Vodafone’s Unified Communications Group, formerly Central Telecom

Vodafone UK, acquired Central Telecom to become its Unified Communications Group in December 2008.

Central Telecom, which will re-brand as Vodafone from 30 March, has specific expertise in IP telephony, voice, managed services and converged voice and data services, exploiting the latest technologies and delivering tailored communications solutions to meet customers' specific requirements. It has implemented solutions in more than 6,000 organisations in the UK and manages more than 700,000 customers ranging from small to medium sized businesses, ‘blue chip’ corporate companies and public sector organisations.

The move is a further significant step in Vodafone UK’s evolution from a mobile-focused company to leading and growing unified communications. Central Telecom brings complementary skills and technologies to augment the solutions Vodafone UK already provides to customers including secure remote access, mobilised business applications and security at network and device level, as well as managed services and consultancy.

Working in partnership with our clients we provide Total End to End Solutions. These extend beyond supply and services to incorporate assisting customers in defining their communication strategies; and designing, customising, building and implementing effective solutions that address key business and technology issues, delivering real business benefits.

Rewarded with a number of industry and business awards across the UK and Europe we have continued to develop our product portfolio to reflect the needs of our customers and increase market penetration. Operating across all market sectors the emergence of IP has allowed us to implement global solutions. Innovative business and marketing strategies remain the key to our continued growth. The presence of MS-CRM SDK and Dot.Net skills within our team of experienced developers allows us to take proactive action to ensure the solutions that we build using Microsoft technologies, fully utilise the platform itself and best practices and processes whilst complying with legislative needs.

Streamline Communications with Voice Over IP
The increasing prevalence of voice over IP in the workplace has provided businesses with the ability to streamline communications while enhancing capabilities. It is possible to migrate to IP telephony without sacrificing flexibility, reliability, security, or interoperability — and still leverage existing investments. 

We have achieved a number of notable business wins including a five year, £multi-million contract to design and implement a voice network solution for The Capita Group PLC, the UK's leading provider of professional and support services.

The solution, a new Capita Voice Network (CVN), which is a centralised Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) infrastructure, provides general telephony services for staff based at Capita’s 200 administration sites and remote workforce, replaced the company’s existing voice technologies.

Designed to provide each business unit with segmentation and the flexibility to allow for investment in existing applications to be reutilised in other areas of the business, it allowed Capita to migrate to a fully populated Avaya Contact Centre solution, as well as supporting all contact methods across multiple Capita campaigns.

The solution has resulted in enhanced working, increased productivity and increased mobility, as employees can just plug in and work wherever they are – whether it’s at home, an office location, conference rooms or hotspots.

Reduce costs and improve responsiveness with Contact Centre Solutions
Multi-site contact centre solutions can dramatically reduce costs and improve responsiveness to marketplace needs using IP telephony. The complexity of managing multiple communications devices is simplified by adopting unified communications to enhance workforce collaboration both in and away from the office.

We have delivered a unique IP Telephony solution to a communications industry regulator which has at its core the first seamless integration of Avaya Interaction Centre with Siebel 7 Public Sector Solution. Other solutions that integrate with Siebel require additional middleware; however the solution allows Avaya AIC and Siebel to communicate directly which means it is faster and less prone to error. This has allowed the organisation to improve the efficiency of its call centre operations and ensure that agents spend more time dealing with caller’s issues.

New technologies won't automatically change the way an organisation conducts its day to day business. Early adopters of business technologies benefit from gradual efficiency gains – big changes happen when ground breaking technologies, products or services encourage innovative business leaders to think differently about their business operations.

Vodafone’s Unified Communications Group can work with your organisation to deliver IP telephony without sacrificing flexibility, reliability, security, and interoperability — all while leveraging existing investments. Our multi-site contact centre solutions can dramatically reduce costs and improve responsiveness to marketplace needs using IP telephony.

Today's business realities drive a new multi-site contact centre model that is flat, consolidated, and global in nature. Proactive Contact Management expands the role of contact centres, adding campaign management and worker productivity tools that enable more transactions per hour, more effective customer interactions, and greater operational efficiency across the entire enterprise.

Utilising the very latest in IP technology, we have developed an integrated hosted solution for Vertex which links a 790 seat contact centre in Liverpool, a 170 seat contact centre in Wirrall and a 450 seat contact centre in New Delhi. The solution allows effective migration of existing clients from stand alone call centre sites to a hosting environment. And in order to achieve optimum reliability, multiple C LAN and media processor cards were also installed. This provided clients with comfort and resilience and offered the same level of security as traditional TDM architecture.

Vertex now has a sound hosting platform, which enables it to serve multiple sites with fast deployment, and facilitates the distribution of calls anywhere within its infrastructure. From a resilience point of view this has resulted in reduced costs and an increased ‘pool’ of personnel who are available to carry out existing tasks.

The solution has dramatically improved Vertex’s speed of delivery. Operating from a single platform has also enabled us to reduce Vertex’s long-term cost model by introducing off-shore operations in India and Canada, whilst maintaining control in the UK.

