Relationships Australia WA is a not-for-profit which provides counselling for persons who have experienced domestic violence and family disputes. Relationships Australia WA also has a strong presence in the Aboriginal community, working with Indigenous communities across a range of issues.

Western Australia is the largest state in Australia by a long way (roughly three and half times the size of Texas) and is also the least densely populated state in Australia. In fact, its capital, Perth, is the most isolated capital city in the world. It is due to this tyranny of distance that Relationships Australia WA has plans to roll out collaboration technology such as IP phones and videoconferencing in order to improve the levels of collaboration between its 35 geographically diverse offices.

Presenting at the recent Cisco Live conference in Melbourne, CIO for Relationships Australia WA, Martha Rousselet, told how the strains on its legacy IT infrastructure would be too great to implement a solution to adequately cover such distances. This is why the not-for-profit has rolled out Cisco UCS as a precursor to a full collaboration implementation. The Cisco UCS has been a great enabler, reducing data centre outages to zero, reducing network administrative overheads from 80% to 20% and reducing the number of physical servers by 220.

This will provide Relationships Australia WA with effective videoconferencing and lower ongoing costs of ICT support. In addition, the organisation will be able generate greater innovation through speedier connectivity between head and branch offices and, above all, provide greater reliability to the end user.

As a not-for-profit, Relationships Australia WA relies primarily on public money and so both the cost and time savings courtesy of the roll-out of Cisco equipment is truly invaluable.