Case Study: Chetham's School of Music

About Chetham's School of Music

Entry to the School is based solely on musical ability or potential, never on background or ability to pay, thanks to generous bursaries through the Government’s Music and Dance Scheme. This common bond of musical passion makes for a truly inspirational place which transforms the lives of all who are part of it.

Chetham’s is the largest specialist Music School in the UK and is the only one based in the north of England. The School is also a national and international resource for music education – welcoming teachers, professional players, composers and conductors, community groups, school children and other young musicians, both experienced and novices, to come together and make music. Their network of partnerships with professional orchestras and organisations extends across the music industry, and our alumni populate orchestras and ensembles across the world.

The Challenge

Chetham's School of Music had previously been using an on-premise Shoretel system. Whilst this allowed them to handle calls and basic call routing the incumbent systems capabilities were very limited and preventing more advanced functionality that the customer required.

The legacy system did not allow them to operate away from the offices, with no remote working capabilities, something that quickly became apparent when the pandemic hit.

Securing a system that would provide them with all of their requirements whilst providing a cost-effective solution presented a unique challenge with Chetham's School of Music - Reducing costs is also always a challenge faced by the education sector and even more so for charities, an aging on-premise system was preventing the school taking advantage of newer more cost-effective technologies such as SIP. 

The Solution

Replacing the incumbent system with Mitel Connect provided a more advanced system supported by an intuitive user interface, giving Chetham's School of Music the capabilities they required without needing to rely on third-party support to change functionalities. 

What's more, as the solution is available on both desktop and mobile, remote working is easily achieved allowing the system's 100 users to continue to  work as cohesively and confidently as when they are in the school. Remote working solutions have become of paramount importance to the school since the pandemic and the Mitel connect solution has allowed staff to stay connected wherever they may be working.

Alongside the Mitel upgrade and the systems ongoing maintenance Wavenet also replaced the school's ISDN with SIP Trunking, allowing them to handle as much as 100 calls per second, providing a robust telephony system with no downtime.

The Results

Through our work together, Chetham's School of Music have been able to take advantage of the following results:

Reliability - With unrivalled SLA's and dedicated Account Managers, Chetham's School of Music have complete peace of mind.

Cost Saving - Utilising the best in class IT solutions and no expensive on-prem systems keeps operating costs low.

Future-proof IT - Partnering with Wavenet has given Chetham's School of Music access to our highly trained IT support who are dedicated to deeply understanding their requirements, helping them plan and evolve their IT infrastructure.

UC - Transforming communications with UC and voice offers high reliability and full scalability.

Usability - With a dedicated account manager and one point of contact, making changes or getting support is quick and easy.  

Agility and Flexibility: As long as staff have an internet connection the new solution allows them to work from anywhere, anytime. This also supports the business in its BC/DR.

"Wavenet highlighted potential problems to us with our existing Shoretel system and the need to move to sip to future-proof our connection. They were flexible in their approach, reusing existing hardware where possible (Shoretel switches) and adapting to our network configuration to deliver a solution at cost and on time." - Andrew Kyle, Information Manager