WWF

Download PDF

The Customer

WWF has 5 offices around the UK with 340 staff, 260 being based at their head office. As an organisation it aims to help people work in harmony with nature and reduce their impact on the environment. WWF realises that better IT means reduced environmental impact, so virtualisation fits their ethos perfectly.

Requirements

WWF will be moving to a new office in two years' time, which will lead to a change in the way they work; this will be a smaller building with reduced occupancy and hotdesking. Therefore unified communications and presence will take on increased importance at that time.

Solution

Previously WWF's telephony infrastructure was spread over 4 sites and a co-location, and was a challenge to maintain. Britannic suggested that they centralise their equipment and mirror it between the co-location and head office.

"We've made a substantial saving in electricity costs and we're already seeing a general cost reduction; we held up the first bill and said "that's visibly smaller!""
Ian Exton, Network Manager & IT Facilities, WWF

All telephony associated applications, including contact centre and voicemail, were virtualised. The legacy analogue and ISDN was all ported to SIP, which added resilience to their call routing plan, and existing WAN from Telstra was re-used. Mitel NuPoint Advanced voicemail accounts were also synced to their Exchange email.

Benefits

These changes have greatly facilitated the process of moving WWF into their new premises. There is now extended homeworker capability and everyone has become a hotdesk user. As fewer desks are necessary, this allows for a smaller building. The company's environmental impact has reduced even further, with less need for workers to travel to the office and lower emissions from the site itself. WWF have also gained higher than predicted cost savings, with a significant amount of money saved in reducing IDSN and call charges, as well as the lower cost of running a smaller site.

We have less 'tin' now, we have substantially reduced costs because we're not maintaining that tin, we've got much increased flexibility and we have very much faster server provisioning. It is also very, very resilient. But the most important thing is that there is substantially less CO2."
Ian Exton