Marine Energy Centre Takes the Plunge into Powerful New Communications Platform with Sangoma
The Customer
Established in 2003, the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) Ltd is the world’s first and leading facility for demonstrating and testing wave and tidal energy conversers – of waves and tidal streams – in the sea. EMEC is also pioneering the development of a green hydrogen economy and smart local energy systems.
Business Challenges
The energy centre’s aging Mitel phone system was expensive, no longer meeting their needs and not up to the standards of such a cutting-edge facility. It was utilizing both costly, outdated ISDN lines and modern SIP trunks, making a convoluted and expensive mess. Additionally, the old Mitel system was far from user-friendly. Users were unable to easily change personal settings and the system lacked modern features and functionality. Chief among these was a need for powerful conferencing features. And with the growth of the marine energy sector, the centre also anticipated the need for more advanced functionality in the future, making flexibility and ability to scale very important.And by choosing PBXact, the energy centre opted out of ISDN channels years before the ISDN switch-off. Not only does this make their phone system future-proof, but it also means considerable cost savings. Money that is better served furthering their mission of building the future of marine energy. Most importantly, PBXact boasts all the powerful features they needed to bring their communications to the next level. With Zulu UC, video conferencing is robust and easy to use and everything is easily managed from a desktop application. With advanced integrations and softphone applications, users have no trouble staying connected when they need to be mobile, whether working from home or on the blustery North Atlantic.
Solutions from Sangoma
Working with a local authorized Sangoma partner, the energy centre reviewed their options and discovered Sangoma, a leading provider of Unified Communications (UC) and UCaaS solutions. They immediately recognized that Sangoma’s fully-supported PBXact UC system included all the functionality they required (and more!) at a price they could afford. Because PBXact is a turnkey UC solution, the facility’s new phone system is packed with the vibrant functionality they need as a world-class organization. Running over cutting edge synchronous fibre lines, their system services their main site and multiple remote sites with a single router. The phones at the remote sites simply use WAN connections to link into the main phone system with both internal and external endpoint manager templates. To ensure quality of service with PBXact, the partner deployed a tagged VLAN to separate voice from data. This was crucial for a centre with over 80 external DDIs.
The Results
The deployment was incredibly swift, just six weeks from planning to going live. This was due in large part to skillful planning and the ease with which PBXact is set up and integrated. The centre’s chief concern was user experience, and with PBXact, they’ve found one that satisfies like no other. Powerful built-in phone apps make it easy for users to perform tasks and the robust integrations save users time and effort. Tasks like video conferencing or call queue management are now simple with much higher quality than their old phone system. Choosing PBXact was a win-win for the organisation because they now have access to futuristic features in a platform that is easy to use. And it wasn’t a hard decision to make. Even with the upgrade to a more secure, more reliable phone system with greatly enhanced functionality, their operating expenses are now much lower.