The way IT functions is crucial to Citygate’s operation - maximising employee productivity, ensuring smooth interactions with customers and also enabling the business to expand to new sites quickly and efficiently. However, Citygate's legacy system, with dedicated onsite infrastructure and phone systems for each of its nine sites, was difficult and costly to manage and network connections between the various sites were also very limited and unreliable. This translated into wasted time for the whole team and the company was not able to reliably offer the levels of customer service that it wanted to; as a result it was severely hindering the business.

In order to achieve the desired efficiency and performance, Node4 first of all looked at the network, as this would be the foundation of any future solutions. As a result, connectivity for all voice and data traffic to all of Citygate’s sites is now delivered via Node4's high-speed, secure and highly resilient MPLS network. This means that all of Citygate’s sites now benefit from a centralised cloud-based infrastructure that integrates all of its IT provisions into one central point rather than having separate infrastructure at each individual site. Telephony systems have been removed from each site and replaced by a central hosted switch at Node4’s Northampton data centre. Citygate’s email server and all other critical equipment has also been relocated, benefiting from central management.

The new infrastructure has significantly enhanced network bandwidth - with higher capacity connections at every site, dramatically improving the speed of the network for the whole group. Central management of the system has also meant fewer glitches and less downtime, freeing up Citygate’s staff to concentrate on their own business. The switch to IP telephony also delivered instant cost savings to the business through reduced maintenance costs and bringing in new functionality to improve both the user and customer experience.

The success of the upgrade and the ‘plug and play’ architecture established by Node4 has enabled Citygate to seamlessly roll out two new sites. Once the new network circuit was live, the hardware install and set up was completed within 24 hours at both locations.

Citygate is now looking at rolling out a fully cloud-based solution for its email and business applications to further enhance its IT service delivery and flexibility.