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Investing in UC for Education

Most college and university IT departments have seen a total depletion of revenue from traditional student land line services.

IT, as a revenue-generator for college has become insignificant. Migration from TDM and VoIP solutions (Cisco and Avaya), and early adoption of education groupware services (Google and Microsoft) have become strategic tools for offsetting budget deficits driven by cuts and the move to student wireless services.

“Current data and voice network funding models, developed in FY2000 (i.e., pay-per-jack models) are now outdated based on the current high and anticipated pervasive use of wireless on campus. The findings suggest that a campus-wide committee be formed to study and adopt a new model. The committee should consider various solutions such as a usage/utility model or a “common good” solution to provide sustained funding for the voice/data network. —CU Boulder Voice & Data Network Strategic Plan, 2006

Today, most IT departments are operating on a minimal budget. While IT professionals in this vertical industry continue to review and assess the value of next-generation UC&C solutions, the business case for funding these applications are lacking. Consequently, the focus for this group has shifted to cutting costs, rather than being communication visionaries or enablers within the campus. More so, IT projects and their associated budgetary allocations have been reduced to demanding generated requests funded by specific departments, or budget allocations mandated by the the replacement of failed systems and/or end-of-life and support conditions.

While generating revenue will be the driving motivation for moving to UC—colleges and universities will also realize the cost-saving opportunities as they leverage Esnatech’s UC investment to flatten and consolidate multiple applications into a single, fault-tolerant and energy-efficient platform.

"Google Apps for Education is catching on like wildfire. When you want to migrate your voicemail system to the cloud, look at Esna Technologies.” —Keith Bockwoldt, Technical Systems and Support, Township High School District 214

Potential Revenue Generating Applications:

Leveraging the move to Google™ Apps

Fueled by the lower cost of providing groupware services—faculty and staff are rapidly moving to Google. Integrating students with the infrastructure to access a user’s location and rich presence offers added value. Utilizing Esnatech UC can extend rich presence with on/off hook status to the mobile device, thus riding the wireless movement and extending the voice platform footprint outside the traditional VoIP or land line environment. Students can buy access to information regarding the availability of their professors, counselors, etc., improving their access to services and their overall higher educational experience.

Mass Notification (for more than just emergencies)

We should all know the benefits to be derived from the implementation of an emergency notification system. While Esna UC can definitely provide for such global communication, emergency notification is just one aspect of Mass Notification.

Within each major university there are hundreds of departments and social clubs, fraternities, sororities and communities each with their own communication needs. Whether it is a need to speed-up communications, organize events or fund-raising campaigns, these entities are extremely viable targets for the resale of voice services around Mass Notification—a fully-tenanted, multimedia solution with voice, fax, email, text and SMS capabilities. As such services can be sold based on individual requirements, they are funded by the groups or departments needing these valuable services.

WeLinK Meet Me Conferencing

As a subset of this offer, Meet Me Conferencing can be added to Mass Notification or provided as a stand alone offer and can be resold to clubs, students, organizations, etc., as a means of bringing together groups of individuals either spontaneously or by a scheduled meeting. In doing so, Esnatech UC extends the reach of these organizations to address the concerns of a mobile workforce or social enterprise.

Cost-Cutting Applications:

Reduction in Staff with UC Apps:

Esnatech UC can enable colleges and universities to create and enjoy new revenue streams from the resale of services. However, moving to UC also means saving money by deploying cost-cutting solutions like Speech Attendants or IVR applications, meaning that operator or department staff that require call routing or provide routine verbal information to callers can be offset by automation.

It is also important to consider that colleges and universities are businesses just like any other. While they are a unique vertical market, they also have department requirements across the educational vertical that include HR, operations, sales, marketing and security. Not only does Esnatech provide a host of pre-packaged UC apps that can be leveraged, but with the addition of our open API and IVR SDK, custom apps can be developed and readily deployed to cut costs and meet the needs of these users.

