Metz Eurometropolis

Country: France
Industry: Government
Solution: Autonomous Network, WiFi Solutions, Cloud Communications, Business Continuity

Metz Eurometropolis is a French metropolis in the Moselle area in the Grand Est region. The Metz IT service is shared between the Eurometropole and the town hall. It serves 80 public administrative buildings.

The Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise solutions have provided us with simplicity, consistency, and robustness. Our agents now have access to a global solution that includes all the functionality they need to be effective on a daily basis. ALE’s support allows us to go even further thanks to the evolving service and the implementation of training for our teams.

Alain Crescimbeni, Head of Network and Telecom, IT Systems Department, Metz Eurometropolis

Challenges

Metz Eurometropolis wanted to modernise the existing metropolitan network infrastructure in order to:

Ensure critical services continuity
Enable new uses such as Wi-Fi connectivity or mobility for 3000 staff and visitors
Maintain communications continuity by enabling widespread remote working during and after the crisis
Make services available quickly for emergency facilities such as a vaccination centre
Securely link all users and connected objects in different buildings
Manage the complexity of the different sub-networks and equipment in terms of deployment, availability and security

Action

After the switch to optic fiber, the objective of the Metz Eurometropolies IT Systems Management team was to offer network and communications services to all public officers on a single infrastructure, meeting the criteria of reliability, security, and availability. This would form the basis for offering new services to citizens and simplifying the management of a constantly evolving network.

Today, many public services and approximately 200 job profiles benefit from network and communications services. Several critical services are hosted on the network and require continuous operation, such as the Municipal Police and the vaccination center. To ensure this continuity, our Business Partner NXO accompanies the IT team in strategic network upgrades.

Wi-Fi connectivity for administrative buildings users and support for over 4000 connected objects was the second step. Citizen wi-fi services in public buildings will follow shortly. To ensure adoption success, a digital inclusion project for citizens is being developed.

The network transformation also ensured a successful transition to remote work for the Eurometropolis public officers during the health crisis, when Rainbow was adopted by more than 500 public officers. To facilitate the transition, a transformation ALE coach accompanied the customer through a gradual adoption and our Business Partner Quonex Alsatel trained designated ambassadors with video tutorials.

The OmniVista NMS solution helps the IT team monitor the entire LAN and Wi-Fi network, as well as to back up and update the 190 switches, making reactive and proactive network management a lot easier.

The future: A more intelligent, autonomous and secure network will enable the Metz Eurometropolis to continue its transformation, to provide more security and new uses for public officers and citizens.

Results

Financial and strategic benefits

Investment protection: Future-proof wired and wireless network, foundation for digital citizen services or smart city projects
Seamless transition to remote work for a very large number of staff during and after the different health crisis waves

Enhanced user experience

New services, enhanced quality and interactions

Technical benefits

Improved IT efficiency as unified management allows devices on the LAN and WLAN to be configured at the same time
Simplified proactive and reactive network deployment and management through a single point of management and control
Improved overall network security