BMA

The BMA benefits from business efficiencies, cost savings and home-worker support delivered by a fully managed Timico PWAN solution

The British Medical Association acts as both a trade union and professional association dedicated to protecting individual members and the collective interests of doctors. Founded in 1832, the British Medical Association is a UK organisation formed "to promote the medical and allied sciences, and to maintain the honour and interests of the medical profession".

The BMA is a voluntary and subscribed association. It currently has around 144,000 members in all branches of medicine across the UK; membership accounts for over two-thirds of practicing UK doctors. The BMA has a range of representative and scientific committees. It has sole negotiating rights with the UK government for all UK registered doctors. The BMJ Group, a wholly owned company of the organisation, is a world-class producer of medical journals, issuing 26 specialist monthly publications in addition to the weekly British Medical Journal. It also delivers innovative point-of-care medical information for clinicians worldwide.

The BMA chose Timico as its technology partner to improve network connectivity between all its sites (the organisation’s head office is in central London, additionally there are three National offices and five regional centres throughout the UK) so that it could benefit from cost savings and business efficiencies.

These include a managed homeworker solution, increased network capacity and a quality of connectivity and customer support that would allow a diverse range of applications and services such as VoIP, video conferencing, data transfer, email, shared databases and back-up including Disaster Recovery (DR) data.

Timico’s fully managed solution for the BMA comprises a robust and comprehensive Private Wide Area Network. The PWAN includes a 1Gb primary leased line and 100Mb backup with diverse cable providers at the Central London HQ; the three national offices are equipped with leased line primary and back up circuits with diverse cable providers on 100Mb bearers with various committed data rates (CDR); a further five regional centres also have leased line primary circuits and back up of either EFM (Ethernet in the First Mile) or ADSL, also with various CDRs, and the BMA’s 122 homeworkers have been provided with a mixture of ADSL broadband and PSTN analogue lines.

The BMA first met Timico at the IT Directors’ Forum and were impressed by their approach to doing business. They saw a presentation on a solution Timico had provided to another corporate client which very closely matched their own requirements and having then spent some time with Timico at the event, invited them to tender at a relatively late stage in the tender process. The BMA selected Timico as a network partner principally on the strength of their complete homeworker solution - a fully-managed, high quality ADSL service, with online self-serve management - which our incumbent was unable to provide and support to the same level.

The Timico PWAN enables the BMA to take advantage of a host of advanced technology features such as IP VPN connectivity, centrally hosted and managed resilient firewalls, proactive network monitoring and reporting and 24/7 technical support. As part of the homeworker solution, the ordering portal enables connectivity for new homeworkers’ voice and data services to be quickly and efficiently set up at the touch of a button (the same if a homeworker’s connection needs to be moved) and Timico looks after all the homeworkers’ service and technical needs.

The BMA found the whole Timico team to be both proactive and professional and recognise that when Timico commit to do something, it will be done. This trust forms the basis of the very successful relationship between the two organisations.

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