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Like all local authorities, Gosport Borough Council is under pressure to deliver improved services with fewer resources and reduced funding.
To this end, the Council has been moving their IT Infrastructure from within the Town Hall into a South Coast data centre, which both liberates office space and reduces the Council’s energy bill.
The final part of the data centre move was to replace the ageing phone system. Bought in 1999, this was proving increasingly difficult and costly to maintain. The PBX equipment had its own room in the Council’s IT suite with a dedicated peg board in that same room. Rationalising this arrangement was key to moving staff around the building, making the best use of the available space and liberating space that could be used by other paying tenants.
Whilst managed by the Council, moves, adds, and changes had until now been executed by the software vendor, meaning an engineer had to be booked and paid for to visit the site and make alterations to the system. Having been bought in 1999, the PBX were becoming prohibitively expensive to maintain, needing specialist suppliers with appropriate spares and the relevant expertise.
David Eland, Head of IT, commented, “Having recognized the need to replace the phone system, our procurement process began with engagement with our usual corporate IT and comms suppliers and we were, frankly, disappointed as none of them seemed to understand either the brief or the financial constraints we are under. That all changed when Wizards introduced us to 3CX.”
David Eland went on to say, “Wizards were able to demonstrate 3CX live in our offices and in about 15 minutes showed us that we could build all the required functionality we had been using ourselves and, using the straightforward 3CX interface, we can make changes needed without expensive external engineering. Where previously we had to pay for help building call queues, hunt groups, manage voicemail and moves, adds, and changes, we could make these revisions quickly and easily in-house. As a local authority, we have an obligation to record all calls and previously that was done using a specialist and very costly add-on server to the main PBX; once more Wizards showed us we could manage those recordings ourselves cheaply, quickly, and easily.”
David Eland continued, “Having established this was the right technical fit for the business, we reviewed the cost implications and were surprised to learn we could implement the complete solution including the entire fleet of new handsets across the organisation for less than one year’s maintenance charge on the old PBX.”
The use of Voice over IP means call costs should fall dramatically, and Gosport Borough Council aims to build on the 3CX deployment by using other features such as softphones on laptops and smartphones. Wizards look forward to supporting Gosport Borough Council for many years to come.
