The background

South West Communications Group provides the University of the West of England in Bristol with a state-of-the-art communications solution that cost-effectively enhances its service to its students and improves staff productivity.

The University of the West of England (UWE) is a modern, growing university in the thriving city of Bristol and, with more than 30,000 students and 3,000 staff, it is the largest provider of higher education in the south west of England. UWE is continually developing and expanding, with a massive £200 million recently invested in new facilities.

The challenge

The initial key drivers of this project were to accommodate the telephony needs of a new sports facility on the main Frenchay campus, plus an additional 1,932 rooms in the student village.

The University was also keen to secure a system that would be capable of providing an additional telephony service to the remainder of the student village including the Glenside, St Matthias and Bower Ashton campuses to encompass a total of 9 locations and 1,700 users.

It was UWE’s aim to select a communications platform capable of supporting its long-term strategy to replace its incumbent Siemens iSDX telephone system and gradually roll out the new solution to the remainder of the University as opportunity and funding permitted. As the aim was to eventually replace the entire 20-year-old iSDX system, it was essential that the chosen solution was able to integrate and run alongside the University’s legacy telephony system during the extended migration process.

Subsequently, UWE identified the need for a contact centre solution for the UCAS clearing process that could be used to help manage the calls to the IT service help desk from both students and staff.

The solution

Following a formal tender process, the University of the West of England selected South West Communications Group to deploy an Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX Enterprise Communication Server to provide the following: :

• Multi-site IP telephony solution for more than1,300 users
• Integration with legacy voice network
• Centralised management
• Contact centre application
• Unified Communications
• On-going support
  

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