Breaking free from depreciation cycles

The Public Center for Social Welfare ‘Ten Hove’ in the Belgian municipality of Mol needed a fitting upgrade to its obsolete network switches, feasible both technically and economically. An impossible combination? Not with the ExtremeSwitching offering and Cipal Schaubroeck’s Network-as-a-Service solution – a true match made in heaven!

The pandemic has shown us all how important it is to be able to connect with each other – that is true especially for the hospital patients or care center residents. A reliable and secure network definitely comes in handy, but with the rapid progress and a new technological breakthrough around every corner, one can start to wonder:

is this a rabbit worth chasing?

Such question was definitely running through the heads of the IT department of Mol, a small municipality located in the Belgian province of Antwerp. This popular holiday resort, known for its intricate network of recreational lakes and woods, is a home to a certain social welfare and residential care center called ‘Ten Hove’.

An out of the box solution

The switches at Ten Hove have become outdated as they neared their end-of-life, so the municipality’s IT team was looking for a smart way to renew the network. In the past, the center’s infrastructure was only used to scale up whenever the need arose, without overlooking the network as a whole. But why invest in costly IT infrastructure when you can simply... use it like a service?

“Since our IT department is not very large, we looked for a network solution that could unburden us as much as possible. We asked the suppliers for some ‘out of the box’ thinking. Cipal Schaubroeck came up with a ciPort Network as a Service solution: operating the switches via a fixed monthly cost, combined with carefree managed service including network management and monitoring”, says Dirk Vanleuven, ICT project leader of the municipality of Mol.

“Seeing that the investment could be spread over several years, combined with the good service we have come to expect from Cipal Schaubroeck in our many years of cooperation, we decided to work with them for this project. An additional decisive factor is that our IT department would get access to the management module, so that we also could do the monitoring”, he adds.

Investing in growth, not the IT infrastructure

In the past, Cipal Schaubroeck provided Ten Hove center with the day-to-day IT management by a system administrator. That didn’t change very much with the modernization project, but with the new solution in place, the IT department’s work is now much less hands-on so that the team can focus more on their own projects.

The big difference, of course, is that the IT budget will not be taking a huge blow. Switches remain the property of Cipal Schaubroeck, the municipality of Mol will be able to use them and receive support and maintenance in the form of a convenient and predictable monthly subscription.

Recent years have seen some major evolution in the Extreme Networks switching portfolio. As a leader in fabric networking, Extreme offers a flexible portfolio of Ethernet and IP fabric solutions, making it easier to manage and monitor everything. Additionally, the systems are modular, so that the center’s IT infrastructure can grow over time.

And with the introduction of Universal Platforms, local governments like Mol can easily avoid technology lock in and extend the life of their switches by simply changing the software while reusing the existing hardware.

“Everything went as planned and agreed, which I find very important. Up until today, we have not encountered any problems, so we have not yet fully tested the SLA. Regardless, Cipal Schaubroeck has certainly exceeded our expectations with the Network-as-a-Service solution and we are looking forward to working together in the future”, Dirk Vanleuven sums up.

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