Azzurri grabs £10m UCLH deal

Integrator Azzurri has bagged a seven-year, £10m contract with University College London Hospitals (UCLH) NHS Foundation Trust to implement and support its communications network.

The deal will see the VAR refreshing and standardising the Trust's entire fixed-line and mobile communications infrastructure. Azzurri estimates that the project will save UCLH £1.7m over the course of the contract.

UCLH's work covers seven hospitals in central London. Azzurri recently completed the deployment of an IP telephony system at University College Hospital. The Trust has now given the VAR the task of replicating that project's success across the rest of its institutions.

UCLH will deploy IP telephony across the board and all communications contracts are to be consolidated into a single service. IT director James Thomas said: "A predictable pricing structure was a key objective. We now have the benefit of fixed pricing and uncapped use, without the extensive management overheads.

"Azzurri takes away the burden of managing multiple suppliers, negotiating on existing and alternative contracts to ensure we are always delivered the most cost-effective communications strategy.”

Azzurri will support the service with seven engineers permanently onsite and a 24-hour helpdesk. The VAR will endeavour to support all the trust's communications requirements including fixed-line telephony, pagers, bleepers and BlackBerrys.

The service will be periodically refreshed over the life of the contract to identify rates that provide best value and do away with duplicate billing, superfluous capacity and redundant lines.

Azzurri sales and marketing director Jason Standerwick said: "Our heritage as a managed service provider enables us to lean on our strong relationships with carriers and operators in order to wield greater spending power on behalf of our clients, such as UCLH.

"By using managed services for its communications strategy, UCLH is able to drastically reduce management complexity to benefit from round-the-clock, onsite expertise and increase its agility to make way for new and innovative services within its hospitals.”