London Borough of Islington use Centrix to replace centrex

The London Borough of Islington (LBI) are one of the City’s largest users of Cable London’s centrex service. However, when it came to co-locating the various offices of the Social Services Department into a newly refurbished building, it was decided that the service would not deliver the functionality required.

It was at this point that Centrix stepped in to design a solution that would not only provide the functionality needed, but would also integrate with the existing centrex service.

Chris Bushell, consultant and advisor to the LBI explains. "The centrex service offered by Cable London offers basic functionality for a sensible price, however it was not able to provide the features that the Social Services required. Hot-desking, flexible call routing and integration with mobile telephony had become pretty much a basic necessity and we needed to look at alternative solutions to deliver this. Oddly enough, the solution that best met the requirements was to utilise an Avaya Definity communications server, supplied by none other than a company called Centrix !".

Chris, acknowledging the slight confusion between centrex and Centrix goes on to explain, "Yes, there were times in the various meetings leading up to the order being placed when it was confusing whether people were referring to centrex or Centrix, but if anything it just made the meetings more light-hearted !".

Andy Jamieson, Senior Project Engineer for Centrix, worked closely with the LBI to tailor the solution to ensure that not only the initial functionality would be met, but that the system would continue to deliver and meet their needs over the coming years. "Working on a project like this is always interesting as we had a lot of hurdles to negotiate before we knew the solution would work. The main issue revolved around the need to integrate with Cable London’s exchange in order to connect to the existing LBI centrex network. This was eventually achieved through the use of a DPNSS connection to the Nokia DMS 100 exchange used by Cable London. Pretty much full integration was possible between the Avaya Definity and the Nokia exchange, which was established during two days of bespoke testing at the Cable London exchange."

The solution, which is due to be installed by mid June will ensure that the Borough of Islington has a first-class Social Services department delivering bespoke support to the local community.

Andy Jamieson ends by saying "Centrix are proud to be associated with the London Borough of Islington to deliver an improved quality of service to local residents; quality and service is very much what Centrix are all about."

> More information from Centrix

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