Politie Antwerpen is biggest local police department in Belgium. Every day, they coordinate their 3000+ personnel to execute necessary police operations to keep the city of Antwerp safe.
Stijn Haemhouts, Deputy Director of IT for the Politie Antwerpen, shared how IR allowed them to gain complete visibility and helped solve persistent problems in their environment.
The Problem
Politie Antwerpen wanted to implement a new digital workplace strategy, with the goal to enable every employee to work at any time, from any place, anywhere they had to.
With their technology partner, they deployed Skype for Business to meet their digital communication and collaboration needs. But due to complexity in their infrastructure, it was not a smooth transition.
Their requirement to deploy Skype for Business agents across multiple networks and domains, while navigating firewalls and other security measures, lead to complex issues that they were unable to resolve.
The Solution and Benefits
In 2018, Politie Antwerpen changed their technology partner and became an IR customer, leveraging the Skype for Business and SIP trunking solutions to enhance their communications ecosystem and enable their digital workforce.
Deep, end-to-end visibility across networks, domains, SBCs, endpoints and other elements of their UC environment, helped Politie Antwerpen solve a number of persistent, complex problems that were impacting user experience.
“One of the key things that made IR’s solutions very useful is that you can look within the traffic,” said Stijn. “Before, you could see Person X calling Person Y, and you could see there was a successful connection, but they couldn’t hear each other, and we couldn’t determine why.”
With IR’s solutions, they were able to drill down into the cause of the issue, take action to resolve the problem and prevent it from happening again.
“Once we changed our technology partner and started using IR’s solutions, problems we had been having for 8 to 12 months were solved in less than 3 weeks.”
Comprehensive visibility and deep troubleshooting across their complex environment have enabled Politie Antwerpen to solve problems faster, resulting in a better experience for their users and the successful execution of their digital workplace strategy.
Stijn said IR’s solutions are “an added value, even more now with the new way we’re living and working. I think it’s of added value for every environment using Skype for Business and other platforms like that.”
Stijn Haemhouts
Deputy Director of IT, Politie Antwerpen
