The Client

The University of Essex is one of the most international universities in the world with staff and students from more than 140 countries, an expanding network of transnational education partnerships and more than 130,000 alumni making a difference across the globe.

Essex’s commitment to making a positive social impact means it is ranked 58th out of 1,963 universities worldwide in the global Times Higher Education Impact Rankings 2024.

It is ranked 23rd in the UK in The Guardian University Guide 2025, 17th for international outlook in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2025 and in the UK top 10 for research power in five subjects following the Research Excellence Framework (Times Higher Education 2022).

Business Needs

The university was satisfying its telephony needs through ageing onpremise NEC / Philips analogue and SIP server platforms which were proving increasingly costly to maintain.

“Many of the Avoira engineers today have been working with us on our systems since their early NEC days”, recalls Andy Tyne, University of Essex’s Senior Engineer (Telecoms).

“Our relationship with Avoira involves a good flow of communication. For instance, they told us before the vendor, that our on-prem systems were coming to end of life. That was not just the analogue stuff, but also the SIP server which we’ve been gradually moving to over a number of years.”

Forewarned and already eyeing up Microsoft Teams as a default platform for its future telephony needs, the university discussed its options with Avoira.

“We knew that we were going to be moving to a Teams environment ultimately, but our Avoira account manager, Joe Burlison, telling us that our existing solution was approaching end of life brought that forward very rapidly.

“We were also promoting Teams internally although a lot of people were picking it up independently. Initially, staff groups were allowed to choose between Zoom and Teams, and in recent months and years we’ve been pushing Teams much harder as the best option for unified communications.”

The Solution

Working in partnership with Avoira’s Unified Communications Engineer, James Lyness, the university’s Telephony team plotted a path to a smooth transition to a hybrid Teams solution.

This would see 2,000 staff benefiting from Microsoft Teams Direct Routing, a low-cost subscription, cloud- hosted, unified communications (UC) service that enables calls to be made and received over any Teams enabled device. At UoE,
this is typically a laptop.

The remaining 1,000 staff would have access to the Teams app, with both user groups being equipped with Sharepoint and other Microsoft productivity tools.

“We asked Avoira to help us with a proof of concept and that rapidly turned into a first phase of deployment,” explains Andy, adding that when rolling out telephony his team built up Powershell commands, scripts and moved extensions over from the on-premise kit to the SIP Trunk Call Manager (STCM).

“That was a process that Avoira very much helped us with, hand-holding us for the first few months,” he acknowledges. “Now we just say to Avoira’s help desk team ‘please will you move these numbers to the STCM’ because we’ve already set up the back end in Teams.”

Whilst the transition process is ongoing as the university continues to exit use of, and maintenance contracts associated with, the old on-premise systems, the benefits of Teams are already mounting.

The Benefits

Avoira’s Teams solution offers the university a number of advantages, from the practical and productive, to the financial.

Being a Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solution, university staff can access Teams and other apps wherever they are working. “It offers mobility, people can make calls wherever they are,” confirms Andy. “When we roll out new devices rather than having a desktop PC, we provide laptops with applications including Teams and telephony onboarded.

“They can work from home (WFH) and at work. We built a series of workstations so that they can come into the university and simply plug a laptop into a portal and have all their apps available on a computer. They can hotdesk.”

He adds: “Now that Microsoft have increased functionality we can also give them a better telephony experience with queues, auto-attendant, messaging and voicemail and integration with services like Sharepoint.”

Microsoft’s A5 licensing, which is specifically designed to serve educational institutions, also offers enhanced security.

This is an important consideration given that the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2024 found that 97% of higher education institutions had identified a breach or attack in the past year.

Arguably, though, it is the financial benefits that are the most impressive. “It’s definitely financially advantageous to move to Teams and run it off hardware of all types,” notes Andy.

Taking into account redundancy of the costly old systems and the benefits brought through the integration of other apps, he forecasts substantial cost reductions.

“We’re expecting to make significant savings over the next five years,” he confirms. Those savings have, though, not seen any erosion in service and support standards. Far from it.

“Avoira has maintained an excellent standard of service. They’re very responsive. We submit tickets to the helpdesk and get replies almost instantaneously. We’re also extremely confident that, if we need someone on site, they’ll be there in a few hours. “There’s a lot in the relationship that we value,” he concludes.