05 February 2017

The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) was founded in 1996 but its roots date back to 1928. Today, it has 17,000 members and 160 staff. Based in Holborn, near Great Ormond Street Hospital, the RCPCH also has offices in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast.

Its staff need to maintain regular contact with members and trainees to coordinate the often time-critical examinations process.

The organisation’s infrastructure and operations manager, Olly Rice, says: “Our phone system is one of the primary ways that we communicate with staff and our members. Sometimes the communication needs to be instant, especially for the examinations team, so it’s really important that we can just pick up the phone and talk to someone when we need to.

“There’s an immediacy that you get with the phone that you don’t get with other forms of communication so we needed to ensure that our telephony system was as reliable as possible, to reduce the risk of outages and to future-proof our systems.”

RCPCH had a Mitel system using VoIP over ISDN30. Annodata recommended moving to the cloud for reliability and cost savings. The UC specialist rolled out a new fully-managed and fully-virtualised Mitel communications solution and placed it in the college’s existing VMware environment. It has additional layers of resiliency; if one server fails, the service will automatically switch to another.

In addition, says Annodata, RCPCH’s line rentals were moved from ISDN30 to SIP. The company says this change has led to significant cost savings, as local and national calls are now free of charge, and has also given the college greater control over its phone numbers.

Rice adds that there has been a marked improvement in service reliability: “We’ve got a rock-solid solution, which is exactly what we need. The additional resiliency of the system has been the big key win for me and has brought me a lot more peace of mind. Another big benefit is that we’ve now got the foundations in place needed to move forward.

“We’re keen to improve our disaster recovery capabilities and explore mobile working, both of which required us to virtualise our telephony systems. We’ve taken those steps now, which puts us in a very strong position to build in new functionality when the time is right.”