Telecommunications system

Tender description

The General Medical Council (GMC) and Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) currently have a number of technologies available to its staff to communicate with. Whilst all solutions work well and have a degree of integration, users struggle to determine the most appropriate technology to use during their working day due to the number of choices available, but also understand the technologies well enough to take full advantage. There are an increased number of remote workers within the business and as a result the requirement for staff to efficiently communicate with one another is more important than ever. GMC would like to migrate from ISDN to SIP and realise the benefits of doing so which will not be exclusive to cost savings. Suppliers should consider whether session border controllers should be included within this bid and be explicitly clear on this and any other dependencies or inclusions. The current instance of Communications Manager 5.x must be upgraded as it is near end of support. Associated telephony services, for instance Call Media, Nice Call Recording and other Contact Centre services are not in scope for change within this Lot. The bidder must consider how the Avaya system will be upgraded whilst not impacting Contact Centre solutions or service. GMC currently has MS Lync 2013 installed and Lync clients have a Skype for Business “skin”. As a result it is known as Skype for Business within the organisation. It is well received and users take advantage of many of the features available e.g. IM, Presence, Video Calls and internal voice calls. GMC would like to upgrade the Lync 2013 solution to the latest supported version of Skype for Business and integrate it with the Avaya telephony system so that both internal and external calls can be made through the SfB client. GMC has identified that a Hybrid SfB implementation would be preferred as it will prepare us for cloud PBX migration. GMC currently has a number of Polycom end points with a complex architecture supporting it. There is also integration between Polycom and Lync using the RealConnect and ContentConnect services. Considerable investment has been made to date in Polycom, but the end points are now starting to age and the solution is expensive to own. Where possible GMC would like to retain some of its investment in Polycom, but where this is done bidders should be mindful of the objective to have a single ways of working with Skype for Business.