J Brand
Future-Proofing Connectivity for J Brand
Service:
Sector and Size
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About J Brand
Established in 1933 as an electrical contracting and repair business, the company still operates with the same guiding principle of customer service underpinning all its activities.
Based in London, but offering a European-wide service, J Brand employs more than 120 staff nationwide and has significantly increased its offering to full infrastructure services for projects across technologies and vertical market sectors.
J Brand attributes its success to its skilled and professional staff listening to clients and tailoring a solution to meet their specific business needs. The company is recognised for its ability to routinely deliver projects, often involving over 1,000 sites to tight time-scales.
J Brand’s services include: electrical and fire alarm services, hardware solutions, network infrastructure installations, consultancy, wireless networks, maintenance and support, digital surveillance and data destruction & secure IT recycling.
Client Challenge
As a total network solutions provider with staff based all across the UK, it was critical that J Brand had an IT partner they could rely on to deliver cost-effective, reliable, yet flexible solutions to be able to keep pace with the changing demands of their clients.
Being used to the ever-evolving world of technology with the services they provide to their customers, it was vital that their own connectivity did not let them down.
The company considers its people to be its most important asset, and it was with this in mind that they wanted to ensure that their staff, regardless of role and whether based at the head office, permanently on the road, or home working, had access to fast, secure, reliable internet and telephony services.
When it was time to go to market to renew their IT contracts, high on the list of requirements were reliability of connectivity and a competitive, flexible solution that would be capable of meeting the organisation’s requirements both now and in the future.
A competitive process was undertaken with multiple companies prior to Digital Origin being selected as the partner. Since this initial contract, the relationship has continued to further develop into a strong working partnership.
Scope of Requirements
MPLS leased lines: Allow multiple sites to communicate with each other. These connections provide superior performance compared to traditional methods, as they guarantee secure communication between all connected sites via dedicated bandwidth. This means that businesses using these lines will experience less latency, higher security and data protection than before, while maintaining high speeds.
Hosted Telephony: A scalable cloud-based phone system that allows businesses to make and receive calls from anywhere with an internet connection, making it a flexible solution for both remote workers and businesses like J Brand, with multiple locations. Unlike traditional phone systems, hosted telephony uses an external provider to manage and maintain the hardware and software required for the service. This means that businesses don’t need to invest in expensive equipment or have technical staff on hand to manage their phone system.
Hardware procurement: The procurement of hardware is often a difficult and time-consuming task. Using a specialist provider for procurement provides access to an extensive network of vendors, allowing companies to shop around for the best value and quality products at competitive prices. This also reduces the administrative burden associated with purchasing hardware.
The Supplier Criteria
It was important to J Brand that the supplier should not only be cost-effective, but they also needed to feel confident that they would be able to have a strong working relationship with the supplier that they chose. Ongoing proactive account management with a partnership built on trust was critical to the company. High quality services and a reliable support desk function, along with the ease of having just one bill for all their IT services, were the icing on the cake.
What We Did
The solution was designed to help future-proof J Brand connectivity and communications infrastructure.
- Four leased lines in separate locations across the country, backed up by failover lines in case of network issues.
- Digital Origin’s hosted telephony solution, 8×8, features a fully-managed deployment schedule, including new hardware across multiple locations and a fully managed service from setup through to live.
- The market-leading 8×8 portal allows administrator self-service access for day-to-day changes, with the reassurance of knowing that they are fully supported by the Digital Origin team.
- 8×8 provided a considerable cost reduction over the existing PBX solution and proved invaluable during the recent lockdowns.
Implementation / Post-Sale Support
Managed Onboarding – Digital Origin has a clearly defined onboarding and managed deployment process which includes onsite support. We worked with the team at J Brand to fully plan and schedule the migration and implementation of the solution to ensure zero impact to users. Once delivered by our operational team, a sweep up and post implementation sign off was agreed and signed off.
Billing Optimisation – Data aggregation, proactive bars, alerts, and real-time changes are all part of the Digital Origin experience.
Client Services – J Brand has access to a fully committed and passionate support team at Digital Origin. We utilise a world-class ticketing system integrated to our CRM and Outlook. This allows us to deal with any questions or day-to-day issues quickly, all tracked and stored.
