Peel District School Board Establishes Platform for Growth with Cisco Unified Communications

Peel District School Board Establishes Platform for Growth with Cisco Unified Communications

Cisco® Canada announced today that the Peel District School Board, one of Canada’s largest public school boards, is deploying Cisco Unified Communications. With this implementation, the school board is taking a key step toward providing better communications capabilities to its student body, parents and staff while creating a platform for future technological expansion and cost savings.

The Cisco Unified Communications system replaces the board’s private branch exchange (PBX) telephone network at its central office, located in Mississauga, Ontario. The Cisco Internet Protocol (IP)-based solution enables Peel to accomplish more than it could with its PBX, including integrating different applications and having the ability to converge voice, video and data traffic over a single network.

Just months after choosing Cisco Unified Communications, the new system was rolled out to all users in the Mississauga office, making Peel’s IP telephony network the largest among Ontario school boards. The school board’s decision to transition to Cisco Unified Communications was a strategic next step for the organization which has had a Cisco wide-area network (WAN) architecture in place for more than 10 years. Prior to implementing the new phone system and the Cisco Unified Contact Center, the PBX equipment would continually reach maximum capacity, causing parents and other callers to receive busy signals or to be placed on hold for extensive periods of time.

“On a snow day, for example, we would receive calls from parents concerned about whether school buses were running. We might get 10,000 calls coming in at the same time,” said Laura Williams, chief information officer for the Peel District School Board. “With Cisco Unified Contact Center, we’re able to put critical information, such as bus status, at the beginning of the welcome message. Not only is this more responsive, but our system can now process far more calls during peak calling periods.”

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