Recently, Education Networks of America (ENA), a Tennessee-based ISP, decided to venture into the hosted PBX space, looking to provide advanced telephony services to schools systems with aging legacy PBXs, or those simply looking to deploy a feature-rich IP-based solution that would also generate considerable cost savings. Upon review the solutions available to embark on this venture, ENA chose to deploy Sylantro Systems’ (News - Alert) Synergy platform to enable its hosted VoIP service — part of its ENA Connect hosted PBX (News - Alert) offering.

 

“ENA made a business decision to move into the hosted PBX space and did an analysis of what pieces and parts it would need, and really liked Sylantro for a variety of reasons,” explained Michael McKerley, director of research and development, ENA. “The Sylantro environment — the call control server, the administrative servers, the Web applications servers, etc — all run on Linux, which was important. Also, the robustness of features allows us to distinguish ourselves from other hosted PBX providers, while still allowing us to cater specifically to the needs of the education market.”

 

ENA saw the hosted VoIP space as an ideal solution for the education space several reasons. It is no secret that school districts typically are more severely impacted by fiscal and human resource constraints than most businesses given budget cuts and other politically motivated actions. This typically precludes them from adopting an on-premises IP PBX solution, and even in cases where it is feasible, school systems deploy on a small scale, hoping to expand in the future. But even this is not always practical. 

 

As McKerley explained, a large Tennessee school system that had deployed an on-premises solution, put out a second RFP a year later to expand its implementation, simply because it lacked the expertise to handle it in-house. Hosted solutions, like ENA Connect, eliminate the difficulties associated with expansion, as they are easily scalable simply by adding extensions and having the provider configure them for the system.

 

For instance, another Tennessee school district, Maury County, is currently implementing ENA Connect in five schools for approximately 300 extensions. If these five are successful, it plans to expand the solution to all 25 of its facilities, which would be in excess of 1,000 extensions, on ENA Connect’s unified hosted PBX environment. The ability to easily and cost effectively scale to demand “has been extremely important to enterprises across the spectrum, but particularly the education space because of the severity of CAPEX and resource restraints in the education space.”

 

Another benefit to schools is that, today they tend to view themselves as a call center establishment for the entire community. When events occur — storms, power outages, cancellations, postponements, etc. — a hosted solution makes it easy to disseminate that information either my recorded message or by faculty and staff being accessible at any location thanks to a hosted unified system. In order to stay in touch, all they need is IP connectivity wherever they are. McKerley added that it invites greater communication and collaboration between students, parents, and faculty because each teach can have a unique phone extension and mailbox — as opposed to a central secretary leaving a pink message slip in a physical mailbox. Teachers can then return calls from anywhere without having to divulge their location or phone number, because they can log into the hosted environment and place the calls via IP.

 

Other features that are particularly important to school systems include time of day/day of week routing capabilities, which are particularly convenient for faculty that move between classrooms and administrators that move between facilities during the course of the day. This same capability ties into the 911 capabilities enabled by Sylantro’s Synergy platform. Because ENA is the sole provider of IP services in most cases, it is aware of each IP address from which calls are placed, and with the Sylantro’s Tenant Location Record, ENA is able to easily identify and convey to the PSAP the callback and address information based on the IP address. 

 

Especially in a school environment, the ability to effectively handle emergency situations — in the unfortunate case they might occur — is of utmost importance. In fact, ENA says with Sylantro’s support, it is able to alleviate the 911 related concerns that often scare people away from VoIP services.

 

As ENA looked to build its hosted solution, McKerley says it was impressed by Sylantro because it does not pretend to be an all-in-one solution.

 

“We liked the kind of Sylantro ecosystem model,” he explained. “We could choose which unified messaging solution, and which SBC, and which media server we wanted to use, and how we would architect the whole solution. We know that meant there would be more integration, but that’s essentially what we do, so we were not put off by that. That’s really part of our expertise.”

 

It takes users some time to become accustomed to the new hosted VoIP solution, but once they learn the system, they quickly discover new and innovative ways they can use the system to create new efficiencies in their daily processes. They inevitably ask for new features as time passes, some of which ENA already has in the pipeline, and still others it has not considered. McKerley added that is another key strength of the Sylantro platform: It enables a vast array of features, many of which ENA has yet to package or brand, but it means there is tremendous potential going forward and a host of new features and services that schools can expect in the future.

 

Frank Salm, vice president of marketing at Sylantro added that, while the Synergy platform is not designed specifically for the education space, the richness of its features made it easy for ENA to integrate into and education-specific solution.

 

“For pure telephony service, the ability to adapt is one of our strengths,” he said, “and the Web services component, and being able to adapt beyond the basic telephony, is very powerful. There are many vendors building hosted Internet services, but they have no telephony tie-in at all, and the ability to marry those two components is something we see as a strength.”

 

Indeed, the applications that are enabled through the ability to integrate voice and Web are nearly endless, and present an entirely new value proposition for the hosted space, above and beyond the pure cost savings associated with VoIP. Distance learning, says McKerley, is something that many schools have been experimenting with, but the solutions have been bulky, inefficient, and costly. The ability, for instance, to deliver a distance learning environment using an inexpensive Webcam and laptop, is a different proposition altogether.

 

“We’ve appreciated Sylantro’s collaborative approach and broad knowledge of the IP convergence marketplace. Sylantro Synergy has greatly helped ENA distinguish its solution.”

 

Indeed, with both current solution and the features to be added, ENA and Sylantro have created a converged communications solution that allows school systems to save on monthly costs as well as initial CAPEX, while receiving a feature rich converged IP service offering. ENA expects to have completed more than 30 roll-outs by the end of the month.

 

“ENA’s Connect VoIP Service is a great example of how organizations large and small can benefit from hosted VoIP. Hosted voice enables full PBX features without the cost and management typically associated with on-site premise equipment, and is a valuable solution for a wide range of institutions, including small and medium businesses and various vertical markets, such as schools, libraries and government agencies,” said John Trobough, senior vice president of Solutions, Sylantro Systems.