UCaaS supports British Medical Journal’s cloud-first ambitions
With a growing global business and a CIO intent on doing everything in the cloud, the British Medical Journal turned to unified communications-as-a-service provider RingCentral to make its comms infrastructure fit for the cloud era.
Under the direction of chief digital officer Sharon Cooper, the British Medical Association-owned organisation has undergone extensive upgrades to its IT capabilities. It has called on Google’s cloud-based productivity suite, and more recently refined a multi-cloud strategy that saw 200 on-premise servers move into the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud in 2017. It has also introduced Alibaba public cloud to support its growth in China.
According to Arron Townsend, head of service delivery at the BMJ, the business has benefited from its cloud-first policy in a number of ways. These include introducing a DevOps-centric culture to the organisation and enabling more flexible working by giving staff anytime, anywhere access to critical applications. It was this growth in flexible, remote working that forced the BMJ to address its unified communications (UC) needs.
Here, the BMJ’s IT team hit a snag, because with the wider BMA generally running Microsoft cloud services and the BMJ running Google, Microsoft’s UC package Skype for Business wasn’t going to cut it because any service it adopted would need to work across multiple cloud platforms to operate effectively within the whole organisation. This need ultimately led Townsend to UC-as-a-service (UCaaS) supplier RingCentral.
“I remember going to [sector trade show] UC Expo three years ago,” he says. “ I walked into Olympia looking for a UC provider that would work with Google and, other than one tiny corner, it was Microsoft across the board. I only talked to one provider who worked with Google, and that was RingCentral.”
For RingCentral’s Emea managing director, Sahil Rehki, the cloud has become a key driver behind customer buying decisions.
“On-prem [UC] deployments are declining 11-12% year on year, while cloud is growing at 21-22%,” he says. “RingCentral is growing at 34%.
“A good majority of our business is replacing legacy. If you look at the market 18-24 months back, you still had to go and educate as to why a move to cloud was beneficial, but I no longer have to have that conversation. Nobody is asking me why they should keep their existing Avaya or Cisco estate – they want to move to the cloud.
“The question now is how to do so, and how that move affects people and processes.”
The BMJ is almost a textbook example of such a customer. It used to use the BMA’s on-premise private branch exchange (PBX), but this was creaking at the seams and no longer fit for purpose, said Townsend.
“If I needed to work from home or was travelling on business, I would have to try to run an old-style version of Avaya one-X on my mobile,” he says. “I was running it without support and if I wanted it on my laptop, I had to VPN into the office and try to run an antiquated system that wasn’t designed for that. Every time my phone got wiped, I had to recall all my settings and set that up from scratch on a crashing app.
“As head of service delivery, I could work through those problems – but imagine being a general member of staff without a tech background using a solution like that. It was very messy.”
Compounding the problem, being a Google house meant it was nigh on impossible for the BMJ to use a common set of tools to talk to its colleagues in China, where Google services are largely banned. It could use Hangouts with its offices in the US and India, but for China it had to resort to the government-approved WeChat, which is widely used for messaging, social networking, and even mobile payments in China, but is virtually unknown in the West.
After extensive conversations with the supplier, and hearing the news that the BMA was moving ahead with a Skype for Business deployment and therefore planned to decommission the old PBX within six months, Townsend and RingCentral had to move quickly.
“We told them we’d be off in four,” he says. “We gave RingCentral two weeks to put their money where their mouth was, and they did everything from setting up the new exchange, setting up rules, and running a proof-of-concept [PoC] across our staff from executives to remote workers, sales and editorial.”
The BMJ’s executive team ultimately signed off on the RingCentral deployment after a global conference call made while a number of its key decision-makers were travelling to a conference in Mexico. This was facilitated by the PoC installation.
“It made it much easier to get sign-off when the solution I was asking them to approve was seamlessly running the session they were in,” says Townsend. “And because half the exchange was already set up for the PoC, it made going live a much easier transition.”
Since the full deployment, the benefits for the BMJ’s workforce have been readily apparent to Townsend, although perhaps not to everyone in the business.
