MDNX is now running Your Housing Group’s wide area network across 60 sites in the north-west of England. The network will enable Your Housing to be more agile and flexible with its network through a ‘carrier integrator’ model, with the network being one of the first to be procured using the PSN Connectivity Framework Agreement. The contract was signed in October 2012 and the deployment was completed by May 2013.
Your Housing was formed in 2012 following the merger of the Harvest Housing and Arena Housing groups. After the merger, there was an immediate need to upgrade the wide area network for the Harvest Housing part of the group to accommodate a growth in staff numbers, cope with the additional complexity of the IT infrastructure and deliver greater network bandwidth.
The WAN comprises 60 sites covering a mixture of data centres, corporate offices, neighbourhood offices, smaller offices and home workers. It was particularly important for Your Housing that the contract and solution design was flexible enough to accommodate its changing requirements as it progressed through an IT consolidation project, as well as being able to support new applications such as VoIP.
Andrew Giles, ICT director, Your Housing Group, said, “We wanted a network that was able to provide us with the agility, scalability and resiliency to support our new initiatives. We have over 60 sites and often there are moves within the network from site to site, so we needed a provider that was capable of handling that requirement.
“MDNX planned and successfully completed the transition of the Your Housing contact centre to the new network recently, and we were impressed at how smoothly it went.”
Through its core integration network MDNX is integrating connectivity from TalkTalk Business, BT, Virgin Media and Exponential-e to create a network that can scale as new technology emerges without Your Housing needing to be restricted to a single provider.
