 a project was completed to integrate the most recent acquisitions at the time onto a unified data network and Mitel IP phone system. Since then, the company has successfully acquired five additional companies and felt that they had outgrown the existing infrastructure. Ascribe had specific challenges with the slow performance of inter-site applications, Virtual Private Network (VPN) dropouts, IP phone calls suffering jitter and latency and a shortage of internet and N3 bandwidth due to the recent acquisitions. Richard Hinchliffe, Group Services and Support Manager of Ascribe explained, “We were experiencing difficulties with our current topology and felt as a whole that we had outgrown the current infrastructure. We wanted to find out which new technologies were available in the market place and how they could possibly deal with the current issues we were facing.” In order to review the technologies in the market Ascribe issued a tender document in late 2008. In response, Scalable Communications proposed a solution that brought together Exponential-e, Extreme Networks and Juniper Networks. Mark Davenport, Director of Business Development at Scalable Communications, commented “Ascribe required a solution that wasn’t only robust, but also future proof, a solution that could deal with further acquisitions and increased bandwidth. The secure, converged solution will enable Ascribe to improve patient care and provide clinicians with the information they require in real time.” Scalable’s solution for high speed inter-site links at the UK sites and in the Australian offices was based on VPLS technology from Exponential-e. The VPLS solution extends the plug and play functionality of the LAN across the wide-area, providing significant advantages to Ascribe such as low latency, quality of service, business grade internet, ease of management as well as being highly resilient. Maximising Scalable and Exponential-e’s direct Technical Assistance Centre interconnections Scalable were able to provide the solution in association with their 24 x 7 Network Monitoring solution. Scalable proposed to increase the bandwidth connectivity to 100MB to the two main data centre locations in Bolton and Wingate to substantiate the access to core information held at these sites and in the future the centralisation of PSTN circuits and clustering of VOIP systems. All other sites were to have 2MB of bandwidth, generally over a 10MB bearer. Whilst completing the design Scalable also ensured the solution was certified compliant by Connecting for Health from a security and standards perspective. Scalable proposed that the remote, international locations be connected via secure Internet VPN solutions using Juniper SSL technology. The model includes Juniper SSG520's and SSG5’s Firewalls for the core and remote sites; protecting the infrastructure against security threats. Ascribe also invested in the Juniper ‘Unified Threat Management System’ (UTM), enabling them to combine an extensive range of threat management services into a single appliance and deliver comprehensive protection to the business. As Ascribe increased their client services, the utilisation of their own existing and one new Datacentre became key, and the local area network connectivity needed to be reviewed in both these locations to deliver performance and stability. To meet Ascribe’s goals of providing an improved client facing service, Scalable designed and installed new core data centre X450a LAN switches from Extreme Networks to provide a highly resilient, high performance network solution to support business critical applications and a solid foundation to support future applications. The data centre would enable them to maintain a host of applications such as video, data and voice, and provided a more cost effective, future proof resolution whilst providing maximum resiliency. Richard Hinchliffe, Group Services and Support Manager of Ascribe added, “We have been really pleased with the solution Scalable have delivered for us, already we are seeing increased performance and receiving positive feedback from our users on the speed of application responsiveness. Scalable hold the highest accreditation status with its partners, we were confident they would deliver a cost effective, fully managed, actively monitored and maintained resilient network and I am pleased to say they have.” ---ENDS-- About Ascribe Ascribe Ltd is a leading healthcare company with over 20 years experience in developing and delivering IT solutions that directly improve patient care, and clinical & business processes, to Primary & Secondary healthcare providers in the UK and overseas. Recently featured in the Sunday Times TechTrack 100, Ascribe provides over sixty robust interoperable clinical systems that deliver accurate and complete patient information to clinicians. Our data is also used to plan ongoing improvements to healthcare and generate reports to measure operational & strategic performance indicators such as ‘Payment by Results’. Ascribe provides systems & consultancy services for both the Clinical 5: PAS, Order communications, eDischarge, Scheduling & ePrescribing; and also for a wider range of clinical requirements including, Community Care & Mental Health, eDocument management, eDischarge letters, Emergency Care, Endoscopy, Pharmacy, Substance Misuse, and Theatre Management. Ascribe employs 270 personnel through its operating companies in the UK, Kenya, Australia and New Zealand. For more information on our systems please visit the Ascribe Website: www.ascribe.com © Ascribe 2010. Ascribe is a registered trademark. All other brands and product names and trademarks are the registered property of their respective companies. |
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About Scalable Communications Plc Started in 1997, Scalable Communications has over ten years of strong performance and consistent organic growth from medium and large sized customers from both the private and public sector, including names such as B&Q, Royal Society of Medicine and Cambridgeshire County Council. With a customer retention rate of over 96%, Scalable Communications can be relied upon to transform an organisations’ business communications. For more information please contact |
0844 7422010
