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Innovative Secure Shared Service
Lowering the cost of ICT across Central Government.
“The ANTENNA programme was formed because we wanted to share our ICT infrastructure with other Departments in a way that’s not been achieved before.”
Malcolm Coates MBE, Director of ICT, Cabinet Office.
Key Statistics
350k
Scalable to 350k users
3
Multi-award winning
33
Government departments on ANTENNA
Background
The Cabinet Office wanted to address the strategic vision put in place by the Government to lower the cost of IT investment through Shared Services. They had already made a significant investment in an Avaya platform and needed a partne who could provide managed support and extend the portfolio to provide unified communications for the Cabinet Office and subsequently to Other Government Departments, to provide innovative, flexible and secure shared service.
The Cabinet Office wanted to build a strategic partnership with one supplier for managed support of an end-to-end unified communications service from the Government’s highly resilient data centres.
Challenges
The approach taken by the Cabinet Office challenged the status quo of how traditional IP based telephony services are delivered to the public sector by utilising existing equipment based in their secure data centers.
Government departments were facing a wide range of challenges such as budget constraints, fragmented communication tolls, high and unpredictable costs, need for improved security, amongst others.
The Cabinet Office has worked in close partnership with FourNet to provide a ground-breaking shared service, ANTENNA to other Public Sector organisations. The new service, an Avaya private, secure, cloud-based Government hosted telephony service that currently supports a customer base of around 6,000 users, has the potential to save millions of pounds of taxpayers money by reducing costs for OGD's (Other Government Departments) and reusing assets across Government. FourNet has created a secure support team to work with the Cabinet Office IT team to deliver ANTENNA and has consistently demonstrated the highest levels of support and innovation.
Malcolm Coates MBE
Director of ICT, Cabinet Office
Solution
The new Central Government solution, ANTENNA was created. ANTENNA is deployed via highly resilient and accredited secure datacentres and is scalable to over 350,000 users. FourNet worked closely with Avaya and were able to develop a bespoke OPEX model that provides the flexibility and cost-effectiveness needed by the PMO.
The ANTENNA service gives users the ability to scale up and down quickly providing best-in-class and security cleared service management, ensuring the service exceeds expectations and continuously improves to meet changing requirements.
Benefits
The ANTENNA service provides an OPEX subscriber cost model; early indications are that savings are potentially significant. For most OGD’s this represents 25% to 40% savings on current spend. The model we have designed and adopted also means the more Departments that join the service, the cheaper the service becomes for everyone.
The ANTENNA service also provides higher security assurance, a managed service provided by FourNet, proactive maintenance and monitoring tools, continual cost savings and a fast and agile service that was flexible to meet departmental needs.
"The experience of working with FourNet on the ANTENNA project has been excellent. Transformation projects are never easy, and you have to be realistic about the challenges. But by working together in true partnership, our teams have achieved the implementation of unified communication services across Government within a timescale not seen before."
Malcolm Coates MBE
Director of ICT, Cabinet Office