WEHI

Country: Australia
Industry: Healthcare
Solution: Digital Age Communications, Rainbow, Unified Communications

WEHI is where the world’s brightest minds collaborate and innovate to make life-changing discoveries that help people live longer healthier lives. WEHI’s medical researchers have been serving the community for more than 100 years, making transformative discoveries in cancer, infectious and immune diseases, developmental disorders and healthy ageing.

When it comes to research and innovation, it’s not just about getting the smartest people in the room together. To get to the best outcomes for healthier living or a smarter, more efficient work environment, you need open communications, partnership and trust. ALE is a vendor with great solutions, supported by a network of trusted Partners. We understand that innovation implies testing, proof of concept and where needed, redesign. ALE is always up for the journey and we value their support in creating a better, more collaborative ICT workspace.

Michael Carolan, CIO of WEHI

Action

WEHI approached ALE to help integrate the ALE telephony environment with Microsoft Teams, to create a seamless user experience for their staff, regardless of location. ALE proposed the Microsoft Teams Connector solution, with the Rainbow by Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise platform. After rigorous testing, WEHI selected the easy to deploy, cost-effective solution to enable their flexible worker solution.

In this scenario WEHI’s existing Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX Enterprise Communication Server was connected, using Rainbow, with Microsoft Teams. This is a great option for Microsoft Teams users who want to use their existing telephony platform to unlock telephony from their desktop. The solution ensures high reliability and rich features. It also provides the essential PSTN connectivity into Microsoft Teams without complexity, at a low cost and enriched user experience.

Challenges

WEHI uphold the highest standards and their medical research has led to healthcare breakthroughs that most of us benefit from, every day. At Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise we are very proud to have been the technology partner of choice for many years for WEHI’s mission-critical telephony and communications environment. During the pandemic WEHI and ALE collaborated closely to enable flexible, remote working, from anywhere. The lockdown directives also saw the rapid uptake of cloud collaboration applications such as Microsoft Teams within WEHI. Challenges encountered during this period included:

Incorporating a new site requiring desk sharing
Adapting existing sites requiring desktop collaboration
Support for desktop user interfaces for Mac users (95%) and Windows (5%) users with telephony integration
Integrating mission-critical telephony into cloud collaboration apps
Using desktop to call mobiles and land lines cost-effectively

Results

Technical benefits

Existing telephony environment with integrated modern cloud services
Securing best of both worlds (ALE telephony and Microsoft teams)
Save on implementation costs; quick and easy deployment

Financial benefits

Cost effective solution – the best TCO
Prevention of rip-and-replace scenario. Unlock the power of existing environments by enabling seamless integration

User experience benefits

Minimum operational impact; working with existing assets, proven technology
Keeping the same user interface; minimal training required to adopt the integrated solution
“One number” experience for all users; supports remote working and mobility
Feature rich telephony;