Achieve competitive advantage with Unified Communications
Unified Communications solutions help you to get more from your partners and suppliers, giving your organisation the agility to achieve competitive advantage in a global world. Unified Communications is the convergence of real-time and non-real-time business communication applications. These applications include telephony, conferencing, email, voice mail, instant messaging, video, and collaboration across a variety of interfaces be it PC or web-based clients, telephones and mobile devices, or speech.

Unified communications and collaboration connects your customers, employees, partners and suppliers more efficiently and seamlessly no matter where they are at any time, allowing your employees to deliver a great service to your customers.

We have provided Cambridgeshire City Council with a resilient communications solution which supports an initial 1000 users and a further 3,500 over a three year roll out.  The solution underpins Cambridgeshire CC ‘Workwise’ an initiative that enables flexible working, saves money, increases productivity and improves service delivery.

Incorporating Modular Messaging, the solution provides full Unified Communications for all users. Citizen’s expectations are increasing and they want more from their councils, Cambridgeshire City Council’s Unified Communications integrates voice mail, email and presence management providing them with information from both their telephony and calendaring systems, providing one single view. This allows them to know where people are, if they are working remotely, out in the field or working from home and whether they are available and what they are doing. This makes employees more responsive, helping them to meet the needs of the community and to balance work life pressures.

Said Alan Shields IT Manager at Cambridgeshire CC said "Central Telecom (Vodafone’s Unified Communications Group) has worked closely with Cambridgeshire County Council to provide us with a new resilient communications solution which underpins our WorkWise Project and is specifically designed to reduce operating costs and improve council efficiency, delivering more than 20% (£1.2m) savings over a three year period. The Council will benefit from a truly Unified Communications Solutions, which provides over 5,000 government employees with a platform to effectively communicate, share and interact together from anywhere at anytime, enabling new forms of flexible working  and significantly improving the quality of public services offered. They have provided us with the design, project management and ongoing support and development that we required helping us to achieve our objective to develop an empowered and responsive workforce."

Cambridgeshire County Council’s solution was a finalist in the European IT Excellence Awards 2008 in the category of Unified Communications and is a current finalist in the Channel Network Awards 2008 in the category of Vertical Market Solution.

We have implemented a leading edge, converged solution for the Borough Council of King's Lynn & West Norfolk, which provides citizen services in a large predominantly rural area. Over the next 20 years they, along with the West Norfolk Partnership, are moving towards a shared vision for King’ Lynn to become the economic ‘driver’ for West Norfolk.

One of the Borough Council of King's Lynn & West Norfolk’s key ICT strategies was moving the organisation to VoIP, their key requirement was the development of a new contact centre using VoIP technology which would eventually be rolled out across the whole of the council. The brief was to provide a resilient, reliable and high quality solution that would enhance communications between sites and remote and home workers.

Andrew Howell, Senior Technical Services Analyst at the Borough Council of King's Lynn & West Norfolk said ‘Now, instead of speaking to individual departments, citizens can now go to one advisor who is able to handle all queries. This has meant a reduction in waiting time with all calls answered at the source instead of being directed through a series of call options. We have been able to ensure that citizens’ queries will be dealt immediately and won’t be passed through a series of departments or directed to voicemail.’

Managed Services for peace of mind
As part of its Managed Service offering, we provide a comprehensive range of mixed and emerging technology advice and consultancy. Unified Communications infrastructure and system support is becoming increasingly complex and many internal teams do not have the breadth or depth of knowledge to achieve the maximum benefit from their Unified Communication environments. With Layer 4-7 switching, application aware network devices, Quality of Service (QoS), packet shaping and distribution technologies, many organisations are challenged when faced with the implementation and support of these new solutions.

We recently signed a significant supply contract with Cheshire Building Society to provide managed services for the whole of their voice and data communications estate. This 5 year contract includes the provision of a Nortel converged solution for their North of England head quarters along with their 42 branches, including an 55 seat multi media contact  centre with an overflow of 25 located at Head Offices and branch networks. They have also replaced their existing WAN with a BT MPLS solution across their entire network and are managing their inbound and outbound lines and minutes.

Richard Basham Jones, Head of Telephony Services said: ‘The Cheshire Building Society and the Unified Communications Group has recently undertaken a significant project, which was a large undertaking for both companies. They provided a great deal of support to the Society in the initial planning stages and has been flexible in resourcing the project as it has progressed and developed.

Their project management team worked closely with the Society's own team to deliver the project virtually on time and within budget, which is a great achievement. In addition, their administration team managed third party mainstream suppliers effectively to feed into the main project plan. The delivery of the solution has enabled the Society not only to realise the original benefits scoped but also some key additional benefits, for example the virtualisation of the Estate Agency.’

The solution for Cheshire Building Society meant that UC Group was awarded the Enterprise Converged Solution at the Channel Network Awards 2008 for the 5th year in succession.

In September 2007, Central Telecom (Vodafone’s UC Group) became the first telecommunications group in the UK to attain ISO 27001 accreditation for Information Security. The ISO 27001 certification for Information Security confirms their compliance with the requirements of the international standard, and endorses its strong capabilities in the field of information security.