Fire service is hot on unified communications

A UK fire service hopes to save £1m through a 50-site unified communications project

GMFRS is implementing a unified communications service across 50 sites

Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service (GMFRS) hopes to save £1m over five years with its new unified communications project.

Converged solutions specialist Intrinsic Technology has been commissioned by GMFRS to design, install and support a converged voice, data and contact centre infrastructure solution across the organisation’s 50 sites.

David Griffiths, head of the unified communications business unit at Intrinsic, said that replacing the service's legacy telephony platform would drive cost savings.

“They had a legacy Centrex-based solution which did not scale and was costly. A large proportion of the expected cost savings will be the result of the removal of the rental and support costs of the legacy system with the new Cisco-based IP system,” said Griffiths.

Steve Cramoysan, research director at analyst Gartner, said that unified communications is more about increased productivity than driving cost savings.

"Unified communications will increase your workforce's productivity through increased collaboration," he said.

Griffiths agreed: “Introducing presence and instant messaging into the fire service’s day-to-day communications will improve their productivity.”

These tools are built into the solution based on a Microsoft OCS integration.

“[The system] will also fully integrate with 999 calls. This element is currently being deployed,” said Griffiths. “In addition, all the tannoying and alarm bells in the stations will come from the call manager,” he added.

This follows the successful completion of an overhaul of the organisation’s network infrastructure, also performed by Intrinsic. This project was separated into three stages.

The first was a wireless deployment, which spanned all stations. The service allows fire chiefs who move between stations to be able to access the network from any one of them.

A Cisco-based LAN was deployed in the second phase.

“This was based on Cisco 6500s and 3750s, with the former at the network core, the latter at the edge,” said Griffiths.

The third and final piece of the project to be delivered was voice.