Vodafone helps a social enterprise move their network to the cloud
Overview
The Places for People social organisation is on a mission to provide new, affordable and sustainable housing and leisure options across UK communities.
The organisation wanted to upgrade its network with a cloud-based solution as part of a new digital cloud strategy that provides the best experience for customers and colleagues.
Vodafone’s end-to-end SD-WAN solution means Places for People now can enjoy much-needed flexibility in their operations, allowing them to react faster to changes and challenges.
Meet Places for People
As one of the UK’s leading social enterprises, Places for People is a network of companies that designs economically, socially and environmentally sustainable homes, places and communities for the long term.
Places for People has more than 50 years of experience and manages over 230,000 homes. They’ve delivered over 1,700 new homes and operate more than 100 leisure facilities, supporting upwards of 500,000 customers across the UK.
Honouring their motto, “community matters,” Places for People always turns profit into purpose. In 2021 alone, they invested £133.1M in their existing homes and a further £947,000 in 93 local and national community projects.
The challenge
A solid digital strategy is key to Places for People’s goal of providing affordable and sustainable housing.
As such, they wished to upgrade their network to accommodate changes in the ways they work, and to better serve their communities. Crucially, they required moving their wide-area network to a cloud-based solution, preferably using SD-WAN technology.
Moving to SD-WAN can be complex, which is why Places for People turned to Vodafone’s experience as a business network provider.
“By moving our network to the cloud, we’ve been able to implement new ways of working, helping us provide an efficient, agile and responsive service that caters to the needs of colleagues and customers and keeps us all connected.”
The solution
Due to its expertise in the field, local presence, global scale and extensive service delivery experience, Places for People chose Vodafone’s offer to modernise the old wide-area network and introduce cloud-based networking.
Together with Cisco Meraki’s professional service engineers, Vodafone brought an end-to-end SD-WAN solution. This includes connectivity and resilience options up to 1GB of data and a simple and secure SD-WAN network – which can provide coverage for Places for People’s 190 sites across the UK.
Additionally, Vodafone agreed to design and plan a seamless transition to SD-WAN to minimise network downtime.
years of experience
Places for People have been providing affordable and sustainable housing options across UK communities for more than 50 years.
sites covered across the UK
The organisation has covered more than 190 housing sites with Vodafone’s simple and secure SD-WAN network.
customers and employees served
A cloud-based network allows them to better serve more than 500,000 customers and employees across the UK.
Contributing to sustainability
Vodafone and Places for People will continue their beneficial cooperation, helping the organisation's employees any time they wish to have further upgrades to the already existing solution.
Vodafone Business is proud to contribute to Places for People’s mission of starting initiatives like the creation of 10,000 new, affordable and sustainable homes for families around the UK in the upcoming ten years.