AdEPT Technology : The TUC partners with AdEPT and chooses Nebula to improve its network flexibility and resilience

30th September 2021

AdEPT Nebula demonstrates its success as the TUC joins 635 customers on the network

One of the largest trade union federations in the UK has appointed AdEPT Technology Group to transform its IT.

The Trades Union Congress (TUC) has partnered with AdEPT to bring more flexibility and resilience to its IT, with AdEPT Nebula at the heart of this transformation.

It means that TUC staff will benefit from technology that is more flexible across locations and for new offices, more resilient to change, and more competitively priced. This, in turn, supports the TUC in its mission to improve working lives for everyone, through representing and campaigning for 48 member unions and 5.5 million working people.

For AdEPT, the new partnership reflects the growing demand for its Nebula service, having been launched in 2018 and attracting 635 customers to date.

It incorporates a number of distinct elements - all brought together to meet an organisation's specific needs. This means every Nebula project is unique -and it is this quality that impressed TUC CIO Simon Parry.

He said: "Nebula for AdEPT was a unique selling point and a differentiator in enabling the TUC to address its business continuity objectives. It made the proposition from AdEPT extremely compelling."

Delivered on time and within budget, the project turned the unique needs of a unique organisation into one unique solution.

Before working with AdEPT, the TUC had applications running in a data centre and from on-site servers. As a result, it wanted to bring this together through a new infrastructure that combines antivirus, web filtering, firewall and data backup services. It also needed to integrate Microsoft 365 - including Teams and Teams telephony - which the TUC had already been trialling.

Additionally, all of this needed to be covered by a protective service for patching and updating the TUC's infrastructure - and done so in a way that works for the TUC's large user community.

It is unique needs such as these where Nebula comes to the fore, thanks to its convergence of IT, telecom and voice services in one environment. One analogy for this is a charm bracelet - Nebula has a core thread of network communications, to which a range of services can be 'hooked on' and connected, like charms. These include:

・Security services such as firewalls

・Hosted and virtualised software such as MIS, a school Management Information System - and Sage, for accounting

Hosted communications such as IP Office, a telephone system from our partner, Avaya - and Ericson LG, from our partner, Pragma.

It can also coexist with other applications, whether running from on-site servers or the public cloud, such as Microsoft 365. Similarly, through Equinix, it can connect to other public cloud services - including Azure, AWS and Google.

Additionally, Nebula reduces costs for customers, in a similar way to an insurance comparison site, by providing a range of competing options from AdEPT partners.

At the same time, AdEPT continually invests in Nebula to improve bandwidth, switching speed, computing power, memory and security, and to innovate new services.

For example, in FY21, the computing capacity within Nebula increased by 192 cores and 2TB RAM, with internet traffic crossing the network increasing threefold, reflecting the importance of Nebula to customers.

During this same period, AdEPT added new services and toolsets for cloud migration, as well as a hosted MIS and cloud-based voice service.

With further investment planned to bring more applications into Nebula, and a fully staffed 24/7 networks operations centre, the Group is focused on expanding Nebula's capabilities and improving its performance even further.

Nebulafalls under AdEPT's cloud-centric strategic services operations, which has seen revenues grow by 8.5 per cent to more than £25 million.