Recruiter employs virtual network

Sirocom wins €17m contract

Reed Recruitment has awarded network operator Sirocom a €17m (£11.6m) three year contract to upgrade voice and data systems at 300 branches across the UK and Ireland.

The recruitment firm expects the agreement, part of a major IT systems overhaul, to generate savings of more than €5m (£3.4m).

Virtual network operator Sirocom will provide a managed voice and data service to the company, and support systems used by 3,000 IT users.

The network overhaul will also help Reed Recruitment achieve its aim of reducing IT spend by 20 per cent over the next two years by introducing productivity-boosting applications such as Citrix thin-client technology and IP telephony.

'Quite quickly we realised that the virtual network model was the way to go in terms of savings,' said Sean Whetstone, head of IT services at Reed. 'Getting voice billing, mobile billing and data systems all onto one contract is difficult with some carriers.'

Reed Recruitment has already converged voice and data into one financial contract but also plans to move both to a single network in the future.

'We are running IP telephony at our call centres already and there are plans for a pilot at two of our other sites using voice over IP,' said Whetstone.

Improved networking capabilities will also assist the companyeith the introduction of Citrix thin-client systems, which will allow workers to access business applications and databases remotely or when working at home.

'We are all changing our work/life balance and with the new systems people will be able to connect via a virtual private connection into the network or hot desk from other sites,' Whetstone said.

The recruitment agency will make financial savings by renegotiating and consolidating the amount of network contracts it has. Further savings will be gained by simplifying IT systems, he says.

Reed Recruitment is also consolidating its data centres from three to two by putting in new blade servers and using VM Ware software to virtualise servers. Oracle databases will also be run over RedHat linux as part of the IT upgrade.