THE CLIENT

Centrica is a leading energy services and solutions company focused on helping its customers live sustainably, simply and affordably. The business is founded on a 200-year heritage of serving people. They supply energy and services to over 9 million residential and business customers, mainly in the UK and Ireland, through strong brands such as British Gas, Bord Gáis and Centrica Business Solutions, supported by around 7,500 engineers and technicians.

THE CHALLENGE

Over previous years, Centrica has driven a set of clear standards in all their conferencing spaces. Being very much a video-first business and having solid experience in this area,  they wanted to ensure they maintain clear and open lines of communications for all staff members regardless of location and who they are meeting. As Zoom and Microsoft Teams came to the forefront through 2020 / 2021 and working from home increased dramatically, it became clear the Cisco room systems in place were no longer a cost-effective or functional way to continue, so an improved more flexible system was required. This also needs to be certified to enable them to grow their Microsoft Teams vision as needed. With a diverse user base throughout the county, this also had to be secure and simple to use with all Microsoft services and bring a unified approach to making calls and collaborating, regardless of which room or which site users are in.   

THE SOLUTION

As time was the greatest issue here with stock being in limited supply across all vendors, we were up against it and needing to maintain clear lines of communications with both all at Centrica and all at Poly. We delivered just under 100 Poly X and P series systems, with full updates in place to Centrica in a very short frame of time from request (sub 10 days). Every system was updated to the latest Poly firmware by our tech team before being packaged up ready for shipping to Centrica HQ and we managed to complete this within the week. This allowed them to simply have a network connection and Microsoft credentials added to the system once on site and they were ready to go with certified Microsoft Teams calls and more.

SUCCESS

Perfectly fitting with the exiting displays that Centrica has in place, the rollout was relatively pain-free. We did have some supply issues on certain mounts (global supply issue)  for the Poly units but this wasn’t detrimental to the overall project as everyone was continually kept aware of arrival times.The MS Teams logins were easily managed by Centrica IT also to have these systems up and working in no time. This along with Poly Lens allowed full visibility of the estate and an increase in workplace understanding and flexibility.