The University of Westminster has selected Midlands-based Amillan to provide IP telephony and unified communications solutions as part of a major internal restructuring. The aim of the restructure is to give staff a robust and reliable communications infrastructure capable of improving cross-campus and external collaboration, allowing them to deliver more effective corporate and student services.

In addition to the communications requirement, Amillan has been tasked with delivering the solution to a tight time-frame to fit in with the university's relocation.

Initially, the Alcatel-Lucent solution provided by Amillan will connect human resources, finance and marketing teams based at the new central London office on Cavendish Street with other university departments.  Once complete, more than 3,000 employees across the entire campus will have access to IP telephony, softphone applications and unified communication tools, based on their individual requirements.

The university decided to converge IT and telecoms and bring all communications under the control of the information systems department. The information systems team evaluated solutions from several vendors, opting for Amillan as the best partner to provide the all-round and most cost-effective telephony offering from supplier Alcatel-Lucent.

"Our corporate services team undertakes critically important work which is dependent upon reliability and quality of communications," said Lee Rose, associate director infrastructure at the University of Westminster.  "Amillan's solution will give us a modern and flexible communications infrastructure to transform these services and give our internal teams swift access to students, other departments and external partners."

However, the university then announced a significant restructuring project that would see schools consolidated and several departments relocated to new premises - all of which urgently required telephony. Tasked with a tight time-line, Amillan completed the initial IP telephony rollout to 400 employees within just two months, allowing the university to migrate staff to the new office with minimal disruption.

Lee Rose said: "We chose Amillan as we knew that we would receive the best service from them, both during installation, and also continuing throughout the contract. To add the tight time frame into the mix, we knew we were asking a lot of Amillan, but we were sure it was able to deliver on-time and with excellent results."

"With such a varied user base, from technical support staff to academics, staff buy-in is crucial to project success," said Martin Ratcliffe, key account director at Amillan.  "The deployment at the new office has served as a useful and successful trial to bring staff on-board, and as unified communications tools are rolled out, we will continue to work with individuals, ensuring everyone is comfortable with the technology they're using."