Networking/Innovators

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Networking/Innovators

10/20/2005

By Wendy Chretien

University of Kansas. But FIU also plans to virtualize education in the classroom through collaboration with other colleges and universities, allowing professors and students at multiple sites to work as though all in one classroom. CIO John McGowan anticipates the College of Business’ International Business Program will be among those to take advantage of this opportunity.

At the same time, FIU hasn’t left behind its local constituents. Partly through funding provided by the National Science Foundation (www.nsf.gov), the university provides outreach to greater-Miami-area high school science teachers and students who can work on collaborative real-time applications with university faculty.

Lessons learned. Enterprise Technology and Support Director Al Losada admits that all of this didn’t happen without some pain. Fortunately, University Technology Services (UTS) looked at the initiative not as a technology project, but as a university project. UTS involved the entire community in the planning, including recruiting advocates from various departments to interface with their users. This made the project a positive experience rather than an invasive one, say those involved.

The university also performs a return on investment (ROI) analysis for every new project under consideration, to ensure that total cost of ownership (TCO) is accounted for. That’s partly what drove the VoIP implementation, say McGowan and Losada. The cost of the initial campuswide VoIP system was recovered within about two years, due largely to the ability to replace Centrex lines (costing $26 per line per month) with the new system (about $5 per line per month). There were also some savings in consolidation of services among multiple campuses. The main campus now provides many functions remotely that previously required onsite equipment and/or personnel.

Planning and staffing. The planning group also spent considerable time thinking about what a converged network would mean, and therefore decided to meld its telephone, networking, and operations groups organizationally before it tackled the physical infrastructure. Losada notes, “We had to artificially create that environment at first, but it’s now a natural thing that the teams work together.” Virtual teams are assigned for new projects, including members from the video/multimedia group.

Outside consultants are occasionally used for specific tasks or projects, and FIU did hire a project manager especially for the VoIP implementation project. The university also plans to outsource an Oracle/PeopleSoft (www.oracle. com) project that is about to begin. However, like many colleges and universities, FIU makes extensive use of its own students’ brain power and know-how.

Innovation: Building a Campus/Vendor Partnership for Bandwidth and Resale

Innovator: University of Pennsylvania Interviewee: Michael Palladino, associate vice president of Networking and Telecommunications

System and services background. Like FIU, the University of Pennsylvania also hosts a GigaPOP known as MAGPI (Mid-Atlantic GigaPOP in Philadelphia for Internet2). By one means or another, nearly one-third of the K-12 school districts in Pennsylvania are connected to MAGPI, as are other higher ed institutions such as Princeton (NJ) and the University of Delaware.