The challenge

In 2020, BGU’s 15 year old telephony infrastructure was reaching end of life, and required weekly rebooting to clear call logs and caches to prevent it from regularly failing. At the same time, the pandemic forced the IT team to consider remote options as staff moved to a work from home model.

After leveraging Microsoft Teams to conduct internal communications, a replacement for the desk phones in now empty offices was needed to maintain the university’s external communication with students and suppliers. In particular, the telephony service needed to be reliably available in time for ‘confirmation and clearing’ weekend, which is a critically important time for the university to fill courses for the next academic year.

As a small and agile organisation, BGU could move quickly. They identified RingCentral as an emerging company in the Gartner Quadrant for cloud-based telephony and immediately provisioned 30 accounts on the platform on an extended free trial basis. Critical student facing departments were migrated including admissions, student support, student placement and student employability. This allowed the university’s vital phone-based services to continue and keep the business running while they formulated a more widespread and permanent plan.

Why Choose Maintel and their Solution

Historically, Maintel had been BGU’s telephony provider. With the pressure of a sustained pandemic and the continued unreliability of the legacy on-premise telephony, several solutions were considered before BGU approached Maintel for assistance. As a Diamond RingCentral partner, Maintel could retire the legacy system, and migrate existing phone numbers across to an expanded RingCentral platform following the successful trial period.

“ Our relationship with Maintel is as good as it ever was. They actually credited us with £4.5K of professional fees because the rollout was easier than expected. "The entire Maintel team were so easy to work with. Complete professionalism and constant support – it’s all really good from a customer’s perspective. I don’t have a single negative thing to say about Maintel services at all.”

Greg Stonehouse, Chief Technology Officer, Bishop Grosseteste University