Essex maps collaboration and shared services agenda with PSN infrastructure

Essex County Council is set to deliver enhanced ICT services to around 200,000 users, including Essex Police and Essex County Fire Services, through its Next Generation Network (NGN) services while also reducing spend.

Daisy Updata Communications Limited (DUCL) has been awarded the NGN contract to manage and develop the IT network infrastructure and associated telephony services for ten years. The contract is valued at £81 million.

The NGN will be built to Public Services Network (PSN) standards but requires no new financial investment from the council.

It has the capacity to quickly encompass other public sector bodies – for example, the NHS – while also potentially connecting other public and third sector organisations from the wider region outside Essex.

The new infrastructure is set to reduce expenditure on network and telephony services, while ensuring a future-proofed, robust and fully-managed service.

The contract will combine the council’s data and telephony networks and add additional services – unified communications, video conferencing and fixed telephony, for example – to support flexible working. One of the contract’s key early deliverables is to provide full compliance with PSN standards to enable secure connectivity to government services and to provide a platform for sharing services with Essex County Council’s other public sector stakeholders, such as the emergency services, the NHS and local authorities.

Call costs will be reduced through the introduction of new telephony services, including the utilisation of IP telephony and the introduction of new mobile tariffs. Fixed mobile convergence (FMC) will enable calls to be routed in the most cost-efficient way.  

David Wilde, CIO at Essex County Council, explained: “For Essex and the users of this network, it is about getting more for less; providing a better service at a significantly reduced cost. DUCL has developed a model that will deliver our strategic objectives and support the transformation of the council’s services delivered to our citizens.

“We are absolutely committed to sharing services and collaborating with our partners and neighbours and clearly the most cost-effective way of doing that is across a shared infrastructure.”

DUCL is a new joint venture between Daisy Group, a supplier of unified business communications services, and Updata Infrastructure, which provides network solutions to the public sector.