Osborne Clarke
Nasstar delivers Skype for Business Enterprise Voice platform to enhance productivity
Osborne Clarke is a multi-award-winning law firm, with 25 offices globally. Founded in 1748, it now employs around 1,600 people and advises clients across a number of different sectors and has worked with a variety of companies, from household names to tech startups. The company’s goal is simple: to help its clients and their people succeed in tomorrow’s world.
Services
Collaboration and Communication
The Brief
The company’s existing global Voice and LAN infrastructure used an Avaya solution which - while it worked well for staff in its offices – had technical restrictions and was not flexible enough to meet users’ needs when working remotely. The hosted version of Skype for Business in place – bundled in with Microsoft Office 365 – was only used for messaging and for presence, and not enabled for inbound or outbound calling from the PSTN, meaning that anyone operating from outside the internal network would need to be contacted via a different method. Requirements were changing and, as early adopters of technology within the sector, the firm wanted to reduce costs and increase agility for its staff, as well as to consolidate its disparate telephone and meetings systems into one solution. After a competitive tender – where Osborne Clarke looked carefully for a specialist that had the right experience and knowledge of deploying a Skype Enterprise Voice global platform – the company selected leading managed services specialist Nasstar to provide a solution that would improve communications and collaboration between staff, offices and customers.
The Benefits
Osborne Clarke now has an Enterprise Voice environment that houses three platforms to ensure a phased approach. No matter which platform the staff are using, they can all easily communicate with each other and with their customers. The solution provides Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery and is helping Osborne Clarke to comply with strict call retention regulations within the Legal sector. The rollout of the platform has been completed with great success in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands, with more offices still to come.
Mark Lee, Managing Director at Nasstar said: “Osborne Clarke had a clear vision; to achieve a more flexible, agile platform for global, internal and customer communications. I’m very happy to say that this has been achieved. The addition of Nasstar's Cloud Contact Centre – an omni-channel platform that integrates natively with Skype for Business - will offer further improvements to the customer experience and internal support.”
The Solution
Nasstar took a phased approach to the Skype for Business Enterprise Voice project, implementing a hybrid environment that housed three platforms; Osborne Clarke staff on the existing Avaya platform, users already using Skype for Business within Office 365, and those on the new Nasstar Skype for Business platform. This enabled all users to easily coexist and communicate with one another no matter which platform they were using - no mean feat given the number of users and the fact that this solution was to be deployed globally. The project consolidated these different systems with minimal downtime, improving relationships as staff could all now effectively use Voice communications via the Skype interface that they were used to. Additionally, to help enable the new Voice capabilities of Skype for Business, Nasstar replaced the existing ISDN 30 estate and telephone lines with SIP connectivity, offering higher levels of flexibility and reliability whilst cutting running costs.
Nasstars experience in not only the solution we required but also in dealing with the stringent rules within the legal sector, was a key part of our decision-making process. Nasstar had a “test and learn” approach to the implementation, which meant that we could be certain the solution would meet all our expectations before deploying it further. The goal was to make the end-user experience for our fee earners as slick and as easy as possible, and I am delighted to say that so far this has been very successfully achieved.