The University of Cambridge is one of the world's oldest universities and leading academic centres, and a self-governed community of scholars. Cambridge comprises of 31 Colleges and over 150 departments, faculties, schools and other institutions, with a total of 15,000 students.

Cambridge was in the process of completely transforming their telecommunications infrastructure into an advanced user-friendly service network. They wanted to complement this with a proven basic platform on which the University could provide centralised visibility and real-time web accessibility to a large number of fragmented Institutions.

Cambridge’s key requirements were to replace the incumbent solution with a more robust and flexible solution to:

• Provide centralised visibility and reporting transparency
• Automate the billing process
• Improve customer/student telecoms service
• Enhance telecom network productivity
• Seamlessly integrate with Cisco.

Cambridge investigated four offerings in the marketplace and selected Optimiser from Soft-ex as their solution of excellence. Optimiser will now be rolled out to manage 15000 extensions and is potentially capable of managing many more across all institutions. Soft-ex has worked in partnership with Cambridge to develop a tailor-made solution and key benefits include:

• New GUI push interface
• Top down global view from 200 university institutions right down to individual user level
• Real-time web-based access to reporting
• Accurate and automated billing
• Integration to Cambridge’s Raven authentication and Oracle Financial systems
• Easy implementation and roll-out
• Flexible partnership.

According to Dr Jake Hornsby, the Head of the Network Division at the University, “One of the most challenging aspects of the University is its extremely flat structure consisting of over 200 separate institutions, each with separate operational responsibilities. A large part of our information strategy concerns devolving system views and management at every opportunity. We thus needed to provide a billing system which would provide such federated management to each institution, and further, each individual. Soft-ex delivered this with their Optimiser platform which provides independent billing reports via a web browser for the telecoms office, institutional administrators, and phone users. ”

Soft-ex has a proven track record in the education sector with other clients such as University of London, Queen Margaret University College, University of East Anglia, Coventry University, London Metropolitan University, Trinity College Dublin, University of Salford, Queens University, National College of Ireland, Royal College of Surgeons and University College Dublin to name but a few.