We were selected to deploy CeramTec’s brand-new solution, which comprised two on-premise Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise OXO Connect telephone systems.
OXO Connect was a perfect choice, as it offers all the functionality the business needs in terms of call forwarding, hunt groups, voicemail and receptionist consoles, whilst also offering an efficient wireless handset solution.
Now, CeramTec's Southampton site uses 11 desk handsets and 30+ DECT handsets, with full site coverage care, of the 13 base stations we installed around the building. Additionally, the Wrexham factory uses 70 DECT handsets and 30 base stations.
Following this deployment, we then replaced their outdated IT infrastructure, including their local area network, Wi-Fi and firewalls. To connect the two sites, we took advantage of secured, reliable and flexible SD-WAN technology. We deployed two internet leased lines into both sites from different carriers. Extra resilience was built into the core of the solution too, with a pair of cabinets mirrored at both sites. We used switches from Cisco Meraki to support a secure, single-vendor solution that included the SD-WAN software and Wi-Fi hardware.
The Cisco Meraki MX100 appliance was key in supplying cyber security to the business. It includes an intrusion detection system (IDS), intrusion prevention system (IPS), content filtering, web search filtering, anti-malware, geo-IP-based firewalling, and IPsec VPN connectivity. Layer 7 fingerprinting technology lets CeramTec’s administrators identify unwanted content and applications, and prevents recreational apps, like BitTorrent, from wasting precious bandwidth.
On top of that, the SD-WAN automatically manages CeramTec’s traffic flow, ensuring the standby connections are utilised to maximise speed, especially for real-time applications such as telephony. We used the site-to-site connectivity to enable an overflow of calls at busy times and allow for easy transfers and free calls between the two sites.