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Introduce better ways of working with ANTENNA
1,500
Employees across the UK
900
Office-based
600
remote/flexible workers
5
Offices across the UK
Background
Food Standards Agency (FSA) is an independent Government department working across England, Wales and Northern Ireland to protect public health and consumers’ wider interests in food. It’s their job to use their expertise and influence so people can trust that the food they buy and eat is safe and honest.
The FSA strategy, ‘Food We Can Trust 2015-2020’, recognises that there are growing challenges around food safety, affordability, security, and sustainability. The policy outlines their purpose and responsibilities, and the roles and responsibilities of others, in meeting these challenges.
Challenges
The FSA was coming out of a contract with Capita who provided all their communications requirements. They had an increasing need to accommodate remote users and wanted to consider Cloud Services, Networks and Data Centres, user devices and the replacement of their existing Video Conferencing.
The end of their contract with Capita meant that they had to meet very tight deadlines and, as they were using Skype for Business, they had to look at ways to tightly integrate this with any solution they were considering.
Solution
The FSA decided that ANTENNA would deliver their communication requirements. ANTENNA is a ground-breaking, secure and shared community cloud service, providing Telephony, UC, Contact Centre, and Collaboration developed jointly between the Prime Minister’s Office and FourNet. ANTENNA is hosted in highly resilient Government Datacentres and is scalable to over 350,000 users. ANTENNA can be extended and mobilised within extremely short lead times. The FSA’s old system was a stand-alone Avaya solution and, although they are considering getting rid of their handsets in the long term, they were not in a position to go to an entirely soft client solution, so did not need to replace them at this stage in preference for redeploying them on ANTENNA.
The FSA wanted to deliver desktop conferencing to all home and remote users. Working with FourNet, they have designed and brought online, 25 meeting rooms of variable sizes to provide a consistent experience across the organisation. With the deployment completed a consistent Video Conferencing/AV experience in all five main offices; London, York, Cardiff, Belfast, and Birmingham is now possible.
The FSA recently moved their London office from Holborn to Petty France, which would not have been possible without the speed of delivery inherent within the ANTENNA managed service. The cloud nature of the ANTENNA solution meant they were able to put a Business Continuity plan in place, with a predictable cost per month, no dependence on onsite hardware and a great deal more flexibility by leveraging the ANTENNA SIP cloud.
"We migrated from an on-premise service to ANTENNA with an exceptionally tight deadline ahead of the end date of our previous managed service contract. FourNet were able to migrate us to the new service in less than two months without excessive support overhead and avoiding any loss of service."
Tim Lewis
Solutions Architect, FSA