Rising call costs, an expanding workforce and new demands for collaboration led Head of IT Matthew Reynolds towards UC&C solution UNIVERGE 3C, courtesy of Premier NEC Business Partner and 2015 Comms Business Awards winning Reseller of the Year, Southern Communications.
Matthew explains “After thorough research it became very clear that the only offering that could completely fulfill every requirement was NEC’s UNIVERGE 3C solution.”
This highly involved UC&C install has provided substantial business benefits across numerous departments of the club, partly due to 3C running the same client across multiple devices for a common user experience. Employees have seen reduced latency thanks to the Presence and IM features for the 300 users. “We estimate we have saved each user 15 minutes per day, the equivalent of seven full time staff each year!” says Matthew.
For the IT department, the ease of administration has reduced the time to manage the system and halved the time required to fulfil a service request. Even the club’s Academy has been given greater leverage thanks to talent scouts being enabled to film promising players on their iPads. Southampton FC’s CEO Gareth Rogers explains, “Our scouts & coaches can now collaborate on the go, with the ability to stream live video of potential players as well as recording an entire training session to analyze at a later stage.”
3C also helped enable a greater synergy between St. Mary’s stadium and their Staplewood Training Campus adding further resiliency - the virtual environment providing complete business continuity and high availability. If there was an issue with any of the Data Centres across our sites 3C would automatically ensure communications were maintained throughout.
Matthew continues, "NEC’s UNIVERGE 3C has fulfilled our requirements, added value to our business and dramatically lowered our Total Cost of Ownership. Overall we estimate a saving of over £170,000 per annum for the club thanks to this solution.”
Picture Shows: Paul Bradford CEO of Southern Communications (left) and Southampton FC Head of IT Matthew Reynolds