The background

South West Communications Group provides Cheltenham Ladies’ College with a scalable IP telephony solution that delivers improved day-to-day functionality and crucial reliability and resilience.

Cheltenham Ladies' College is an independent boarding and day school for girls aged 11 to 18. Founded in 1853, the College has been at the forefront of girls' education for more than 150 years and has a worldwide reputation for academic excellence.

The challenge

Cheltenham Ladies’ College required a new scalable telephone system; specifically an IP solution that could run over the College’s existing data infrastructure that covered its entire site, including multiple school buildings, boarding houses and sports halls. It wanted to change to a system that was reliable, easy to use and easy to manage but also offered improved facilities and resilience with no single point of failure.

The telephone system was viewed as critical to College. As a boarding school, its parents, pupils and staff relied on it being available 24/7. Therefore the College was not simply looking for a company to supply and install its new system, but it was seeking a strategic communications partnership to offer further advice and support into the future.

The solution

Following a formal tender process, South West Communications Group was awarded the contract to supply, install and maintain an Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX Enterprise BiCS telecommunications solution for Cheltenham Ladies’ College with an that included the following:

·    Scalable & flexible telephony architecture
·    Site-wide IP telephony
·    Resilience
·    Hot desking
·    Voicemail & unified communications
·    Contact centre capability
·    System management
·    LAN audit
·    Training
·    Maintenance & support

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