"The project will see BT, Cisco, and the University's IT Consultancy partner, PTS Consulting, deliver approximately 20,000 IP telephony handsets to the University over the next 18 months, replacing the existing system.
The University's investment will modernise the student experience, enabling students to collaborate in new and more innovative ways through the deployment of a converged voice, video and data network. Sharing information more easily will improve the quality of education and research, with students and academics using instant messaging, voice emails, streaming video and much more to share ideas in real time, from anywhere in the world."
This seems to be true convergence of communications and IT.
2 comments:
A colleague mentioned to me that there is an interesting perspective on the Cambridge development in the Register. See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/08/cambridge_uni_voip/
Yes, the press release is interesting. Perhaps more marketing speak but then that is what a press release generally does! Although Oxford has been doing IPT for about seven years on two sites and have a good working knowledge of the issues around convergence in a collegiate university. I think our friends at Cambridge have a lot of hardwork ahead of them. From our knowledge and testing it seems that CLI is the killer application that most people want now. I think the benefits, or not, of IM in a distributed architecture such as Oxford remain borderline for the moment as we need the backend systems to support it. We need to keep an active watching brief, not just on Cambridge but our US colleagues who are much further down the road. From our research the constant patching of switches needed in a data network does adversely affect the voice service.
Very good that we are both going in the same direction with the same technology but deploying it differently.
Post a Comment