Goughs Solicitors
Goughs Solicitors (Goughs) is one of Wiltshire’s leading law firms with seven offices across the county, providing legal services for individuals and businesses. With over 140 years of combined experience, they are committed to meeting and exceeding clients’ needs and providing excellent, trusted and personal legal services.
Drivers for change
Goughs Solicitors had been working over the past year with their IT provider to virtualise their servers in VMWare, moving to the cloud for greater resilience and reliability. The next phase, managed by Blackstar Solutions, was to virtualise the Mitel telephony system and migrate it to VMware and move away from traditional ISDN and migrate all seven offices over to centralised SIP, with the purpose of rationalising lines and for cost-saving benefits.
Solution
- Virtualisation and migration of an on-premise Mitel MiVoice Connect PBX to private cloud and migration of ISDN at all of Gough’s locations to centralised SIP
Benefits
- Rationalised and centralised lines
- No hardware or equipment on site
- Cost savings on calls and line rentals
- Improved efficiency and security
- High availability for maximum resilience
A flawless transition
Blackstar’s role was to virtualise the telephony estate away from physical appliances and move Gough’s telephony infrastructure to the data centre.
Blackstar conducted the migration in a phased approach, undertaking every element in a controlled manner. They decommissioned and unplugged the on-premise equipment, so Goughs no longer had cabinets full of equipment.
The next phase was to prepare the sites for porting the legacy ISDN DDI ranges to the new SIP service on a site by site basis. The final step was to migrate the users over to SIP, one office at a time, and then decommission the legacy equipment.
The solution
Goughs have had a Mitel MiVoice Connect telephony solution for seven years, with hardware and ISDN lines hardwired into each office. Goughs selected Blackstar Solutions (Blackstar) to support the Mitel system, pre-Covid because their incumbent provider did not have Blackstar’s skills or knowledge around the Mitel technology.
Goughs deployed Blackstar’s services to help them migrate their telephony over to SIP. Blackstar has repurposed the MiVoice Connect, which has been virtualised in VMWare in the customer’s data centre. The central server was a physical on-premise device, and now Goughs can reap the benefits of a private cloud solution, primarily for continuity, security and reliability.
Great agility and flexibility
Blackstar has successfully migrated Goughs from legacy on-premise equipment to private cloud. The SIP trunking means they now benefit from inclusive local, national, and mobile calls, which has substantially brought their phone bill down.
The phased deployment enabled Goughs to report to the business as each phase was successfully completed, with a risk-free, seamless cutover and minimal downtime.
Gary Denham, IT Manager at Goughs Solicitors, commented,
“Everything was spot on, which is a rarity with suppliers these days! I have dealt with a lot of IT providers in my time and Blackstar excelled. I rarely gush about suppliers, but Blackstar has stood out as a shining light.
It was technically quite a complex project, but it was also the smoothest IT project I’ve ever seen – they made it appear seamless. The telephony is all now working exactly as it should and we are no longer firefighting our IT, all thanks to Blackstar.”
Steve Henson, Accounts Manager Blackstar Solutions, added,
“By virtualising Gough’s telephony and migrating them to use SIP trunking, we have enabled them to reduce call costs dramatically. And by centralising their lines to the cloud, they now have peace of mind that their telephony is more resilient, agile, secure and scalable.”
Ongoing support
Goughs originally planned to deploy Blackstar’s support services on a temporary basis for the SIP migration. Once the telephony system was virtualised, Goughs intended to retain all of their IT services with one central supplier for both voice and data. However, they were so happy with Blackstar’s service that they have decided to continue using them for their expertise.
Future plans
Blackstar will be implementing an Edge Gateway for Goughs soon, allowing remote workers to connect securely with no VPN and make client calls from home over the hosted platform and SIP service.
Having moved away from ISDN to SIP trunking, Goughs now have the infrastructure in place and the agility to switch to MS Teams using Direct routing in the future if they so wish. They would no doubt rely on Blackstar for their carrier routing and all other telephony support.
