Meridian move comms to the Cloud
Erangey: Cloud attracting more people
Meridian Business Support has implemented a Mitel-hosted telephony system provided by internet protocol (IP) telephony company Voxalis that will run in the Cloud and connect all of its 50 branches throughout the UK.
Nigel Dobinson, group IT manager at Meridian, told Recruiter that it provides the group with a consistent and centrally controlled system that better serves the business.
Meridian, which has 340 direct employees covering the construction, commercial, education, industrial, health and international markets, also wanted a system that was able to adapt to changing work practices such as hotdesking and homeworking.
“It is making internal communications much more efficient,” says Dobinson. “For our mobile people, as long as they are logged on to the system, it will find them wherever they are.”
Previously, Meridian had several telecoms suppliers managing many different and ageing exchanges and had a number of ways of routing and diverting calls. The recruitment firm wanted one supplier, the ability to reduce overall costs including call spend, more sophisticated out-of-hours routing and a disaster recovery plan. It also wanted to keep all existing numbers the same.
Meridian ran a pilot with Voxalis two years ago and started to roll out the service nationwide at the end of last year and the project is now almost complete.
Because Voxalis is a hosted system, there is no equipment based on-site so there is no capital outlay, with the service charged on a fixed monthly price per-head basis. The telecoms kit is housed in the Voxalis data centre in a carrier grade resilient environment, which means it has been stringently tested to meet certain standards.
Adrian Erangey, business development manager at Voxalis, says more recruitment companies are now moving to the Cloud for telephony as well as other business services. “The advantage of adopting our hosted service is there is no capital expense to roll the project out and in most cases we allow their IT department to manage the install themselves,” he says. “Again this really helps with overall project savings.”
