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The Client
RIBA Enterprises has over 30 years experience providing effective and established solutions to the information needs of the UK construction industry. RIBA Enterprises runs across three main sites at Newcastle, London and Newark, and has further subsidiary and retail sites across the UK. RIBA Enterprises also employs a large number of home workers. Whether it’s the latest books on architecture or a full specification system using cutting edge technology, RIBA Enterprises offers a range of RIBA and NBS products and services.

The Challenge
Bringing together RIBA Enterprises’ collective operations and business systems into a single entity resulted in an increased level of communication within and between the organisation’s disparate sites.

The existing ICT infrastructure had become unable to cope with the increased demands placed upon it as Mike Ray-Jones, IT director, RIBA Enterprises explained: “We were trying to do things with the previous system that it simply couldn’t cope with. It served our purpose at the time, but as we have grown, we have spent a lot of time dealing with network issues due to the system’s shortcomings.” The company’s infrastructure had grown according to requirements, and as a result it had separate agreements with different ISPs for each location. With no guaranteed quality of service between sites, circuit rental costs were high and involved an enormous amount of paperwork and management.

To improve working practices and processes, RIBA Enterprises was also looking for a solution that would enable VoIP and video conferencing, as well as reduced rental costs of telecommunications, improved resilience and a comprehensive reporting tool to enable it to track how well the infrastructure was working.

The existing infrastructure had essentially become disjointed, involving numerous suppliers, and became difficult to manage, as Ray-Jones explained: “We were looking for an integrated data and telephony infrastructure, preferably from a single supplier who could advise us and guide us through the project.”

 The Solution
The project called upon the joint expertise of the Redstone Converged Solutions and Redstone Managed Solutions teams. They deployed an MPLS Based QoS-enabled IP VPN including an Avaya Communications Manager 3 (CM3) S8500 solution at three sites and an Avaya CM3 G250 solution at four sites. The solution also includes voicemail for all users, Call Management System (CMS), Tiger Call Logger, Internet access, a Managed Firewall, VPN access software DSL and ISDN2 circuits. The solution was also future-proofed with the modern infrastructure guaranteed to meet the organisation’s requirements for the next five years, whilst also allowing for any future potential growth and development.

The complexities of communicating across multiple sites with an outdated infrastructure led RIBA Enterprises to review its telecommunications set-up. Redstone, a national provider of IT and communications solutions, was appointed to deploy the new technologies
Mike-Ray-Jones, IT director RIBA Enterprises

The Results
The integrated data and telephony infrastructure enables RIBA Enterprises to save costs, communicate more effectively between branches, and it now has one network it uses for all voice and data communications as well as company wide VoIP, video conferencing capabilities and a web-based reporting portal, all of which makes management of the infrastructure a much simpler task.

Ray-Jones explained: “The Redstone team impressed us with their professionalism from the outset, and what they have delivered now enables us to have a company-wide reception, calls between sites are now free of charge using VoIP, and staff can now dial between sites using four digit extensions.” One of the original aims of the project was to reduce overall costs for the company and as a consequence of the solution implemented by Redstone, costs have been reduced and call rates have gone up from 8,000 to 12,000 per month.

The Outcome
Following the success of this project, RIBA Enterprises is discussing its future requirements and has subsequently chosen to set up its web-hosting with Redstone. This project demonstrates the value of the combined skills of Redstone Converged Solutions and Redstone Managed Solutions, and further cements the group as one of the leading IT and communications integrators in the UK and Ireland.

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