Georgetown College

Georgetown College is a liberal arts school located in central Kentucky, the heart of Bluegrass Country, amid rolling hills and thoroughbred horses. With a motto to “live, learn and believe,” the college encourages an innovative community of scholars and students. More than 1,350 students and 400 faculty and staff straddle two main campuses.

“We had conducted extensive research on voice over IP solutions, and saw how the flexibility of conducting moves, adds and changes to faculty extensions each semester would save time and money. We also needed a better way to unify how the college communicates. We conferred with colleagues, and were introduced to Unified Technologies, a ShoreTel reseller. That’s when we learned about ShoreTel.”

— Grover Hibberd, Associate VP of IT Services, Georgetown College.

Hibberd and the IT team at Georgetown College were keen on bringing the school’s communication systems into the 21st century using IP-based technology. The manufacturer of its ailing 17-year-old Rolm PBX system had announced end-of-life for the system and that no new parts would be available. Plus maintenance costs were mounting.

“If all we wanted was a dial tone, the existing system was fine. But our PBX equipment was almost the same age as our incoming freshman students. The college could greatly benefit from a more agile, feature-rich communications platform that moves us forward with respect to better productivity and efficiencies.”
— Grover Hibberd, Associate VP of IT Services, Georgetown College.

The college implemented a ShoreTel UC system, including ShoreTel Voice Switches, ShoreTel IP Phones, ShoreTel Director, and ShoreTel Call Manager. The solution including design, project management, implementation and support, was provided by Unified Technologies.Benefits include:

• The ShoreTel UC system was quick and easy to deploy, allowing the college to purchase, design, implement and test under extremely tight deadlines.
• ShoreTel’s brilliant simplicity means the college has reduced the time spent on moves, adds and changes and provisioning by 75 percent; and simplified procedures required for summer NFL training sessions.
• ShoreTel’s low total cost of ownership enabled the college to implement the system for approximately the same price as existing PBX maintenance and support costs, while gaining failover resiliency.

“We gained this state-of-the-art technology that’s simple to manage, for roughly the same price we were paying to maintain the old system. ShoreTel has given us so much more for our dollar. And we really like ShoreTel’s resiliency factor. If a switch goes down in the building, the ShoreTel system readily finds another switch to service the building. We didn’t have to pay extra for that, because failover is built into ShoreTel’s distributed architecture.”
— Grover Hibberd, Associate VP of IT Services, Georgetown College.