Shaw Trust turns to Sirocom in £2.5m VNO deal

One of the UK's fastest-growing charities is investing £2.5m over four years with virtual network operator (VNO) Sirocom.

Shaw Trust, which helps those with disabilities and other disadvantages get into the workforce, will use a converged VPN service to tie together around 200 home workers as well as 1,300 personnel in 60 offices across the UK.

The deal means money saved for Shaw Trust but flexibility to allow rapid growth - the charity is doubling in size every 27 months - was just as important, said IT director Gavin Megnauth.

Megnauth said: "We have seen an instantaneous reduction in cost for the same service [as before], though this deal was not primarily about cost but the flexibility to grow."

He said turning to the VNO model means his organisation is unlikely to be left with wide area network (WAN) technology that quickly becomes dated and added Sirocom took care of extricating Shaw Trust from its previous contracts - with MCI across the WAN and BT for ADSL to workers' homes.

Megnauth said: "Sirocom have the power to get us out [of those contracts]. That's their forte."

Sirocom hopes the charity will take additional services as the relationship grows. One of those is voice over IP (VoIP), which would save more money. Now all intra-company traffic is carried over the public network.

The growth in Shaw Trust's work comes as the UK government recently stated its aim of reducing annual expenditure on incapacity benefits, which totals around £12.8bn.