Digital transformation
Anglo American case study
Meeting geographical challenges with collaboration, cost savings and innovation.
January 09, 2024
2 minutes
Digital transformation
Anglo American case study
Meeting geographical challenges with collaboration, cost savings and innovation.
January 09, 2024
2 minutes
For businesses working in the remotest parts of the globe, there are some pretty serious connectivtiy challenges and collaboration costs.
BT replaced multiple service providers with a single IP Connect global infrastructure, introducing tools like One Voice for local-rate calls.
Anglo American has lower costs and a fast network to increase automation, improve productivity and drive collaboration across businesses.
When Anglo American increased its shares in De Beers to 85%, it decided it was time to make sure the management and governance systems of the two companies matched up. As part of this process, Craig Charlton, De Beers’ newly-appointed CIO, came up with an IT strategy that put service and value at the top of the agenda across the whole group of companies.
Evaluating Anglo American’s different service partnerships was crucial to this. And that included its global managed network services contract with us. As its original architect, no one was better qualified than Craig to see the value in that deal.
The challenge
From the smartphone in your pocket to the railway that takes you to work, mining products are everywhere in today’s world. But their sources are spread around the planet. And they’re usually not easy to get to. That’s a problem for the firms that find and extract them.
Anglo American is one of those companies. In fact, it’s one of the world’s largest.
David Heppenstall, Chief Information Technology Officer and Head of Global Infrastructure, explains: “We work in the remotest corners of the globe, like 3,500 metres up in the Chilean Andes or hard to reach parts of Africa. It means we face connectivity challenges seldom found in other industries.”
We work in the remotest corners of the globe. It means we face connectivity challenges seldom found in other industries.
The solution
We made a global managed services deal with Anglo American. This originally swept away a large number of different service providers to create a single IP Connect global infrastructure.
An end-to-end IP Connect global infrastructure comes with a big plus: it’s easy to add collaborative tools.
For starters, it has replaced hundreds of legacy private branch exchange networks (private telephone networks, or PBXs) with our One Enterprise solution. This uses Cisco Unified Communications Manager (UCM) technology. UCM hubs serve over 20,000 users in each of the company’s four regions, with full eight-digit desk-to-desk dialing throughout the world.
Anglo American uses managed One Collaborate video conferencing as another collaborative tool, which runs over the IP Connect global infrastructure.
Meanwhile, One Voice makes sure that (where regulations permit) we carry international fixed and mobile calls over our network, so they’re only charged as local calls.
We’re also supporting Anglo American’s move to cloud services. However, with most of their operations happening in the southern hemisphere – and apps like Microsoft Office 365, Box and Jive hosted in the northern hemisphere – latency issues could slow things down.
To tackle the issue, we designed and launched a secure internet gateway in our Croydon data centre, negotiating peering arrangements with Microsoft, Amazon and more.
The result
“[IP Connect global infrastructure] assures us of a fast and resilient network anywhere to increase asset automation, improve productivity and drive collaboration across and between our businesses,” says David.
Thanks to One Voice, Anglo American now sees a big reduction in its annual call charges.
And as Anglo American cloud traffic travels over our IP Connect global infrastructure, it’s so much faster.
Not only is it sped up over long distances by CoS technology, but when it arrives at Croydon, it’s a short hop to the app provider through our lightning-fast Internet Connect service.
Globally, over 160 video conferencing devices are in use. Six Cisco TelePresence suites (two in London, two in Johannesburg and one each in Rio de Janeiro and Santiago) are in near-constant use and 99% of users say they’re satisfied with them.
IP Connect’s class of service functionality (or CoS – the two-way symmetrical bandwidth available to connect a site with a customer’s virtual private network) helps that satisfaction score by speeding the video conferencing traffic, prioritising it over less time-sensitive data.