O2 business today announced that it has won a three year contract worth £2.6 million to work with East Coast, to consolidate the train operating company’s IT and communications infrastructure.
From the beginning of October, O2 business has embarked on a programme to refresh the East Coast estate, across its 23 sites throughout England and Scotland. The re-design of the infrastructure will see improvements in operational efficiency and communications, producing savings in excess of £1 million over the term. By converging its infrastructure and working with one provider, East Coast aims to improve service and build a foundation that can take advantage of future innovations for passenger services.
O2 is looking to improve business continuity and reliability by re-designing East Coast‘s infrastructure and reducing complexity. This will involve refreshing both WAN and LAN networks, upgrading the IPT system to include unified communications and migrating 1,600 mobile phones to the O2 network.
East Coast’s implementation of new security systems and processes will secure its position as a leader in PCI compliance. SIP trunking will enhance business agility and ensure passengers have access to the very latest travel information.
In addition, East Coast has chosen a partner that can bring together other areas of expertise from across the wider Telefónica group. This new partnership brings the opportunity for East Coast to engage with their customers through their mobile devices with the support of O2’s media team.
The business will also be working with O2 Open, an employee discount scheme for business customers’ employees. East Coast employees can get free airtime credit, for themselves or to share with friends and family. They can also take advantage of Priority ticketing, Priority Moments and other offers including discounted travel insurance.
East Coast is just one of a number of O2 business’ recent wins, and demonstrates its move away from purely mobile offerings and into IT and communications services, to become a one-stop shop for enterprise telecoms.
Paul Osborne, Managing Director of O2 Unify said, “This win demonstrates how our strong service culture and customer focus from our core mobile business is continuing to put us in a very strong position to provide wider communications services. We presented East Coast with an over-arching solution to its mobile, IPT and network needs and identified where we could deliver significant savings. Through our past work with Network Rail, we demonstrated that we had a deep understanding of the sector and showcased our ability to deliver complex solutions which will join the business together.”
East Coast Finance Director Tim Kavanagh: “As a business, we were looking to simplify the way that we ran our communications in order to make savings, but we also wanted to streamline our processes to create easier, more user-friendly systems that benefit East Coast employees and our customers. O2 offered us a simple solution to our needs, andthis, combined with its strong background in the transport sector, means we know we are in safe hands going forward.”
This announcement is the latest example of O2 working to deliver its Joined Up Business vision – creating solutions to help businesses drive efficiency, productivity and innovation. By supporting senior decision makers in businesses of different sizes, across a wide range of industries and sectors, O2 has a proven track record as a trusted and helpful advisor, enabling them to adjust their operations to an ultra competitive marketplace and the ever changing needs of the workforce.
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