Beaumont Offices

The Challenge

Beaumont Offices operates high-end serviced offices in prime Central London locations. Throughout 2015, Beaumont Offices experienced almost weekly communications outages at one of its Central London sites. Tara Byrne, Operations Manager at Beaumont Offices, describes the problem: “With five locations in and around the City, a fast and reliable internet connection is really important. The problems we were having with our incumbent service provider meant that our clients were unhappy and were threatening to leave.”

The existing poor service was simply unacceptable for Beaumont Offices and its clients, and in 2015 the company put the communications and connectivity contract out to tender. Following a glowing recommendation from one of her own clients, Tara asked Backbone Connect to respond to the tender request. Tara says: “We decided to upgrade the service at the same time – moving from a single provider to dual fibre in all buildings. We didn’t want to have to worry about connectivity and we didn’t want our clients to worry about it either.”

The Solution

Following a comprehensive tender process, Beaumont Offices decided Backbone Connect would enable it to provide the best service to its customers and chose its resilient, high performance connectivity solution. With two service providers and two diverse routes into each building, each with 1GB capacity and a 1 hour SLA, Backbone Connect met Tara’s requirements in terms of solution, price, and professionalism.

“Backbone Connect ensured a smooth transition and helped us to migrate all our clients painlessly,” says Tara. “With more than 250,000 sq ft of office space, 450 clients, and 2,000 end users, this was a considerable undertaking and we really appreciated Backbone Connect’s support with this.” The solution includes a centralised MPLS between sites, which is the first time telecoms will be centralised for Beaumont Offices and has delivered the resilience and reliability Beaumont Offices sought: “The Internet is no longer a problem for us,” confirms Tara.

The Backbone Connect team are super-personable, they have that rare combination of being both techy and good at the customer facing stuff – often it can be one or the other.

The results

Tara has also been impressed with the service she has received from the Backbone Connect team. She says, “We’ve had one outage in the two years – compared with one every week before. That only happened because one of the Tier 1 carriers had done an update without informing anyone, and there was a reconnection to the backup lines. We were still liaising with our clients about it, and Backbone Connect were already on the phone with us – having diagnosed it before we had! That’s a big change – we just don’t have to worry about it.”

The quality of service delivered by Backbone Connect is now also playing an important role in Beaumont Offices’ competitive positioning.