Cloud to the rescue for West Midlands Ambulance Service

West Midlands Ambulance Service (WMAS) is the first public sector organisation to use the Government’s CloudStore and G-Cloud Framework to buy Microsoft Office 365 and SharePoint 2012 cloud services for all its staff.

In a move aimed at reducing costs whilst improving communications and streamlining processes, WSMA has taken to the cloud. “We needed to consolidate our systems and get everybody onto a common platform as quickly and easily as possible,” explained Phil Collins, Head of IN&T at WMAS.

Recently created from the merger of existing ambulance trusts, WMAS, was previously running three legacy instances of Exchange. Consolidation was an obvious move, but Collins was also keen to deploy more collaboration tools than the NHSmail platform could provide.

“We knew that moving to the cloud would help us overcome these problems, but we also needed to ensure that we maintained the highest level of security around our patient data. Microsoft solutions and IMGROUP gave us the ability to combine cloud services with our on-premise applications, delivering exactly what we needed,” added Collins.

By moving legacy email and collaboration systems to the cloud WMSA will simplify communications and enable staff to collaborate more easily. As well as using Microsoft Office 365, WMAS is also implementing SharePoint 2010 for document management, utilising the built-in version control and collaboration features.

The IM&T department also saw the benefits in deploying Office 365 as a collaborative solution going beyond replacing a mail platform or document management got its 4,000 staff. This, they believe, will deliver the benefits of hosting core services in the cloud whilst enabling consolidation and facilitating future innovation. In particular, Collins saw the advantage of using Lync unified communications to introduce videoconferencing and conferencing and awareness of presence into the organisation. “That was a real bonus, so people could potentially travel less or be more efficient in their use of the time," he said.

Marcel Bonfrer, head of Office 365 Sales at IMGROUP explained, "Our hybrid approach means we can help large organisations maximise the benefit from cloud services in a risk-free manner. Many public sector organisations, who are struggling with the alchemy of how to do more with less, see their IT budgets eaten up with maintaining existing systems. Cloud computing is an opportunity to redress these numbers, allowing these organisations to innovate and drive change.”

Guardian Government Computing reported that WMAS expects the technical return on investment (ROI) on the project to take three years. Savings would come from lower licensing and hardware costs compared to legacy systems, reduced administration overhead and a redeployment of IT staff from support work to higher value projects.

However, the three-year ROI doesn't take into account any additional savings that may be through improvements in productivity, said Collins: "We would expect to see more benefits being realised from efficient working and potentially savings on some of travel costs coming through next year - we haven't made a case for that yet... we decided that we could make a clear case [for the implementation] from the technical investment that would be required and that's backed up.”

Mark Smith, Director of Healthcare, Life Sciences & Health Solutions Group, Microsoft UK said that this implementation is “a great example of how organisations can leverage the power of the cloud to streamline business processes, whilst delivering scalable, high performance solutions. Office 365, delivered by IMGROUP, will enable West Midlands Ambulance Service to embrace the power of Microsoft Cloud Services and provide it with a platform for the future.”

Posted by Howard.

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  June 28, 2012
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