CUSTOMER STORIES: Unity Schools Partnership
Stone Group Partners with Unity Schools Offering Expertise and Cost Savings
The Unity Schools Partnership is a family of secondary, primary, middle and special schools located mainly in Suffolk, and also on the Essex and Cambridgeshire borders as well as Romford in East London. The schools share the same values and face similar issues, while providing a close network of support.
Comprised of 17 primary schools, three special schools, two middle schools, eight secondary schools and five sixth forms, the Partnership educates around 14,000 young people supported by a staff of 2,200. Mike Vaughan is Head of IT and Data Protection Lead and manages a staff of 30 who are responsible for the smooth running of the Partnerships IT structure and delivery.
When Mike joined the Trust, Stone was one of the incumbent technology providers and they had proved themselves to be efficient in supplying a variety of kit such as PCs, iPads and other hardware. However, it was when the Trust wanted to review it Microsoft licencing that the Stone Group’s expertise became apparent.
Developing A Master Licence
“With so many educational establishments within the Trust there was considerable disparity around Microsoft licencing,” said Mike. “We had around two thirds of our schools and colleges that did not fall under the central master agreement we had established, and, as a result, it was expensive and difficult to manage. We wanted to ensure all of our schools came under one master licence that Stone Group would manage.”
With thousands of pieces of kit within the Trust, finding and checking if each individual PC or laptop was licensed proved to be a challenge too big for Mike’s team. He said: “Individual schools would often renew licences automatically without thinking about whether it was relevant. We also had numerous licences running at different times for different products, or we could even be running products with expired licences. The first job for Stone Group was to identify just what we did have across our entire estate.
Stone Group is a Microsoft Gold Partner and boasts its own team of licencing experts. Thanks to the close working relationship it has with Microsoft the two were able to work together to identify each piece of kit within the Trust and the relevant licence for it. “Having visibility of all the licences for the first time was a major benefit in itself,” said Mike. “Stone Group provided us with clarity and an overview of the situation which allowed us to survey all of our establishments to see what licences were in place when they were due for renewal and if they were still relevant.”
As a result of Stone Group’s audit, the Trust did have some areas of under-licencing which would have proved a risk for the school. The exercise immediately removed that risk. Mike adds: “As anyone who works in this area knows, Microsoft licencing can be fiendishly complicated but thankfully Stone Group’s in-house licencing team were able to provide analysis and advise us on the most cost-effective way we could bring everything under a master licence to make sure we were fully covered.
“There were numerous options available to us and Stone were able to suggest various combinations which offered us the best value. There is no way we could have done that ourselves and Stone Group’s knowledge and expertise meant that we have saved around 25% on our annual licencing bill, which is currently around £100,000. That’s money we have been able to reinvest elsewhere in the school.
“Stone’s hard work has also resolved our ‘housekeeping’ licencing issue which makes the job of my team a lot easier. We now have a comprehensive overview of all our licences and when it comes to annual review, the renewal will be much quicker and slicker.”
Stone Group Servers Installed Across the Trust
The Trust has also made a strategic decision to re-evaluate all its hardware requirements and so wanted new servers in each of its secondary and primary schools. After doing a lot of research around cost and performance it made the decision to purchase Stone Group branded servers.
The Stone Equinox is a hyper-converged virtualisation platform and service designed for the expanding and evolving education, public and private sectors, which the Trust will use in its secondary schools. Stone Equinox uses the latest Intel® technologies to deliver a hyper-converged solution, at a fraction of the cost of most competing solutions, whilst giving the Trust the edge with value-added services. It also uses Virtualisation Support Services (VSS), allowing Mike to offload the ongoing configuration, maintenance and management of the platform and so allows his team to concentrate on more focused service delivery tasks, rather than the nuts and bolts of the underlying system.
The primary school severs within the Trust will all eventually be replaced with the Stone Eclipse flash-accelerated host that uses the latest in SSD Caching technology to revitalise IT infrastructure. Based on the latest Intel® scalable family platform, it provides performance and cost gains over traditional RAID solutions and is available in a wide variety of configurations.
Mike said: “The Stone branded servers represent excellent value for money and our own in-house team outlined the specification we required which means they are designed to our requirements and offer a robust and bespoke solution. Stone Group build them at their HQ before shipping to us where they are all set up and ready to go just as we want them.
“Finally, the after care and support we receive from Stone Group is second to none. In fact, Stone Group have been known to spot a problem with the servers before we do! If there are any significant errors that can’t be resolved remotely, Stone Group will send an engineer same day or the day after.”
Mike says he wants to work with partners that offer a wide range of skills and expertise that complements his in-house team. “Stone Group is an important strategic partner for the Trust,” he said. “We are building a mutually beneficial long-term relationship and we work with Stone not just as providers of IT kit but also as consultants who offer a broad range of skills and knowledge.”
“Stone’s licencing experts was invaluable and saved us 25% in licencing renewals”
Mike Vaughan
Head of IT and Data Proection Lead
Unity Schools Partnership
