Vodafone (News - Alert), a telecommunications group with a significant global presence, has always been committed to delivering useful innovations to help business customers grasp every opportunity in an increasingly connected world; the company looks after clients’ communication needs with products that range from branded phones to a USB Modem Stick supporting HSDPA and HSUPA.
In the U.K., there are several million Vodafone customers—many of them enrolled in Vodafone Live!, a service which combines calls, texts and mobile Internet access for a single daily payment of £3-4 (approx. $5-6) when travelling in Europe. Vodafone is also signing up users for a new service, the launch of their 4G data services for the first time. The plan is said to provide 4G coverage up to 98 percent of the population, as an Oxford Mail post revealed.
Aside from being a fixed and mobile communications provider and global enterprise unit delivering carrier services, Vodafone Group recently began offering hosted and cloud services for its business customers that need a scalable solution to keep in touch with their workforce on the move. In fact, Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust, an organization that provides physical and mental health and social care in Oxfordshire, announced on Monday of this week that it is replacing its four existing phone systems and additional exchange lines with a cloud-based service from Vodafone. By moving to the Vodafone hosted telephony service, Oxford Health will significantly reduce its operational costs by around £1million over 5 years.” That sum, with one million U.K. pounds equivalent to around 1.6 million USD, according to the estimated figures from Oxford Health Trust, presents significant savings; it is basically “equivalent to the treatment costs of over 150 patients a year.”
Richard Aspinall, head of regional public services at Vodafone UK, said, “Oxford Health is the first NHS body to install our Vodafone hosted telephony service, which will provide greater staff flexibility and better service for patients.” He explained that the new system will cover up to 140 sites in Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Wiltshire and Somerset, with a total of 3,000 phone extensions. The innovative cloud based solution will not only improve customer communication but “the Vodafone hosted telephony service will enable the Trust to scale flexibly so that phone lines can be increased according to demand,” Aspinall explains. He says the plan is to provide a “single architecture to replace four separate telephony systems and additional exchange lines [that will] simplify arrangements for staff and service users, allowing Oxford Health to redirect ICT resources to patient care.”
Dominic McKenny, director of informatics at Oxford Health, expressed that choosing U.K.-based telecom giant Vodafone Group allows the Trust to expand and grow without the cost to add phones or additional lines. Having a telephone system hosted entirely in the cloud can lower the business capital costs and operational expenditure, while providing an affordable, scalable, and reliable solution to enhance productivity and communication. It is a solution, he said, that “would support changes to [their] working practices and be responsive to changing business needs over time.”
Oxford Health’s business cloud-based hosted telephone systems will be hassle-free and easy to manage with great call quality and scalability for the number of users at each site. It presents an opportunity to extend IP communications across locations and allows routing telephone calls across the network, as needed, via a hosted unified communications platform.
Vodafone's cloud solutions and hosting services is meant to give Oxford Health the ability to benefit from a distributed workforce and also ensure all patients’ calls are attended to. By moving to the cloud, McKenny said, even when patients call the wrong Trust number, the new system will allow forwarding to the correct service quickly and easily; “this is particularly critical within a mental health setting, when callers may be in distress and need to speak to a clinician urgently.”
Edited by Alisen Downey