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Well I think all businesses including the business of higher education are
much more complex than they've ever been before and because of that and because we
need to have more voices in the room when we make the significant decisions that we
make technology allows us to do that. My name is George Latter, I'm the Vice
President for finance administrative services here for at Point Loma Nazarene
University.
The university was founded in 1902, meaning we're in our one 110th
year. It was originally in Pasadena, California and in 1973
it moved here to San Diego. We have approximately 2,400
undergraduate students located on this campus and about 1,300
graduate students who are located at regional centers in central and southern
California.
We knew that we needed to make a change in telephone system several years ago
because our old system was no longer being supported by the vendor.
We actually purchased a voice-over IP telephone system
from another vendor and realized before too long that the cost of
that in terms of the equipment and the maintenance of it was just going to be too
excessive for us.
We maintained a Cisco voice-over IP system for 20% of our users
for the past 5 years, and the problem became price in licensing. The cost
and maintenance was spiraling out of control.
My names is Corey Fling I'm the Director of Network Services and Telecommunications
at Point Loma Nazarene University.
When we were beginning to look for a new voice-over IP system we were looking for something
that was cost effective, that was distributed, and redundant
for our multiple sites, and
would allow for a virtual environment to maintain the system.
Virtualization was a key requirement for us; in our server environment were already
90% virtualized.
And so as we look at new applications adding into out environment, that's a key
consideration so we're not having to add hardware to maintain as we add new applications.
As we looked at all the vendors there's only one that met the requirements.
Cisco and Avaya were too complex or required command-line interfaces for
some of the more advanced features.
Or had too many hardware and system requirements.
ShoreTel really met out needs in several areas: total cost of ownership was less
compared to the other solutions, a simple
interface to manage
the entire environment, and it was a single environment to manage as opposed to the
other solutions where you're managing Windows and Linux environments and
patches. The simplicity in management for us has allowed me to use my existing telecom
staff that is used to the Nortel environment and pull them over to the ShoreTel
environment and easily maintain the system instead of having to have a systems engineer or
network engineer due the maintenance and upgrade on the system. In total we'll be saving
over half a million dollars with the ShoreTel system over the next 5
years.
The benefit ShoreTel brings as far as collaboration is we can utilize our
existing environment such as Microsoft Linc for instant messaging and integrate that
into the ShoreTel system.
Conference bridging, e-911,
and other enhancements are built straight into the system
instead of having to add hardware and other software.
The ability to maintain a system in a cost effective manner and with little
staff has been a huge help our university.