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 new network enables us to integrate all of our sites and home workers. We now have a single telephony network which enables us to work under our ethos of one company,” commented Ray-Jones.

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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