Reducing Costs and Complexity

Businesses depend on communications, government organisations even more so. So imagine the criticality of communications to the Embassy of Brazil and the Brazilian Ambassador in London. Turning to Yorkshire based telecoms specialist Northern Telecom may have seemed somewhat leftfield - but as Jorge Breia from the Embassy explains, the decision to move to Northern Telecom was compelling: “Our tender process enabled us to hear from a wide range of communications providers, and Northern Telecom clearly came out on top. We had very specific requirements and an opportunity to transform both our IT and telecoms connectivity”. Jorge adds

“We had no prior experience of Northern Telecom, but it was clear that they understood our requirements, our concerns and our problems. Northern Telecom won on merit - winning on the quality and price of the proposed solution”

Jon Graves, Managing Director of Northern Telecom, takes up the story: “Having met Jorge and the Embassy team it was clear that they had a tight timeline and we needed to demonstrate that we could deliver on time and on budget”.

“Our ability to be agile in our response to challenges is perhaps what sets us aside from the competition. For example, in our original proposal, we priced on a Leased Line from two different partners, but after the deal had been done it became clear that one of the providers had a logistical issue which would prevent us from getting service from them entirely, and the second provider had a network capacity issue which would ultimately take a few additional weeks to resolve.”

“I’m proud that our team worked around the problem and in actual fact had alternative Leased Lines up and running within 20 days, substantially within the client requirement”.

This dedication to delivery didn’t go unnoticed, as Jorge Breia adds “One of the things that impressed us most during the initial installation was Northern Telecom’s ‘can-do’ spirit. In spite of the complexity of working in a grade 2 listed building, Northern Telecom were friendly and professional and we always felt that the project was under control. They delivered on what was promised, both in terms of the intial installation and in terms of the product that we’re now using, which has helped us make considerable savings.”

As Jon Graves explains, the choice of solution was critical; “We deliberately chose solutions that balanced resilience with price point. Our aim was to deliver a right first time solution at a price that demonstrated real value for money.”

“In terms of the installation, our approach was to avoid over complicating the technical solution. The UniFi Enterprise grade WiFi solutions on both sites delivers great signal coverage and is feature rich enough to deal with ad-hoc requirements for guest access and WiFi hotspots for specific events.”

”Our reliable hosted PBX solution has enabled us to provide a service that has so far run with zero down-time, and enables us to make small or even significant changes remotely at the touch of a button - and eliminating costly on-site maintenance that is the blight of many telecoms contracts.”

As Jon sums it up, “In our proposal to the Embassy, we said that we believe in ‘good old fashioned customer service’ and that approach has driven everything we have done with Jorge and the team at the Embassy of Brazil and the Ambassadors residence. I’m proud that we won against bigger competitors and delivered a result that we know they couldn’t have delivered”.