NEC and Getronics make the grade with the University of Edinburgh win

Sixth oldest English speaking university gets a communications modernization courtesy of NEC Business Partner Getronics.

Wednesday, 25th May 2016 Posted 8 years ago in by Phil Alsop

The University of Edinburgh has selected NEC and its UK business partner Getronics to provide a new communications infrastructure. Up to 15,000 users at one of the UK’s oldest and highest ranking Universities will get the benefit of the latest Unified Communications and lower communication costs thanks to NEC’s UK business partner Getronics.

As well as ranking as the fourth most popular university in the UK, The University of Edinburgh also ranks 1st in the UK for Computer Science and Informatics. Standards for the communications and IT install were no less demanding with requirements for unified communications, contact centre and mobility solutions along with a full resilient IT framework.

The solution will provide a highly availability (99.999%) and fully redundant unified communications platform based on the latest NEC SV9500 communication server – the first of its kind in the EMEA region.

Getronics participated in a competitive tendering exercise for this customer win against extremely tough competition but were ultimately successful in securing the contract. Key differentiators against the competition included a significantly lower cost of the new solution and the ability to demonstrate competence in traditional telephony, IP telephony and unified communications.

Alan Boyd, Acting Head of Communications Infrastructure at the University of Edinburgh confirmed, "Getronics and NEC had the winning combination of the best technical and most economically advantageous bid in a public sector procurement process.”

Richard Smiles, Client Director at Getronics says, “We have been particularly impressed with the NEC UNIVERGE SV9500 platform both in terms of availability and functionality. It was the obvious choice for this bid and we are confident that it will meet and indeed exceed our customer’s expectations. The support from NEC during the bid was exceptional and the win was definitely a team effort.”