Southern Polytechnic State University (SPSU)

Southern Polytechnic State University (SPSU), founded in 1948, is a residential, co-educational member of the very progressive University System of Georgia and has earned an exceptional academic reputation. Located in the historic city of Marietta, just 20 minutes from downtown Atlanta, SPSU has approximately 4,000 students from 35 states and 82 countries.

“When we decided to go with VoIP, we looked at a lot of vendors, including ShoreTel, and our top priority was reliability. We also wanted to be able to phase the new system in easily, utilizing the existing analog phones.”
— Bill Gruszka, CIO, SPSU.

In late 2002, SPSU’s Centrex telephone system and the services provided by the Georgia Technology Authority were proving to be very costly. The service was also substandard and the phone system itself outdated, so SPSU began its search for a new solution. Upon further investigation, the university decided to implement an IP-based system in order to capitalize on the cost savings and ease-of-use features of the technology.

“SPSU is known as Georgia’s technology university — where we develop minds to serve the real world. ShoreTel fits perfectly into this mission. We won a Board of Regents Best Practices Award for Information Technology with this ShoreTel implementation."
— Bill Gruszka, CIO, SPSU.

SPSU chose ShoreTel for its reliability, seamless integration, lower total cost of ownership, and management simplicity. The system’s open, scalable architecture permitted deployment in stages, with 150 phones deployed during the first phase, eventually growing to 1,200 stations over the next 18 months. The integration schedule was defined by SPSU and is further evidence of the flexibility of the ShoreTel design. Thanks to the phased implementation, the university incurred no downtime and the changes were seamless. Benefits include:

• Enhanced productivity with ShoreTel Call Manager, which allows employees to manage voice communications from their PC desktop and make calls from local directories or from Microsoft^® Outlook^®.
• Improved response time to incoming calls in the Financial Aid, Admissions, Registrar’s, and Finance Offices.
• Yearly savings estimated at $202,000 per year includes operational costs, as moves, adds, and changes can be handled by non-technical staff.
• Advanced features allow SPSU to replace its auto-answering system with a switchboard staffed by live attendants, an option that had been cost-prohibitive in the past.

“The savings we realize every year with the ShoreTel system — which we estimate at $202,000 per year — are even more than the one-time implementation cost.” 

— Bill Gruszka, CIO, SPSU.