Green Technology:

As previously mentioned, colleges and universities may have multiple voice, data and imaging/document management applications already in place, some of these include Speech Attendant, IVR, and Fax, etc. With Esnatech UC, you not only have an opportunity to reduce operating costs by deploying valuable speech and IVR solutions, but also the ability to reduce your carbon footprint and the power-savings connected with the operation of these solutions. You can take advantage of the lower cost of maintaining multiple servers and support contracts by combining these applications into one scalable, fault-tolerant platform.

Other Considerations:

Interoperability and Low Cost of Entry:

It is important to note that Esnatech UC is a SIP-based, software only solution that is backward/forward compatible with legacy and next-generation voice, data or groupware platforms from virtually any manufacturer. As such, a campus can begin to deploy unified communications immediately without the need for costly rip and replace strategies employed by Microsoft, Cisco and others.

Esnatech UC is NOT an appliance, and is OS agnostic. It can operate on your server standards and can be managed like any other node on your network. Smart device friendly, it requires no special clients to be loaded or supported.

Esnatech UC is not only voice, data and groupware agnostic, but can also be deployed in a mixed platform environment to provide simultaneous integrations to multiple email, and third party core business applications like, Salesforce.com, Micrsoft CRM, Skype or PBX environment—all without the need for a coordinated dial plan.

Highly Fault-Tolerant Architecture:

Generally, the more you come to leverage and/or combine mission-critical systems into one platform, you must be concerned about system availability, force majeure (greater force out of your control) or other unforeseen service-affecting issues. Necessarily, Esnatech provides a unique high-availability UC architecture that virtually ensures 100% uptime, despite whether you are leveraging your virtual environment, or deploying physical servers in a single site, redundant and/or geo-redundant array.

Flexible Procurement Models:

Operating capital is at a premium. To remove roadblocks in the CAPX process, Esnatech offers a OPX per user, per year model that can be customized to meet the financial needs of any higher education organization. Utilizing Esnatech’s rich UC capabilities, coupled with our ability to tenant any app or community of interest, you can pay-as-you-go and isolate charges by department, organization or individual to streamline the deployment and billing process.

Our Experience:

Higher education organizations like U Mass Lowell, the University of Maine and others have leveraged our experience to make the most of UC either on-premise or in the Cloud, with minimal operational changes.

We provide installation, maintenance and ongoing software support, as well, we offer software design, application development and operational/administrative interface training and support for an additional fee. This enables you to leverage our team for web services, interface development, selling, developing and managing UC apps more efficiently and profitably.

Other education-based applications included in the Esnatech Unified Communications application server framework:

Grades Hotline:

Office-LinX has an add-on IVR interface and text-to-speech module, which can read text from any database and converts it to speech. For example, with a central database of students, Office-LinX will login by authenticating their passwords and voice their grades over the phone. This convenient system is helpful to parents who may not have Internet access to view information. The IVR interface can be used for unlimited applications.

Distribution List Maintenance:

Used to create customized phone lists for staff, faculty, alumni, PTA members and classes, etc. A daily absent list can also be created for schools with no student information systems.

Absent Caller and All School Caller

Use the Office-LinX system to telephone parents and report absences and/or call all parents. The built-in text-to-speech feature will play the student’s name, so parents will know what the call is regarding. The Office-LinX platform can be automated to phone parents and report absences with IVR.

Application Benefits:

Efficient and accurate way to listen to homework assignments by class
Allows parents to participate and motivate students for class assignments
Allows students who miss class due to illness to keep up with class assignments
Only items that have changed need to be updated
Parents have an easy and secure way to communicate with teacher, when they are not available
Teachers no longer need to have a dedicated telephone to communicate with parents and students
Office-LinX can make over 100 calls per/hr using one line. It can be configured with 2-64 lines unlike other systems that can only go up to 4 lines.
Office-LinX can be used for small and large schools. It can also be used in large districts as a centralized system.

With Esnatech UC you can turn you college or university’s IT and telecom department into a revenue-generating machine that provides value-added services to the campus community for a reasonable fee. This reoccurring revenue can provide a strong ROI and also become part of the solution to funding your departments ongoing strategic initiatives in the face of inevitable budget cuts and staff reductions.