“At a time when the trust was under huge pressure to make significant cost-savings without compromising patient care, Cloud21’s software licensing audit and the subsequent implementation of their recommendations greatly reduced licensing costs with zero negative impact to the trust or our patients. The project achieved the stated objective within the required timescale, and the level of support and communication from the Cloud21 team was excellent throughout.”  IT Manager

Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust is a large acute hospital trust in the South East of England, providing a full range of general hospital services and some areas of specialist complex care to around 560,000 people in the south of West Kent and the north of East Sussex. It operates from two main clinical sites in Maidstone Hospital and Tunbridge Wells Hospital, and employs a team of over 5,000 full and part time staff. 

At the time of the project, the trust was experiencing serious financial pressures, leading to an increased emphasis on all departments to develop ways to generate cost-savings. As part of this cost-saving drive, Cloud21 was asked to complete a range of technical audits to identify potential areas for reducing expenditure without compromising patient care or user experience. 

The technical audits completed ascertained that the trust relied heavily on Microsoft services, especially SQL, which were licensed as part of a Server Cloud Enrolment Agreement (SCE). Using our extensive licensing experience and understanding of the Trust’s physical and virtual servers, we undertook a full review of the SCE and benchmarked this against the current SQL infrastructure. 

A digital platform was designed, procured and implemented which enabled the trust to deliver their long-term vision and strategy for the continual enhancement of patient care, specifically: 

  • The changes to the licensing agreement resulted in significant cost-savings to the trust 
  • We assisted the trust in negotiating a new contract with Microsoft to secure a more efficient and cost-effective way for the trust to licence its SQL estate, taking into account all active and pipeline projects to ensure that the trust had sufficient coverage.