Logicalis

Logicalis helps Lockton relocate and upgrade its Voice and Data network

The Client

Founded in Kansas City in 1966, Lockton is the world’s largest privately-owned independent insurance broker, with more than 3,800 associates providing services to companies of all sizes and to individuals throughout the US, UK, Ireland, Latin America, Middle East and Asia. Headquartered in the City of London, its international operation has seven regional branch offices located across the UK.

The Challenge

In line with its continued growth and long-term business strategy, Lockton needed to relocate to larger premises at St. Botolph in Houndsditch. The company viewed this relocation as its most important IT project for 2009/10 as it would create a solid foundation on which to meet its future business objectives and continue to improve the service it provides to all its clients. Lockton also saw it as the opportunity to update its IT estate, services and procedures.

The fast pace and fiercely competitive nature of insurance broking means Lockton’s Associates rely on highly resilient, highly available and high-performance voice and data networking for 24/7 access to information. The strategic objective when upgrading its network infrastructure was therefore to accommodate high levels of voice and data traffic in a seamless and highly-available manner.

“In addition to being reliable, secure, integrated and highly resilient, we required our chosen solution to be as future-proofed as possible. These requirements had to be balanced with ensuring we met the business requirements of implementing a proven and cost effective solution that met all the functional requirements,” says IT Director, Chris Wheeler. “We already had an overall technical vision for our LAN but needed to ensure that we did not close any technical doors to the rest of the Lockton worldwide offices with our final selected solution for both voice and data.”

Lockton issued two separate Invitations to Tender (ITTs) - one for its Local Area Network, the other for its voice requirement. Short-listed providers were asked to demonstrate their ability to deliver on time and propose innovative, flexible working arrangements, plus a willingness to work against highly demanding targets. Among the bidders was Logicalis, a highly accredited Cisco Gold Partner and one of the most experienced in implementing and supporting the new generation of Nexus technology which Lockton was planning to deploy.

Whilst Nexus technology was relatively new, Logicalis had invested heavily in training and had already succeeded in winning contracts for several UK installations. It was one of the first Cisco partners to achieve Cisco Data Centre Unified Computing Authorised Technology Provider (ATP) status, with specialisations in networking and storage. This together with its Nexus experience, meant Logicalis could offer Lockton the next generation data centre solutions it required.

“Their ability to provide a proven track record against our tender requirements in LAN/WAN design, unified communications and applications integration meant Logicalis was well positioned to optimise our network infrastructure”, says Chris Wheeler. “Longer-term, it meant we could develop a solid relationship with a single integrator to address a broader range of needs, maintaining Lockton’s key philosophy of delivering excellent service to clients as well as driving economies of scale. “With regard to Nexus, they had deployed projects of a similar size and implemented their own Nexus-based data centre. This depth of experience was precisely what we required to ensure a smooth project.”

The Solution

Based on Cisco technology, the proposed design for its LAN comprised a highly scalable, resilient and feature-rich architecture to provide an access, distribution and core layer, with the distribution function held within the core devices.

Logicalis began by validating Lockton’s proposed design, but suggested several technical changes. For instance, it proposed an alternative hardware configuration that offered several technical benefits and cost savings - and the introduction of a more cost-effective Nexus bundle solution. It also proposed design changes using a Cisco Nexus specific feature set in order to optimise and increase the overall bandwidth capability of the solution.

Logicalis’ alternative LAN solution fulfilled all of Lockton’s requirements by providing strong network availability, resilience and performance. All hardware had rich feature-sets to support Quality of Service, and security needs. Moreover, the topology of its solution was based on modular architecture to promote scalability and allow segments to be upgraded without affecting the entire network.

Lockton was impressed by the Logicalis technical team and its considerable experience in deploying Nexus technology. “From the outset, we were confident they could deliver what we required,” says Chris Wheeler. “We liked the fact they were prepared to be flexible during the negotiation and push very hard to meet delivery slots, which was essential given the extremely tight timescales involved. They also demonstrated the great desire to work with us and create one team supporting us as we acquired the remaining gaps in our Nexus technical knowledge during the implementation.”

The Lockton project team also saw the benefits of engaging the same technology vendor and partner for both its LAN and voice solutions and therefore invited Logicalis to propose a commercially attractive solution for its IP telephony, contact centre, conferencing, unified messaging and voice recording systems - all based around Cisco’s Unified Communications portfolio.

The Outcome

During the relocation and implementation of the new network architecture, any issues were quickly resolved, thanks to the strong relationship between Logicalis and Cisco and the involvement of their respective management teams. As a result, the solution has enabled Lockton to move into a ‘unified fabrics’ data centre environment - one that merges fibre channel Storage Area Network (SAN) and traditional Ethernet network environments on a single network platform.

Cisco’s Nexus architecture not only provides Lockton with its core network, but also its server aggregation switches. It therefore responds ideally to the requirement in the ITT for future-proofing by providing state-of-the-art technology, advanced features and much greater scalability. Implementation of the voice and data infrastructure has now been successfully achieved - much to the delight of the Lockton management team.

Chris Wheeler says Logicalis met Lockton’s high early expectations, formed during the tender process, throughout the life of the project. “We were confident they understood our business issues, including the major emphasis Lockton places on servicing its clients, the importance of managing the potential risks to our business, and our desire for a long-term partnership. Above all, we were confident they would complete the deployment on time and to budget.”

The underlying technology

• Core Call Control via Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) to provide telephony registration, routing and voice networking
• Enterprise Attendant Console functionality provided by Arc Enterprise.
• Cisco MeetingPlace Express for scheduled voice, video and Web conferencing; ad-hoc conferencing being provided within CUCM
• Cisco’s Unified Contact Centre Express (UCCX) to provide contact centre functionality for 45 agents and four supervisors - providing advanced call queuing and intelligent distribution
• Cisco’s Unity to provide Unified Messaging with Microsoft Exchange
• Voice Recording via a RedBox recording solution.

Logicalis proposed some optional components to build on this core solution and add further business benefit and functionality, including:

• Single Number Reach/Personal Numbering via Cisco Unified Mobility, part of CUCM
• Integration with Microsoft Office Communications Server to provide user telephone presence via server based Cisco Unified Presence and client side based Cisco Unified Communications Integration for Microsoft Office Communicator (CUCIMOC)
• Click-to-dial from Microsoft applications and browsers via Cisco Widgets or CUCIMOC.

With the deployment of CUCM in the central London offices Lockton used the opportunity to provide a centralised IP telephony solution to their remote branches.  This centralisation of the telephony architecture allows the enhanced UC features to be made available to all of Lockton’s locations, not just for the main London office.  Along with these operational benefits are the operational cost savings as Lockton will no longer need to maintain telephone PBXs in the remote branch locations.