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Focus
Peer Pressure
9/19/2005
When one Georgia school opted for VoIP, the new telecom initiative sparked precedent for a whole university system.
IT’S NOT JUST POLITICIANS who promise their constituents “sweeping change.” Bill Gruszka, the CIO at Southern Polytechnic State University (GA), recently instituted a “sweeping change” trend of his own—voice over IP (VoIP). In fact, Gruszka’s gutsy switch to VoIP has laid the groundwork for change throughout his school’s parent organization, the University System of Georgia (USG), inspiring at least five other institutions in the system to switch, as well. And according to insiders, the real changes have only just begun. “In switching to VoIP, we started something incredible,” Gruszka readily admits. “I can’t believe it took us so long, and looking ahead, the possibilities are just wild.”
The seeds of the switchover to VoIP actually sprouted sometime late in 2002, when Gruszka had his ‘eureka’ moment. After spending upwards of $400,000 annually on Centrex-based voice service from the Georgia Technology Authority, Gruszka decided there had to be a better way to tackle telecom, and set out to find it. He wrote up a request for proposals (RFP), and received offers from a variety of vendors, including Cisco Systems (www.cisco.com), Avaya (www.avaya.com), 3Com (www.3com.com), and others. In the end, however, Gruszka chose a system from ShoreTel (www.shoretel.com), mostly because when he tried it, the system was easy to use.
Sell the Concept; Spread the Word
The implementation, a hybrid model that incorporated both analog and digital technologies, took 18 months to complete. As part of the effort, ShoreTel technicians configured the campus so that all faculty and staff members would switch to VoIP phones, while students in on-campus dorm rooms could choose between VoIP phones that connected through Ethernet jacks, or analog phones that ran over VoIP behind the scenes. Both solutions yielded the same result: more reliable service across the board.
“With VoIP, we determine when to do adds, moves, and changes, and we’re paying much less for them than we would have with Centrex,” he says, noting that longdistance savings, long reputed to be the biggest benefit of VoIP, was only a minor factor in the switch. “VoIP really has made everything easier around here.” Everything got so easy, in fact, that perhaps the only challenge with the new system at Southern Polytechnic was getting permission to set it up. Because the new technology diverged so significantly from the older technology, Gruszka had to get permission from Randall Thursby, vice chancellor for Information and Instructional Technology (the USG technology coordinator), to make the switch. Thursby was skeptical at first, but eventually came around with great interest. As it turned out, Thursby didn’t only grant Gruszka permission; he took the opportunity to endorse VoIP as a viable alternative to Centrex-based telecommunications, and then he spread the word to other schools in the University System of Georgia, urging them to embrace the technology, too.
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