City & Guilds first to deploy Azzurri's new cloud communications tools

City & Guilds CIO Ian Turfrey tells Computing why he opted to be Azzurri's first ICON Communicate customer

The City & Guilds group, the vocational education organisation offering more than 500 qualifications to two million current learners, has become the first customer to deploy ICON Communicate from Azzurri Communications.

ICON Communicate is a fully managed cloud-based suite of communications services incorporating IP telephony, unified communications and contact centre services. The solution essentially enables 2,500 City & Guild employees to work from anywhere, be they in the office or working remotely.

"We have a desktop that follows you anywhere you are - anytime, anyplace, anywhere - you're now working from your mobile device or phone so it's enabling softphones and homeworking," Ian Turfrey, CIO at the City & Guilds Group, told Computing.

City & Guilds chose ICON Communicate in order to bring together all of its communication tools while removing the need to run its own in-house services.

"It didn't make sense to have five different telephony providers and similarly now it doesn't make sense to have a support agreement and physical infrastructure. This is now the next stage in the evolution," said Turfrey, who believes in a "cloud first" strategy for IT infrastructure where appropriate.

"Office 365 is moving email to the cloud, Lync works in the cloud. The key thing is cloud first, especially where we've commodified IT. But when you start looking at business-enabled IT you need to think a bit more carefully and I'm not going to move our online transactions to a totally cloud-based solution," said Turfrey.

"You'll always have some services on premises depending on the service," he added.

City & Guilds considered a number of solutions providers for its communications project, but the combination of the services offered and the cost made the educational organisation opt for Azzurri.

"When we look at the managed voice infrastructure and the internal telecommunications solution it was a very compelling cost proposition for us to migrate these services over to Azzuri rather than a separate provider," said Turfrey. "So moving to managed voice and further reducing my spend, from copper ISDN, really made sense for us as a cost proposition that we got."

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City & Guilds first to deploy Azzurri's new cloud communications tools

City & Guilds CIO Ian Turfrey tells Computing why he opted to be Azzurri's first ICON Communicate customer

Turfrey told Computing other providers were not able to offer City & Guilds the specific tools it was looking for.

"In terms of the solution we did look at the market, but the market is difficult for what we want in our business, which is to get a pay per use solution with the features we require to help our learners, colleges and employees," he said.

"So we did benchmark that against best practice in terms of those goals and Azzurri came out tops."

In addition to being the best solution that the City & Guilds group could deploy for its needs, the Azzurri Communications ICON Communicate solution is set to save the organisation a lot of money over the coming years.

"We spent over £1m on our old solution and we're spending that over five years compared with what we spent previously. Again you see why we have a much more cost effective solution from what we had previously."

Turfrey explained how their previous telecoms vendor had abandoned them when they stopped support for their solution, but thanks to Azzurri, that won't happened again.

"It was a private branch exchange (PBX) telephone based system that reached end of life when the vendor stopped supporting it and it was quite an expensive solution at the time.

"Now I'm getting all this new capability over five years for a cloud solution and that's all-in, without the ongoing costs of support that I've done previously," he said.

Ultimately, Turfrey explained, City & Guilds has selected the solution because the organisation believes it's the best solution available on the market and that'll continue to be the case for some time to come.

"Azzurri's ICON Communicate totally fits with my vision for City & Guilds Group. In my view, it is at least 12 months ahead of anything else on the marketplace," he said.

"No other managed communications provider has either the necessary infrastructure or the depth of product range to deliver a cloud-based communications service as comprehensive as ICON Communicate," Turfrey added.