The Stroke Association

The Stroke Association is the only UK-wide charity solely concerned with promoting stroke prevention and education

Its head-office is located in the City of London and it also has a warehouse and resource centre in Northampton. In addition, the charity has staff based at over two hundred other locations across the UK: at NHS premises, regional offices, small satellite offices and home offices.

As a charity, the Stroke Association is always looking for ways to control its costs. In 2008 it decided to merge its two Northampton-based premises and take advantage of the move into a new building to upgrade its private wide area network (PWAN). A new network topology was needed that would be able to transport various complex IP technologies at a business-strength standard. Key to the upgrade was the ability to run video conferencing, as this would deliver savings through a reduction in ongoing travel costs and other associated costs such as accommodation and out-of-pocket expenses.

"We wanted a network that would deliver applications such as video conferencing to a high quality, in a timely fashion and also be future-proofed. As our old network service provider didn’t have the class of service (CoS) or quality of service (QoS) to do this we went shopping for one who did," explains Paul Hughes, Head of Information Technology at The Stroke Association.

"Timico have provided us with a first class PWAN and we are also benefiting from an enhanced Disaster Recovery solution. The extra bandwidth and co-location between the Northampton resource centre and London head office means that if a fire, flood or burglary occurs at either site, all our data is secure as there are off-site copies in both locations.

"As part of the installation Timico even managed BT for us, a black art in itself! Timico really know their stuff and engendered confidence right from the start," continues Paul Hughes.

Based on the success of the network rollout and the feedback received from users at The Stroke Association, the following year, the organisation’s 600+ mobile devices were moved over to Timico. This was shortly followed by the transfer of The Stroke Association’s entire fixed line estate, incorporating both line rental and calls.

"Every migration we have completed with Timico has been project managed perfectly. I warn everyone to expect some downtime, but this is always kept to an absolute minimum so our people can carry on with business as usual."

Most recently, Paul has selected Timico to install and roll out a new IP phone system which will, in time, incorporate every member of the 780-strong staff working for the charity. Timico recommended the VoIP Cortex solution, which has been deployed with a mixture of ISDN and SIP Trunk technology. The rollout has also necessitated a significant upgrade to the organisation’s bearer circuits serving its Northampton, London and Belfast offices.

"Nothing beats trusting a single supplier to take care of all of your communication needs. I know I can rely on Timico one hundred per cent and for me, that’s priceless. The fact that we are saving over 25% in costs by consolidating our services is a bonus. Timico’s customer service team worked hard to structure our bills and monthly reports the way we wanted them using all our internal billing codes and with everything appearing on the same invoice each month, we save hours on admin time too" concludes Paul Hughes.

Paul Hughes
The Stroke Association

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