Plymouth City Council will launch a unified communications (UC) system to more than 4000 users to reduce costs.
The UC is based on Microsoft Lync and is installed by NEC IT Solutions.
According to NEC, the contract of undisclosed value is the largest ever non-Microsoft-delivered deployment of Lync in the UK.
According to a report by Computing, the UC system will replace the council’s existing communications infrastructure into a single environment across multiple sites.
The council hopes the move will reduce operating costs while improving communications.
Plymouth City Council ICT assistant director Neville Cannon said the new system is expected to make the council "more agile and streamlining our communications in light of the recent budget cuts announced by the government."
"Over the past few months we have had to reduce our office space by 30 per cent. However, we still need to be able to deliver the same levels of service to the public and our old communication systems simply would not have enabled us to achieve this objective," said Cannon.
"Having considered what we were paying on maintenance and the costs to bring our current environment up to a standard where it could be used for unified communications, we quickly arrived at the conclusion that even with the cost of implementing the new Microsoft Lync technology, we would achieve a tangible return on investment," he added.
