CallTower and Cisco Deliver Hosted Unified Communications Solution for California

FOSTER CITY, CA--(Marketwire - 06/29/10) - CallTower, the market-leading provider of Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), today announced that Santa Clara Unified School District (SCUSD) successfully secured E-Rate funds to procure CallTower's innovative and comprehensive unified communications solution that is built largely on Microsoft and Cisco technologies. The deployment will allow the school district to leverage the best-of-breed solution to maximize the student, faculty and administrative benefits that will result from the next generation communication environment while allowing the district to cut expenses.

The school district

The school district was looking for a better way to connect teachers and administrators to students and parents as well as enable distance learning; however, like many budget-challenged schools, it lacked the financial resources to make it a reality, said Bob Barnes, executive vice president of sales, marketing and business development, CallTower. The district had a clear vision for an all IP communications model that would enable the entire school system to communicate more quickly, accurately and effectively. Together with Microsoft and Cisco we were able to take an innovative approach to packaging a program that would deliver all the benefits of unified communications with full E-Rate funding.

The federal E-Rate program's goals are to provide discounted telecommunications, Internet access and internal connections to eligible schools and libraries, providing them with affordable access to modern telecommunications and information services.

The service connects SCUSD's 24 schools with advanced IP phones and equipment from Cisco and software from Microsoft. As a result, the district's teachers, students, parents and administrators now have a much more effective means of communication. In addition, the solution allows the district to enable distance learning with video, extend its applications to mobile devices, and much more.

The country that

There are so many school districts across the country that would greatly benefit from this technology but face a roadblock when trying to obtain the funding, said Barnes. In this case we partnered with Cisco and Microsoft and tapped the E-Rate program to come up with an affordable solution that will make the unified communications vision a reality. We hope to provide similar services for others to further the advancement of unified communications in education, continued Barnes.