Manches Case Study

Converging services on to one, easily managed, cost effective and scalable network

Background

Manches LLP has been active in the London market since it was established in 1937. With offices in the Aldwych, Manches LLP is in the heart of the legal community with a demanding established client base who expect the highest standards.

The Manches LLP team focuses on the Property, Construction, Technology and Creative Industries, with a special emphasis on the retail sector. Bespoke services for Corporate Finance, Tax, Employment and Litigation expertise are also offered.

Manches LLP Family Law team has consistently topped the surveys of lawyers in London dealing with this emotional and often contentious area of law. The London team of partners and legal assistants are consistently ranked as leaders in their field.

The success of Manches LLP is based on their practical, pragmatic and approachable attitude to its clients.

The need for change

The Manches network had served the law firm well but Manches were keen to upgrade it to help them enhance the client experience and boost partner productivity. As part of this they were also keen to find new efficiencies in terms of overall cost of ownership.

“Our typical working patterns involve considerable telecommuting and remote working. It was vital that we moved to a communications platform that could provide support for that level of mobility. We also needed access to a lot more bandwidth” explained Derek Brookes, IT Director at Manches LLP. “Our use of different suppliers made it difficult to treat our underlying platform holistically. New applications, such as virtualisation, have a lot of potential for our business but they would be difficult to deploy on our existing platform”.

The converged solution

Manches LLP turned to their business communications provider, Reeves Lund, to begin scoping out a new approach. . Reeves Lund is a voice and data systems integrator with strategic partner alliances with leading industry players. To set the foundation for improved operational efficiency, a Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) Wide-Area Network from Exponential-e was the Reeves Lund choice. This powerful, multisite corporate network employs Ethernet to support the services running over it and is the ideal underlying fabric for converging Manches LLP’s VoIP, three site Internet access and fully meshed any-to-any communications platform. VPLS in effect, delivers all Manches’ business-critical services on one single Ethernet pipe. Installing 100mbps access circuits provided ample bandwidth for the required services, and paved the way for future virtualisation and disaster recovery programs.

The use of VPLS requires those same Ethernet networking skills as those used in a LAN, so Manches LLP didn’t need additional training, neither was there any need for them to appoint new WAN specialists to the company for the day to day administration of the network.

VPLS effectively creates a single bridged domain across different sites. Multiple VPLS bridges or instances can be created within a converged network – with each one dedicated to a type of service. Two secure VPLS instances were created in order to converge Manches LLP’s new solution, each with very different objectives:

The VPLS voice instance

Business class IP telephony with QoS was provisioned using SIP trunks to replace the existing inflexible ISDN30 lines and analogue extensions. The voice service included 3Mbps of QoS protected bandwidth to support the use of toll-quality voice codecs such as G.711. This not only reduced the number of physical lines, and removed single points of failure, but also provided significant cost savings. Key benefits such as command control in a disaster recovery scenario were also provided with the new voice system, meaning that in the event of failure, calls could be routed to another Manches LLP office with ease and simplicity. Users are now able to work from home or remotely, and in the unlikely event of an outage, can operate from the disaster recovery location – minimising any potential down time, thus further improving efficiency.

The network data VPLS instance

This was created specifically for efficient and secure data transfer and communications between Manches LLP premises. With more bandwidth now available than ever before and the layer 2 characteristics of a VPLS network, each site can now communicate as though on the same local area network (LAN). The ability to easily scale the bandwidth was added in the event of their data usage increasing.

Derek Brookes, IT Director at Manches LLP explains, “Converging our services on to one, easily manageable connection was always on my wish list for improved operational efficiency. Working closely with Exponential-e, Reeves Lund was able to provide this, and so much more. We now have our own any-to-any wide-area network from where we converge all our essential services. Add to this the benefit of it costing half of what we used to pay for a far less flexible and reliable service, and the result is one future proof converged solution, and one very happy customer.”

The personal approach

Manches LLP wanted to use just one supplier for all their business communications needs. They needed this partner to work closely with them and personally manage the entire process. Reeves Lund was particularly well placed to fulfil this requirement and, through its close relationship with Exponential-e, was able to walk through the new integration step by step and at Manches’ convenience.

Conclusion

A new WAN solution is usually commissioned to significantly enhance a company’s data communications, business responsiveness and to simplify their communications administration and this was no different for Manches LLP. They now enjoy a three site any-to-any network which, in effect, hosts all three sites on the same LAN, and, just as importantly, has allowed them to converge their business critical communications. In doing so, Manches LLP staff can now work remotely and thereby helping to improve partner and associate productivity.

Manches LLP were able to realise significant cost-savings. Whilst the solution they commissioned improved their overall operational efficiency, they also enjoyed a significant reduction in ICT spend by consolidating their number of ICT providers and in converging voice and data services onto one single unified service-supporting platform. The entire new solution will save money in the first year, and over 3 years will be half the cost of their previous, fragmented and in-flexible communications network.

For Further information please contact Peter Harper-Hill at Reeves Lund on

E peterhh@reeveslund.com
DDI +44 (0)20 7749 7402