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Enabling Better Ways of Working in Central Government
FourNet’s ANTENNA solution creating better communication and collaboration for the Food Standards Agency
Key Statistics
1500
Employees
25
Bespoke Virtual Meeting Rooms
5
Offices Around the UK
Background
Food Standards Agency (FSA) is an independent Government department working across England, Wales and Northern Ireland to protect public health and consumers’ wider interests in food. It’s their job to use their expertise and influence so people can trust that the food they buy and eat is safe and honest.
The FSA strategy, ‘Food We Can Trust 2015-2020’, recognises that there are growing challenges around food safety, affordability, security, and sustainability. The policy outlines their purpose and responsibilities, and the roles and responsibilities of others, in meeting these challenges.
Challenges
The FSA were coming out of a contract with their previous technology partner who provided all their communications requirements. They had an increasing need to accommodate remote users and wanted to consider Cloud Services, Networks and Data Centres, user devices and the replacement of their existing Video Conferencing.
The end of their contract meant that they had to meet very tight deadlines and, as they were using Skype for Business, they had to look at ways to tightly integrate this with any solution they were considering.
"We migrated from an on-premise service to ANTENNA with an exceptionally tight deadline ahead of the end date of our previous managed service contract. FourNet were able to migrate us to the new service in less than two months without an excessive support overhead and avoiding any loss of service."
Tim Lewis
Solutions Architect, Food Standards Agency
Solution
The FSA decided that ANTENNA would deliver their communication requirements. ANTENNA is a ground-breaking, secure and shared community cloud service, providing Telephony, UC, Contact Centre, and Collaboration developed jointly between the Prime Minister’s Office and FourNet. ANTENNA is hosted in highly resilient Government Datacentres and is scalable to over 350,000 users. ANTENNA can be extended and mobilised within extremely short lead times.
The FSA wanted to deliver desktop conferencing to all home and remote users. Working with FourNet, they have designed and brought online, 25 meeting rooms of variable sizes to provide a consistent experience across the organisation. With the deployment completed a consistent Video Conferencing/AV experience in all five main offices; London, York, Cardiff, Belfast, and Birmingham is now possible.
Benefits
ANTENNA has enabled the FSA to introduce better ways of working. The collaboration delivered by the video conferencing in meeting rooms has been transformational, saving both time and money. Adopting ANTENNA as part of the IT and Communications strategy has allowed the FSA to build an integrated and cohesive solution to provide their user base with:
- A single compelling, mobile-first user experience with support across mobile, desktop and browser that delivers enterprise-class telephony and persistent, multi-device instant messaging and team collaboration
- An elegant and powerful meeting experience with HD video, wideband audio, and rich interactive content sharing
- Advanced browser/cloud application integration including full no-software (Web RTC) for voice, video, IM, presence, and team collaboration.
- The FSA is planning for a future freed from hard phones on desks, with unified calls to laptops from any device.
Impact
"Once the FSA had made the decision that the ANTENNA service met all our user needs, the process of contracting with FourNet was quick and straight-forward. FourNet were supportive of collaborative discussions to ensure the contracted service best met the FSA's requirements, aligning to our desired payment profiles and enabled work to commence on service transition almost instantaneously."
Craig Thomas
Commercial Manager, Food Standards Agency
"Before our migration to the managed service we experienced regular outages on our voice network and frequent issues with both packet loss and latency with our VoIP service. Since adopting the managed service, these issues have been eliminated and the number of service desk calls relating to telephony issues significantly reduced"
Tim Lewis
Solutions Architect, Food Standards Agency