Darren Gore (Calibre One).
Technology partner Calibre One has taken Somerville Community Services along a cloud transformation journey, creating a resilient IT environment.
The project involved taking the national disability insurance scheme (NDIS) caregiver’s on-premises server to Office 365 and legacy telephony to Telstra Calling for Office 365 while implementing enterprise-grade cyber security.
Supported by Telstra’s triple-redundant fibre connectivity and third-party mobility solutions, the digital transformation program reshaped how Somerville’s 200 staff served their customers and improved its resilience to external shocks.
Somerville’s cloud journey started with the devastation wrought by tropical Cyclone Marcus in 2018 — the strongest cyclone to hit Darwin in 45 years, costing the Northern Territory $75 million and felled 430 power lines that blacked-out 26,500 properties.
“We lost power in the office for a week, so I had to carry that server to our other office and it wouldn't turn on,” Somerville manager ICT and systems administration Jannie Bacus said.
“I restored it to a virtual server and got us up and running but it was very much a ‘never again!’ moment for me.”
By the time the COVID–19 pandemic struck the Territory, Calibre One had migrated Somerville to its cloud managed services, led fibre internet to the caregiver’s three administration sites and linked it through Telstra’s triple-redundant fibre paths. For the first time, Somerville had dedicated bandwidth and 24/7 services.
“Providing enterprise fibre services was a big underpinning. Everything before was standard business or consumer NBN service,” Calibre One CEO, Darren Gore said.
Calibre One also provided Wi-Fi, a SharePoint intranet with OneDrive, cloud backup, managed services for telephony helpdesk and cyber security including mobile device management.
“There have been many outages elsewhere in the Territory since we installed Somerville’s network but, with Telstra, they now have redundant fibre paths,” Gore added.
Bacus said the connectivity and digital collaboration through Microsoft Teams and universal email transformed how Somerville cared for its vulnerable clients while improved data collection and privacy protection satisfied regulatory obligations.
Since its transformation journey, Somerville has experienced an improvement in service delivery as staff spend more time serving their vulnerable clients and less time on manual paperwork; cost cuts and simplified financial management through infrastructure standardisation and Calibre One managed services; and boosted productivity by empowering staff to access data when and where they need to.
The project also saw Somerville unify voice and telecommunications by replacing three systems that were difficult to manage with a single and fully integrated cloud platform.
And while no category five storm has hit NT since Marcus, Bacus was confident Somerville’s redundant and resilient IT architecture would weather any blow.
“It has changed the trajectory of this organisation – the project laid the foundations for future innovation,” Bacus said.
“It’s changed people’s expectations of what they can do and their comfort levels around the new systems.
“We met our immediate goals in major improvements such as communication, giving access and flexibility to staff and, longer term, we have the scale and foundation to provide tools to staff and support growth. None of that would have been possible without the solutions that Calibre One built for us,” he added.
