Balfour Beatty Capital is one of the largest private sector investors in healthcare, education, roads and infrastructure in EMEA.  It has a network infrastructure supporting up to 500 users spread across three key sites with smaller branch sites diversely spread across the UK.

The problem

Due to rapid expansion and key infrastructure components becoming end of life, Balfour Beatty Capital approached UCcert to audit and recommend a new LAN and telephony solution across all its sites. In addition to this it required a strategy for future upgrades and further consultation on feature enhancements that would be beneficial to the business.  After a period of consultation with key business decision makers and end users, UCcert put forward a solution of Cisco’s Unified Communications Manager and Unity Unified Messaging layered on Cisco 3750 PoE stackwise switch’s.

The solution

Cisco’s Unified Communications Manager offers Balfour Beatty Capital a fault tolerant and resilient telephony solution as the servers can be configured for failover with the IP endpoints load balanced between servers.  Should one server fail the other can continue call processing.  UCcert also configured Cisco’s Survivable Remote Site Telephony (SRST) solution at the Branch offices which allows a further point of resilience.  If the WAN fails, IP Endpoints re-home to the local Voice Gateway so the site can continue to make and receive calls as normal.

The results

As Balfour Beatty Capital were running a Microsoft Exchange environment, Cisco’s Unity Unified Voice Messaging solution was the preferred option due to its tight and seamless integration with Exchange.  Users now receive all their Voicemails to their desktops via Outlook and also their Blackberries meaning staff are always in touch with each other and their clients.

“Each site was installed seamlessly, with minimal downtime and fuss and the feedback from end users has been very positive,” stated Gareth White, Balfour Beatty Capital Project Manager, “UCcert pulled out all the stops to get this in and working”.