Relationships Australia NSW transforms counselling services with Nutanix and Avaya

Security, simplicity and cost-savings drive the not-for-profit’s digital strategy

Sydney, Australia, 2016 – Not-for-profit counselling organisation, Relationships Australia New South Wales (RANSW), has selected Nutanix and Avaya to power a digital transformation aimed at providing counselling services anytime and anywhere while protecting the anonymity and safety of its clients.

RANSW offers relationship support services to individuals, couples, families and communities; in fiscal 2016, the organisation helped 22,500 clients. With almost all its funding coming from State and Federal Governments, the organisation is required to demonstrate innovation in its service delivery in order to maximise value for money.

The organisation implemented the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform running Nutanix AHV to create a secure, on-premises cloud environment that could not only deliver critical applications through Citrix XenDesktop and support extremely sensitive customer data, but securely enable Avaya contact centre and video conferencing – a key component of its digital strategy. These technologies were selected because they are simple to use and maintain, designed to provide the required security and confidentiality to protect clients’ anonymity, improve productivity, and mobilise employees – all at a lower price point than alternative options.

RANSW said it is already saving upwards of $150,000 per annum using the Nutanix and Avaya platforms to power its 23 sites. Its return on investment is expected to increase as it scales up to accommodate business expansion. Using Nutanix, the not-for-profit can reliably run all production systems and critical business applications via the platform’s built-in virtualisation, Nutanix AHV. It can now reliably operate a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), powered by Citrix, which provides mobile access to the resources used by more than 400 employees to deliver relationship support services to the people of New South Wales. The integration between Nutanix AHV and Citrix has allowed RANSW to deploy and manage secure end-user desktops with a rich set of applications.

Among these resources is the Avaya IP Office Contact Centre platform, which provides counsellors with the ability to deliver a customised experience to citizens while maintaining the personal human interaction that is fundamental to their roles. With IP Office, counsellors can anticipate the needs of returning clients so that services are provided more efficiently.

The next phase of the organisation’s digital transformation involves the deployment of an upcoming version of Avaya’s video conferencing platform, Avaya Conferencing 9.0. The new version will be able to run in a web browser without the need to install software on the client’s device.

The Nutanix and Avaya solutions were selected with consultation from services provider and Avaya partner, CCNA, which worked closely with managed services provider and Nutanix partner, BEarena, to design and implement the technologies.

“Security is paramount to everything we do – our clients trust us to help them in a safe environment,” said Mark Hindle, Head of Technology at RANSW. “The Nutanix and Avaya technologies create that safe environment so our counsellors can interact with their clients while ensuring their confidentiality. Nutanix and Citrix keep all data private so there’s no risk of that sensitive information leaking, while Avaya allows our staff to deliver support to people when and where they need it.”

“Think of a scenario where an individual is in a hostile situation at home – perhaps they are victim to an abusive partner. If they can’t leave the home for a face-to-face meeting, we will be able to provide a URL to access Avaya conferencing, giving clients the ability to initiate a private browsing session that won’t leave a trace. Because Avaya will be hosted on Nutanix, we won’t need to worry about the data’s security or complexity as we need to scale it.”

RANSW indicated that, to date, it has experienced a considerable rise in uptime across all systems, a dramatic increase in application performance, and overall growth in confidence in the IT system by employees. An independent security consultancy firm has subsequently performed an audit of the new infrastructure, which passed with no issues.

Supporting Quotes
“RANSW’s business is shaped around the trust it delivers to its clients. With the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, the organisation not only equips its employees with the tools to support clients at any time and from any location; it also ensures that these interactions and their associated data are kept private.”
--Matt Young, General Manager, Nutanix Asia-Pacific and Japan

“Client experience is everything for an organisation like RANSW. With an operation that relies so heavily on the personal and contextualised relationships between counsellors and clients, its ability to provide a safe digital support service via Avaya Conferencing is critical to the community. It gives clients a new way to connect with counsellors that is aligned with today’s consumers’ digital preferences, and also keeps that contact private.”
--Darren Read, General Manager of Services, Avaya Australia

About Nutanix
Nutanix makes infrastructure invisible, elevating IT to focus on the applications and services that power their business. The Nutanix enterprise cloud platform leverages web-scale engineering and consumer-grade design to natively converge compute, virtualization and storage into a resilient, software-defined solution with rich machine intelligence. The result is predictable performance, cloud-like infrastructure consumption, robust security, and seamless application mobility for a broad range of enterprise applications. Learn more at www.nutanix.com or follow us on Twitter @nutanix.

About Avaya
Avaya is a leading provider of solutions that enable customer and team engagement across multiple channels and devices for better customer experience, increased productivity and enhanced financial performance. Its world-class contact center and unified communications technologies and services are available in a wide variety of flexible on-premises and cloud deployment options that integrate with non-Avaya applications. The Avaya Engagement Environment enables third parties to create and customize business applications for competitive advantage. Avaya’s fabric-based networking solutions help simplify and accelerate the deployment of business critical applications and services. For more information please visit www.avaya.com.

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