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24/7 policing supported by 24/7 call center

With 80 miles of fabulous coastline and two-thirds of the county designated as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, Sussex is one of the most beautiful places in the British Isles. Breathtaking views ranging across the South Downs countryside, combined with the energetic, cosmopolitan city of Brighton, mean there's no shortage of things to see and do. Often the envy of other constabularies, Sussex Police serve areas from Crawley to Brighton and Chichester to Hastings.

Sussex Police are committed to serving their community, hence effective and secure communication is a top priority for the force. Their 36-seat call center at their Lewes headquarters allows residents to report crime incidents and request additional information, 24 hours a day throughout the year.

Dave Shoult, IT support officer, Sussex Police explains, "The call center in Lewes ensures that Sussex residents have a point of contact, at any time, to report a crime or ask advice of trained police personnel. By channeling non-emergency calls such as crime reporting and information requests into a call center, we have ensured that efficiencies are maximized and police resources remain focused."

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Nortel Symposium^TM + Stratus^® ftServer^® System = 24/7 Call Center

The Nortel Networks^TM Meridian^TM platform has been the core infrastructure for communication and the force attributes a lot of the success of their call center to their Nortel Symposium^TM solution. Supported by British Telecom (BT), it has performed faultlessly for the last two years.

A long-time Stratus^® Continuum^® customer, the police force understands the role fault-tolerant technology plays in delivering 24/7 continuous availability. When they learned of the Stratus ftServer^® system's support for Nortel's Symposium application, they were keen to evaluate possibilities of upgrading to ftServer hardware.

"We were very familiar with the Stratus Continuum product, but not their new ftServer range. When BT demonstrated the fault-tolerant capabilities of the ftServer system, I was very impressed. The elimination of single points of failure was apparent when over half of the hardware was removed and the system continued to run," says Shoult.

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The ftServer line is a fault-tolerant, industry-standard family of servers that provides maximum uptime for Microsoft^® Windows^® environments. These Intel^® processor-based systems avert unplanned downtime by using built-in Stratus Continuous Processing^® features. And with uptime protection designed in, affordable ftServer systems meet or exceed the computer industry's highest level of availability - 99.999% in real-world customer installations.

Every ftServer system uses replicated components - CPUs, memory, I/O adapters, and more - that operate in lockstep. The duplicate components perform exactly the same task, in the same way, at the same time. In the case of a malfunction, the partner component acts as an active spare and continues normal operation. Lockstep hardware is complemented by the ftServer family's failsafe system software, which prevents many software errors (such as problems with device drivers) from escalating into outages.

Continuous self-monitoring and remote troubleshooting are enabled by ActiveService^TM functionality engineered into the server. If the server detects a potential issue, processing continues uninterrupted while the condition is isolated. The server then automatically dials out to the Stratus Customer Assistance Center (CAC) to relay information about what action to take.

The server's lockstep hardware, failsafe software, and ActiveService capabilities are transparent to standard Windows-based software. As a result, off-the-shelf applications instantly take advantage of Stratus fault tolerance without the special configuration and software modification needed to use the high-availability features of a cluster.

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Application is only as good as the hardware it runs on

In addition to the installation of the Stratus ftServer system, Nortel Symposium software was upgraded to release 4.2. The new version of Symposium software comes with enhancing skill-based routing and advanced, intelligent call-handling capabilities. This enables agents to have customer records immediately because the caller line identity (CLI) is recognized. Furthermore, advanced reporting ensures that call records can be analyzed in order to improve the overall efficiency of the call center.

The successful implementation of the new Symposium solution on the ftServer system has the Sussex Police considering an extension of the call center to handle direct crime reports. Confidence in the availability and scalability of the solution has been the key driver behind their expansion plans.

The Stratus ftServer platform with Nortel Symposium delivers bulletproof call center solutions for mission-critical environments. "The new server is an excellent piece of kit. Combined with the Symposium product, it has improved the efficiency of the call center by ensuring calls are intelligently routed to the right officers, while also giving us the performance guarantees we require," adds Shoult.

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See also Customer Profile Sussex Police: Vital information protected with DataWise^TMsoftware and Stratus systems