Fujitsu and Cisco land Gatwick cloud UC contract

Gatwick Airport, the UK’s second largest airport, has entered into a contract that will see its 1950s-era communications infrastructure moved to Fujitsu’s cloud with Cisco providing collaboration services, including voice, video, instant messaging and presence.

Initially, the service, which is being provided through service integration firm Xchanging, will be rolled out to 1,100 of Gatwick’s staff, before being extended to all 2,500 end users and its commercial customers.

Xchanging will also handle the customer interface and first line support and trouble shooting, as well as some of the configurations.

John Keegan, CTO at Fujitsu UK and Ireland, told Cloud Pro the facility had chosen the Fujitsu-Cisco proposition over other possibilities due to the level of resilience offered by Fujitsu’s cloud.

“We have built a highly resilient, highly available, carrier-class cloud platform where not only is it resilient within a single data centre, we’ve got this mirrored across dual data centres – one in north London and one in south London – one of which is a full Tier 3 data centre. So we can fail over between data centres, as well as between servers within that infrastructure” said Keegan.

“This was a key part of what the Gatwick team were looking for; that high availability and that confidence that as long as they have a network in place they could rely on a cloud-based solution that would scale, would meet their demands and offer that high availability,” he added.

The project is initially being carried out as a five-year project, with full roll-out of the service due to be completed by the end of 2014. However, Keegan said he hopes the contract will be extended beyond the 2018 mark.