New York City Schools Sign $43 Million UC Deal
The New York City Department of Education has signed a five-year, $43 million agreement to overhaul voice communications at 300 of its schools.
The massive department, which runs 1,700 schools serving 1.1 million students, signed on with Mitel, which will become the exclusive unified communications provider for those schools, according to information released this week by the company. The contract is an expansion of an existing deal and will place Mitel in about 700 New York schools, the company reported Tuesday.
Mark Spencer, senior director of telecom services for NYCDOE, said in a prepared statement that the overhaul will help NYC schools take advantage of new technologies to enhance operations. "Installing the Mitel solution for these 300 schools means we will be equipped to take advantage of IP applications in the future that enhance the safety and security of our schools and help them run more efficiently," he said.
Deployments at the schools will be built around Mitel's "Freedom" unified communications architecture, which is designed to work across various platforms to deliver IP-based communications services on "any LAN/WAN infrastructure." Using Mitel Communications Director, the architecture delivers voice, conferencing, and various other collaboration and communication applications on a range of devices. It also supports virtualization and can be deployed in VMware environments.
Further information about the technology to be used in the deployments can be found here.