Telecommunications >> VoIP is for Victory

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Telecommunications >> VoIP is for Victory

5/27/2005

By Matt Villano

www.sbc.com). After lengthy discussions about reducing the school’s monthly $25,000 bill, SBC issued its final offer: a 10-year deal for the same technology that the school had been using, with a 5 percent price increase across the board. Not surprisingly, Jeff Wolf, VP of Fiscal Affairs/Administration, rejected the contract outright, and began to pursue other options. After researching some of the benefits of VoIP, he approached Cisco for a second opinion. The vendor responded with its own wide-ranging solution: a VoIP server, and 1,700 VoIP phones that would allow the school to avoid the 5 percent increase, and set up new features and revenue streams, to boot. For the very same $25,000 per month, the school leased Cisco equipment and signed up for the vendor’s Unified Messaging Service, which enables features such as call forwarding, and a new voice recognition technology through which students and faculty members can read and respond to e-mail via voicemail. And because the new Cisco system is plugged into the school’s data network, users can access phone directories from the LCD screens of their Cisco 7960 Series telephones, eliminating the need for paper-based phonebooks all together.

“VoIP has changed just about everything about the way our people communicate,” says Wolf, who adds that while students previously received new phone numbers every year, they now are assigned one telephone number when they enroll and they keep it until graduation. “It’s really been wonderful to watch,” he adds.

Yet, all of the new features pale in comparison to the crowning benefit of the newsystem: the opportunity for additional revenue streams based on digital advertisements that appear on telephone display screens periodically throughout the day. Thanks to the marketing efforts of Halo Branded Solutions (www.halo.com), the university can now sell ads to local businesses such as pizza parlors, car repair shops, and more. Businesses can purchase advertisements to run on the phones daily, and included in their advertising fee is the option to run special promotions via programmable buttons on the VoIP phones: For instance, a button can instantly connect students to their favorite pizzeria, to snag the $10 pizza special.

Currently, the school is ironing out the specifics of its advertising program. But when the program gets off the ground, says Wolf, the school will run about three ads per day, fetching the university an extra $18,000 each year. Down the road, if the school opts to expand this effort, Wolf estimates that the program could bring in two to three times that amount. One of the school’s biggest concerns about the advertising program is to make sure the technology d'esn’t inundate students with marketing messages. With this in mind, Wolf says that whenever the school chooses to launch the ads, he will monitor the effort closely, and conduct frequent surveys to track usage and make certain that the information is something students want.

At the University of Evansville, technologists have turned to VoIP not just to save money, but to make it via digital advertisements appearing on campus telephone screens daily.