Flagship Housing Group

Timico helps The Flagship Group re-design its IT network to increase efficiency and cut costs

Flagship is a not-for-profit organisation which collectively owns, manages and provides over 21,000 affordable homes to people across East Anglia. The company wanted to re-design its IT network as the existing one, using 'point-to-point' links, had been in place for a number of years and was proving very costly to run. After successfully winning the tender process, Timico proposed a business strength Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) solution to provide Flagship with a more resilient, flexible and scalable network infrastructure to connect all its different sites.

"We wanted to move away from our existing network solution as the 'point-to-point' set up we had in place was delivering much lower bandwidth than our business required and it was also very expensive to run. We selected Timico as a partner to provide us with an MPLS-based network, which involved connecting all our network links to their network locations throughout the UK, then using their network to link all of our sites together. This has had a huge benefit in terms of cost, as each site connects to the closest location that Timico has in that area, which is often much closer than the distance between our offices.

Installing the MPLS network has helped us make considerable improvements to our network services. Between some sites we have almost quadrupled the bandwidth available. At our Mildenhall and Thetford offices we have doubled their links to the rest of the network from 1Mbps to 2Mbps, and the link between our Dereham and Keswick sites has been increased from 2Mbps to 1Gbps, meaning it's roughly 500 times faster. Also, on the old network our 41 satellite offices were running on 512kbps ADSL broadband links. These have all now been upgraded to the maximum broadband speed that the phone lines can support, so that across the business we now have a 21st Century Network enabled service, with higher bandwidth, fewer points of failure, a lower cost to maintain and the ability to expand if we so wish," says Sandra Smith, IT Systems Development Manager at Flagship.

Expanding Flagship's network in the future will now be easier as each of Flagship's sites, whether large or small, now connects directly into the Timico 'cloud'. This makes the network significantly more efficient in terms of how it sends data between offices, as the 'cloud' allows each office to connect directly to every other. This offers a much improved process than before, where if someone wanted to open a file stored on a server at a different office that file would possibly have had to pass through one or two other sites to get to its desired destination, saving Flagship a considerable amount of time and money. As a result of the cost savings Flagship made by introducing MPLS technology and the additional benefits such a set up provides, they have been able to ensure that a number of their sites all have a backup broadband link in case the main link ever fails, considerably enhancing resilience within the network.

"In my opinion Timico are an exemplary organisation. As we were undertaking such a major project things could have gone very wrong. However, the whole Timico team has worked unbelievably hard in managing the migration from our old provider, and making the transition as easy as possible. We were working to very strict deadlines, but all the solutions they have implemented for us have been tailored to exactly what we need, plus they managed to complete the project earlier than planned and within budget. They were a pleasure to work with. I have found Timico to be upfront, honest and genuine, and the professional manner they conducted themselves in, combined with the expert knowledge of their employees has exceeded anything we have experienced in the past. I would have no hesitation in recommending Timico to any other organisation looking to take on a similar implementation to ours," concludes Sandra Smith.