How Winckworth Sherwood Reduced their Telco Costs by 25%

Winckworth Sherwood is a medium-sized London based law firm who had the challenge to seamlessly move an expanding business to a new building combining their two London offices. A key element of the challenge was to select a secure telecoms system which would provide reliability, flexibility and deliver a high level of resilience. In addition, the new system would have to cater for the needs of the firm's home worker population and fit in with the firm's overall disaster recovery [DR] strategy.

Excell provided Winckworth Sherwood with two options: The first was aligned to their initial plan of using traditional ISDN30 circuits and the second was a SIP model incorporating their existing Mitel 3300 system.

A teleconference and a face-to-face demo session were set up between the Winckworth Sheerwood and Excell's who explained exactly how the SIP technology worked. Christel Aguila, Head of IT said "They understood our fears of coming out of our comfort zone into something completely new despite being advised to "not go there" until the technology was proven and mature". From this it became clear to the team that their DR requirement could be delivered by SIP technology, eliminating the need for a second phone system in Bracknell. As this was part of the original DR strategy bit was clear considerable cost savings could be made.

Excell, with Mitel, has provided Winckworth Sherwood with a unified communications system which offers maximum flexibility, easy management options, good voice quality and a simplified DR facility. Winckworth now experience no difference in the voice quality between the old ISDN 30 and the new Excell SIP solution. A key benefit of Excell's SIP solution was that Winckworth Sherwood was able to keep their existing numbers despite being told that it was not possible as one of their offices was on a different exchange. The solution also gives staff the ability to divert calls to their Blackberries or other phones, using the Call Management Portal (CMP).

The overall infrastructure investment has provided Winckworth Sherwood and their 300 staff with more than double the bandwidth, further resilient lines for the branch offices and a more robust network and telecoms infrastructure. What's more, as a result of going the SIP way, DDI call and maintenance charges have reduced by at least 25% in the first year.

>> Find out more about the SIP solution Excell provided Winckworth Sherwood