Case Studies
Trans-aXion Enhances Customer Services with hSo Hosting
- Significant expansion using SIP Trunking
- Business Continuity ensured through high-resilience hosting
- Improved levels of service gained by pro-active monitoring and responsive support
About Trans-aXion
Trans-aXion offers a range of web-based logistics solutions for the transport industry and consumers of parcel delivery services in the UK, Europe and USA. Offering ‘software as a service’ (SaaS), Trans-aXion provides complete solutions to improve logistics management and processes.
As Steve Wilton, Support Manager at Trans-aXion explains, “As a provider of web-based Logistics software and mobile client software, our network is critical to our business.”
The Challenge
Voice
Trans-aXion had identified that it could use its expertise of the logistics industry to launch a service specifically for SMEs and consumers. The Parcel Network (www.theparcelnetwork.com) is supported by a telesales and marketing team, which needed flexible, high quality voice communications.
The company recognized that VoIP would offer it a service that could cater for planned expansion—its flexibility and scalability would allow the addition of new services and technologies in the future.
Trans-aXion found that there were few truly professional service providers of VoIP around. According to Steve Wilton “hSo was a clear contender. After going out to tender we found that they not only offered the best price, but more importantly, their staff had the right technical know-how and the solution offered very high levels of reliability. ”
Data
As Trans-aXion’s business grew, it became clear that it also needed to improve the reliability of its hosting environment. The company used multiple data centres in a bid to improve redundancy, but had suffered from frequent outages. Steve Wilton explains, “We originally chose multiple data centres as we thought it would offer us better resilience. This was not the case, and we were constantly flipping between them, resulting in a lot of support costs—not to mention the internal resources and time spent dealing with these issues.”
Trans-aXion decided that consolidation to a single reliable data centre was the answer. The decision to ‘put all its eggs in one basket’ was a tough one, so the company looked at 14 service providers in the quest to find one that met all its needs:
· Very high levels of redundancy—a factor that was key. As Steve Wilton puts it, “In a fast-moving industry like logistics, even a downtime of five minutes is a catastrophe.”
· Competitive price—although overall value was more important.
· Responsive support—Trans-aXion needed a partner which could provide comprehensive support and speedy resolution of any problems.
· Future-proofing—the company is growing fast and needs to be able to scale up and add new services as required.
Why did Trans-aXion choose hSo?
Of the 14 suppliers that Trans-aXion considered, hSo was the only one that could meet all of Trans-aXion’s Voice and Data requirements:
· Redundancy—hSo was able to prove that the hosted service would provide the high levels of uptime Trans-aXion would need to deliver a reliable service to its customers.
· Responsiveness—Trans-aXion needs 24/7 support to ensure that its services are constantly available. hSo had already demonstrated its performance by delivering the voice solution for the Coventry office, so Trans-aXion felt confident it could rely on the hSo team to support its additional hosting requirements.
· Price—hSo offered the best value for money, despite not bidding the lowest. Steve Wilton explained, “Once you take into account the cost benefits of factors such as the high level of uptime, hSo has worked out as the cheapest.”
The Solution
SIP Trunking and Data Connectivity for Coventry call centre
hSo implemented a SIP Trunking solution for Trans-aXion’s Coventry office, along with a dedicated connection to support voice and data services. SIP allows Trans-aXion’s phone calls to travel over their data connections and by doing so eliminates the need for ISDN circuits.
Unlike ISDN circuits, SIP Trunks are not limited to 30 channels which means that Trans-aXion are now able to add or remove users and sites to their network swiftly and easily. SIP Trunking provides them with a truly scalable solution.
Hosting of servers powering web-based SaaS offering
hSo hosts Trans-aXion’s mission-critical business servers in one of hSo’s world-class data centres. To ensure maximum uptime, hSo’s data centres use multiple independent power supplies, multiple connections to the hSo core network, multiple IP Transit providers, uninterruptable power supplies with surge protection, backup diesel generators, cooling systems designed specifically for server hosting, raised floors and advanced fire detection & suppression systems.
Trans-aXion’s servers, circuits and services are proactively monitored 24/7 by hSo’s technical Network Operation Centre. If problems arise, skilled technicians are on hand to fix any them.
The Benefits
· High levels of redundancy—Trans-aXion has not had a single network outage since moving to hSo—a factor that they believe has significantly improved their relationships with their customers.
· Future-proofing—the company has recently re-located its call centre operation for the parcel service to cater for expansion—something that was achieved quickly and easily with no disruption to the business. They have also upgraded to higher quality, lower latency voice services which puts them in an ideal place for future development and expansion.
· 24/7 support—as Steve Wilton explains, “hSo’s 24/7 Network operations centre means that if we have a problem at 5am and need to get hold of someone, we always can.”
· Cost Savings—by consolidating to a single, reliable data centre, the company has achieved significant cost benefits and their management costs of dealing with downtime have been eliminated.
Steve Wilton concluded by commenting on hSo’s service: “Our experience has been excellent. The support we have received has been invaluable and we have been offered the consultancy we needed. All in all, it was the right solution at the right price.”
