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Accountancy firm upgrades to unified comms

Accountancy firm haysmcintyre rolls out unified communications to boost disaster recovery plans and cut costs.

By Miya Knights, 19 Feb 2009 at 16:01

Unified communications is helping haysmacintyre, a top 35 UK accountancy firm, to boost staff productivity, improve business continuity capabilities and cut its costs.

The firm wanted to make use of the Cisco kit installed in its offices to support converged voice and data networks.

When the lease for its existing, traditional PBX telephony system came up for renewal last year, haysmcintyre decided to maximise its networking investment and buy unified communications capable hardware and software.

The London-based accountant chose Siemens Enterprise Communications' OpenScape suite, featuring applications such as presence, availability and video/web conferencing, to allow its 160-strong workforce to communicate more effectively with clients and colleagues worldwide.

It also opted for a session initiation SIP-based trunk to ensure that business continuity processes are activated quickly and effectively.

Simon Bulleyment, haysmacintyre chief information officer, told IT PRO the unified package would provide the firm with its final piece of business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities.

“It also allows us to provide clients with one number for staff, be it to communicate via mobile, landline or just leave a voicemail,” he said. “And in the second phase, we were going to use it to extend out our mobile and remote working capabilities too.”

Work to deploy the Siemens systems is just about to begin, and the firm will also make use of the provider's managed services as well.

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2 comments

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Disaster Recovery

Growing risk awareness and an increasingly dangerous business environment may have prompted more companies to invest in disaster recovery (DR) as part of the business continuity programme - but what is the practical experience behind the plans?
Just what, indeed, is being recovered? Few organisations have any real insight into the true extent of their IT assets. Not only does this challenge the validity of the DR solution but it also raises huge questions in the event of an insurance claim.

For most companies, one of the major issues is the complete lack of co-ordination between the asset register recorded within finance and the inventory lists used within the IT department to determine system maintenance and support.

Any inconsistency between the asset register held within finance and other inventory records in the business will raise significant doubt for insurance companies, delaying payment at best. At worst an organisation could lose any chance of an insurance pay-out, even face charges of claiming for non existent items.

There are simple processes that can be followed to ensure greater information consistency. A central repository that records the serial number and asset location, as well as the value of each item, will meet the needs of all departments from finance to IT.
Critically, this ensures that reliable, accurate information is available for both insurance and DR planning, reducing business risk whilst also giving companies more confidence in their business continuity investments.

Yours sincerely

Karen Conneely
Group Commercial Manager
Real Asset Management
Central Court
Knoll Rise
Oprington
Kent
BR6 0JA
01689 892100
www.realassetmgt.co.uk

By Ip_clairel2adbaa on Thursday Feb 19

Learn more about Unified Communications

A timely piece of news, there is a big trade show at Olympia in a few weeks that focuses on Unified Communications, Collaborations, Conferencing & VoIP etc, loads of education and its free, there is also a Microsoft Community event on Sharepoint and Messaging/Mobility, check out http://www.ucexpo.co.uk Siemens and Cisco are both there

By Ip_mikeengland3b on Thursday Feb 19