VoIP saving college big bucks

Colleges and universities are adopting Internet telephony as the way to improve communications and save money, reports News.com.

Arthur Gloster recently took over as CIO of Bryant University and has transformed the college's antiquainted phone system into the second-most wired university in the U.S., according to the Princeton Review. The university converted to Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, equipment from Cisco Systems, including about 2,700 IP-based phones for its students and eliminated the expense of operating multiple voice and data networks. The system integrates technology so that material can be accessed from dorm rooms and classrooms. All operations, even the heating system, is operated from a single network.

"We looked at the money we were spending on long-distance phone service, and we decided we could be better spending that money to converge the data network and the voice network," Gloster says.

Cisco, the market leader in VoIP gear, has sold millions of phones as more and more companies convert to Internet telephony. Although less than 5 percent of the base of business phones used in the world, are based on VoIP, the technology may have reached a tipping point.

Companies are always on the look out for ways to cut costs and improve productivity, such as an application which incorporates corporate directories into the phone, so that anyone can look up names and dial them at the same time. Another app tracks workers' physical locations, along with the device they're using at any given time.

"Research shows that the average worker uses 6.4 different communications systems," says Lambert, whose own phone and device-packed office reveals him to be well above the average in that department. "We want to make it all more unified."