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Beggars Group

Helping one of the largest independent record labels in the world to consolidate local networks, enhancing collaboration and saving money.

Originating from the London record shops of the same name, the Beggars Banquet record label was born in 1977.

Today, comprising five independently run labels, the Beggars Group is one of the largest independent groups of labels in the world, counting Adele albums, 19, 21 and 25 amongst its many global successes.

The group has three offices in London, two in the US (New York and Los Angeles), and a dedicated office in every major territory. Each of the five labels that comprise the group is run independently, but their collaboration is at the core of the business.

The Challenge

An external audit of Beggars Group identified the need to overhaul communication between its key offices. A legacy of fragmented local infrastructure meant that the quality, security and cost of communication within the group were far from optimal.

With Ideal having successfully designed and configured the wireless networking solution for the London and US offices, Beggars approached us to design and implement a single unified communications (UC) system across all its sites.

Once we got into the project we quickly realised that bringing data as well as voice communications together would provide significant benefits for collaboration, access and security.

The Solution

We evolved an overall IT roadmap for Beggars Group that would consolidate its existing, fragmented IT arrangements into a coherent global platform.

Leveraging the power of Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS), the innovative new infrastructure consolidated all of Beggars networking and
communication services into an improved data centre, placing the new facility in the middle of a WAN for global resilience.

The solution built on the group’s existing Cisco investment, extended a single voice and video platform to all of its offices, enabling immersive video conferencing between core sites, optimising availability, and intelligently maximising cost savings.

The final piece of the jigsaw was to provide 24/7/365 global managed service support to ensure reliable performance at all times.

The Result

The Ideal solution:

  • Enables easy and consistent access between all sites in the group and among colleagues, regardless of their physical location
  • Reduced call costs by over 85% in its first year
  • Demonstrates Ideal’s ability to translate business objectives into IT solutions that deliver real impact for customers

Besides the immediate voice cost savings, this project demonstrated the value of having a single standardised proven platform to enable global voice and data collaboration – all maintained and supported via Ideal’s secure managed service.