Silatel To Improve IT & Telecom Efficiency

The customer

The Client is an international consortium of higher education universities present on every continent with more than 434 agents stationed in 65 branch locations and operating under nine regional offices.

Since 2000, the Agency has experienced a period of unprecedented development, marked by budget consolidation and a 50% increase in its membership. It is today the core of a network of 728 establishments covering 88 countries.

In the context of this consolidation, The Agency started a large project of optimisation for its IT and Telecom infrastructure. For this purpose, the choice has been made to adopt Open Source Software as much as possible. Therefore, the Agency started the migration of all its servers and clients to Linux based operating systems and initiated a project for the adoption of Voice over IP telephony.

The challenge

Education is a sector where IT and Telecom budgets can rapidly hike to an extreme extent. And this is even truer within an organization with an international presence and a regionalized management.
This means that a special attention have to be paid to the organizational impact of any decision. Also, with a budget based management, it is mandatory to justify investments on the short and long terms while maximising the return on investments. This, with the reusability of the existing infrastructure and the upgradability of any solution.

In this context, the Agency has to project the evolution of its system in accordance with the transformations of the organization on all levels.

Solution

To satisfy to all this concerns, the Client looked for a consultant to assist its IT department with expertise and know-how, while keeping the management of its systems at an internal level.

The Agency chose SILATEL for this mission to perform a battery of services in support to the IT department. These services cover the following:

• Technology Audit
• System reengineering
• Technology selection
• Maintenance

Benefits

The proposed architecture is based on all IP technologies with PSTN support. The consolidation of most of the infrastructure and the identification of redundancies helped lower maintenance costs. The proposed solution was taking full advantage of the latest Voice and Data technologies while integrating seamlessly in the existing infrastructure of the client.

With the help of Silatel’s experts, the client was able to renegotiate its telephony and internet connectivity contracts generating an instantly 40% economy on its telephony and internet connectivity costs. The solution proposed by SILATEL is rapidly repaid by a significant cut in costs and a tremendous improvement of IT management. The return on investment for the client was estimated at less than 18 months with the economies on operational costs and to less than 9 months if we add up the reduction of maintenance costs.

Technical Summary:

• ·         400+ agents
• ·         728+ establishments
• ·         65 remote sites
• ·         1 VPN
• ·         60%+ economy made on installation and exploitation costs
• ·         Optimized IT management
• ·         Free inter-site communications
• ·         Plug and Play Terminals