IT Pain Points
This school district exemplifies the journey of many institutional organizations to modernize their business communications infrastructure. The school district enrolls more than 6,000 students in kindergarten through 12th grade and employs a staff of 700 people across 10 buildings, so it is easy to see why the half-dozen people in the IT team were spread so thin. The phone system operated by reassigning users to their extension. In addition, technical staff had to populate 15 different fields every time there was a staff move. These factors resulted in an outdated, error-prone process.
A Comprehensive Solution
The drive to upgrade was focused on automating repetitive tasks. As is true of so many school districts, there were no major automation or cost-cutting initiatives in place. The Assistant Director of Technology for the school district initiated the project by securing funding for a system upgrade. He began with an online search for “automating UCS” and “UCS management utility,” among other terms. He found only two or three vendors and requested demos and quotes from all of them. He then made his decision to go with Kurmi Software based on the strengths of our solution, which improves security and reduces risk.
With Kurmi, the school district was able to reduce provisioning time from 30 minutes down to a few seconds per user. Implementing the system took just one week. The school district uses Microsoft Active Directory, Cisco UCS, and Jabber. Feedback from the three-person technical staff is that the software’s stability and efficiency makes their jobs easier. Its user-centric interface lets them delegate repetitive provisioning tasks to users. These users welcome the autonomy, and IT team members are freed up to complete other more important projects. This streamlined process is a win for everyone involved.
Key Features Utilized
Kurmi is multi-vendor and hybrid by nature. It provides a central control point for managing all your Unified Communications apps in a hybrid and multi-vendor environment. This means there’s no need to search through multiple screens to find the devices and services associated with a user, nor are multiple templates required to make changes. And one-click tiles enable easy updates to the user’s profile. Our single platform reduces operating costs.
Nemertes found that businesses of 2,500-10,000 employees require an average of 3.9 FTEs to manage their Unified Communications and Collaboration infrastructure. This situation is no longer tolerable – or necessary – in the information age. UC Management can take the complexity out of operations!
