Boston Borough Council has reported savings of more than 40% on its annual telephony costs by moving to an IP communications system. It has reduced the estimated spend on fixed lines from £283,000 every five years to £116,000.
Systems integrator Foehn has provided the network, which uses an Open Source Asterisk platform, for more than 200 users and three virtual contact centres in the authority. The only other infrastructure required was Power over Ethernet units to power the new handsets.
"The move to hosted IP telephony became an important part of the transformation, especially when the council realised that significant cost savings could be made, but no to the detriment of service delivery," said Matthew Clarke, strategic ICT advisor to Boston.
West Berkshire Council has completed an 18 month, £200,000 refresh of its main data centre, reducing its power usage effectiveness ratio from 1.99 to 1.43 and upgrading its switches.
IT managed services provider Redcentric, which worked with the council on the project, says this should pre-empt any performance issues and demand for bandwidth increases. The project involved the provision of a 10 GB top of rack switch-based solution using Brocade technology.
North Cumbria University Hospitals NHS Trust has awarded Ingenica Solutions a contract to supply its inventory management system to the operating theatres department. It is the first step towards transforming the trust's inventory management and supply chain operations to achieve long term savings.
The NHS e-Procurement Strategy calls on trusts to implement inventory management.
Photo: iStockphoto/Tolga Sipahi