“Because we have this flexible working policy, we see this as a nice benefit,” he says. “I’m just back from the US and I could just turn up, switch on my laptop, plug in my headset, and people could call me and not realise I was away from the office, let alone abroad. It just makes life a lot easier and people aren’t thinking about lots of different ways of doing things.”
For the BMJ’s IT team, the introduction to RingCentral has helped improve its support processes by enabling Townsend to transition some elements over to the BMJ from the BMA. Because his team has full visibility of the settings on the RingCentral service, they can offer more immediate point-to-point support, and BMJ staff feel more comfortable engaging with people they already know.
Source: computerweekly
Industry news: unified communication news
Latest Jobs
-
- VOIP / SIP App Developer. Contract. SIP | VOIP experience needed. SC Cleared Outside IR35 Contract. London
- London
- OUTSIDE IR35
-
SIP | VOIP Developer. SC Cleared Contract. London Looking for a SC Cleared SIP / VOIP Developer to develop an application that interacts with a set of voice and video signalling API’s You will also work on developing in-house applications, browser plugins and automated tooling to support secure communication systems. Responsibilities Develop an application that will manage number mapping and associated identities using commercial SBC API’s. Develop new user-facing features using React.js or other modern JavaScript frameworks. Build reusable components and front-end libraries for future use. Collaborate with the design team to translate UI/UX design wireframes into code. Work closely with backend developers to integrate front-end code with server-side logic. Conduct code reviews and provide constructive feedback to team members. Stay up-to-date on emerging technologies and industry trends to continuously improve our front-end development practices. Troubleshoot and debug issues that arise during development and in production environments. Maintain high coding standards and practices and ensure code is well-documented. Requirement Experience of developing specialist applications using REST API’s. Good knowledge of Go, Java and Python (open to alternative combinations of languages). Proficiency in front-end languages and frameworks such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React.js, etc. Strong understanding of web standards, responsive design, and cross-browser compatibility. Experience with version control systems such as Git. Knowledge of RESTful APIs and asynchronous request handling. Familiarity with UI/UX design principles and tools.
-
- Senior Data Privacy Consultant. Client Facing | London
- London
- N/A
-
Senior Data Privacy Consultant. Client Facing | London Senior Data Privacy Consultant needed for a key client facing opportunity. Must be willing to undergo SC Security Clearance. Hybrid role- onsite with customer / office 2-3 days a week. London Key Responsibilities: Lead and support client facing data privacy projects. Assess compliance, define and deliver strategic projects / implement privacy solutions. Manage project teams and develop business opportunities. Required Experience: Experience in data protection and privacy standards. Background in consulting. Skills and Qualifications: Business consulting experience IAPP Privacy Manager / Privacy Technologist Location Greater London UK based role. Not able to provide VISA sponsorship.
-
- Security Analyst - Internal role. London commutable. Permanent
- London
- N/A
-
Security Analyst - Internal role. London commutable opportunity. Operational Security - Investigate, escalate and proactively work to ensure household name remains protected. Project Security - Coordinate, log change requests with project delivery teams to meet security requirements Policy / compliance - work with team to aid in uplifting these as and where needed This role is role to investigate, escalate and proactively work to protect a globally recognised brand. You must have current hands on operational analytical security experience with Microsoft technology stack Someone with a SOC Analyst / security engineering background would be well suited. This position will join a small team and would suit someone that has broad experience across the security threat landscape. Experience / knowledge across industry GRC standards such NIST, ISO27001 etc very advantageous and a priority. You will work across multiple teams proactively working to secure the business. Must be able to commute to Central London 3 days a week. Visa sponsorship not available Apply today to find out more.
-
- Network / Security Infrastructure Engineer | West London | Permanent
- London
- N/A
-
Network / Security Infrastructure Engineer | West London | Current Config, Install, upgrade experience On prem / Datacetner experience essential. Hands on experience MUST include: Routing, Switching, Network Security (firewall, IDS etc), Microsoft exchange / Exchange 365. Scripting / automation experience wanted. Python, Powershell etc Regular travel to West London is required. Visa sponsorship not available. Apply today for more information chris.holt@dclsearch.com Use this whatapp link to reach out https://wa.me/message/6USF5RAQBOZIP1