January 08, 2025
Community College Modernizes Communications by Moving Phones to the Cloud
Alexandria Technical & Community College transitions to Cisco Webex Calling with help from CDW’s higher education team.
Alexandria Technical & Community College can be found in the heart of lake country, in Alexandria, Minn. Its phone system, though, is a different story; for that, a visitor would have to look to the cloud.
The public institution, with nearly 4,000 students representing every county in the state, transitioned from its traditional on-premises phone system to Cisco Webex Calling in the summer of 2024. The cloud-based solution allows instructors and staff to make and receive calls from any internet-connected device, and because it’s part of the Webex Suite, it integrates seamlessly with Cisco’s videoconferencing and messaging tools.
The service had been on ATCC’s radar as far back as 2018, recalls Joni Leuthardt, voice administrator and an IT security specialist with the campus technology team. At the time, she decided that the school should keep the Cisco calling infrastructure it had. “That system worked well, and everyone was used to it,” she remembers. “As far as moving to the cloud, I didn’t think the technology was there yet.”
Leuthardt was especially concerned that a cloud-hosted service might not provide reliable 911 functionality. She also worried that instructors would be frustrated if there weren’t physical phones in their classrooms. She had her hands full managing the dozen servers that kept ATCC's on-premises system up and running, but she’d done so successfully for many years and didn't see why the school should make the switch.
“That was then,” Leuthardt remembers. “Things have obviously changed a lot since.”
“I think all the work we did up front really paid off in the end. People seemed to get comfortable with it really quickly.”
— Joni Leuthardt, Voice Administrator and IT Security Specialist, Alexandria Technical & Community College
Controlling Costs and Maximizing Value
The biggest change, of course, was the new normal created by the COVID-19 pandemic. It was early 2023, and colleges and universities around the country had finally rebounded from the lockdowns and remote learning of the previous three years. At ATCC, Leuthardt found herself in a meeting with CDW’s higher education team. The topic on the agenda that day: cloud-hosted phone systems.
Cloud services of all kinds had become ubiquitous, Leuthardt recalls, so adopting a cloud phone system didn’t seem like such a stretch. “At that point, I was a lot more open to moving off-premises, just because of everything we’d been through,” she says. “I was comfortable with the idea because we were used to the cloud.”
Leuthardt’s main contacts at CDW, account managers Matt Lubawski and Steve Tatge, encouraged her to take the time to investigate multiple cloud phone vendors. Because the school’s on-premises system was Cisco-based, she started by sizing up that company’s unified communications offerings.
“CDW had helped me for many years whenever we upgraded to new versions of the Cisco system,” she says. “I knew that I could trust them and that they wouldn’t try to steer me in one direction or the other.”
Price was a top consideration at first. ATCC is the fiscal agent for Distance Minnesota, a program providing call center support to students enrolled in online courses across the state. Running the phones for that service alone was a significant lift for IT, which also had to maintain and support every network-connected phone on the school’s campus.
“To maintain the system that we had wasn’t going to be easy,” Leuthardt explains. There would be ongoing costs associated with everything from repairs to patching and the occasional upgrade, and there was also the fact that managing servers took time her team could be spending on other projects. “We looked at that and the value of what we’d be getting, and that really helped us make our decision.”
Leuthardt and her team opted for Cisco in part because they were already using the company’s routers and switches, and because she was confident that Webex Calling would provide the high level of service they’d come to expect with their on-premises system. Finally, she liked that Cisco was a proven leader in videoconferencing. With so many people now dependent on the technology, she figured the college would benefit from moving to a unified communications solution.
Less Is More
To kick off the transition process, Leuthardt met with CDW’s account team to hammer out the details of a contract, and she sat down with its field service architects to develop a migration plan. They would need to remove the on-premises infrastructure that supported ATCC’s Cisco VoIP system. They would also need to determine how many licenses the institution required for its employees and for the Distance Minnesota staff.
“Our main goal was to meet the customer’s needs, both from the implementation perspective and from a services perspective,” says CDW’s Lubawski. “It was important for us to get to a price that fit ATCC's budget, but it was also about working with Cisco to make sure every step of the project went smoothly.”
The CDW team gave Leuthardt workbooks to calculate ATCC’s calling-related needs. She sent out surveys to individual school departments to gauge their readiness for a cloud-based system, and she updated the firmware on the institution’s Cisco devices so they would work with Webex.
Leuthardt and CDW also worked closely with Distance Minnesota Manager Mary Lenz to ensure that the program’s student support capabilities wouldn’t be compromised by moving to the cloud. The call center’s employees had all worked from home since the beginning of the pandemic, and Lenz had decided they’d do away with physical phones and exclusively use softphones installed on their computers.
“In the setup meetings, whenever I had a question, the CDW people always found the answer,” Lenz recalls. “If I had a concern or told them there was something we needed, they’d have a solution by the next time we met.”
ATCC launched the new system in a trial environment with only one department at a time. Any kinks were worked out on the spot by Cisco and the CDW engineers, and training was provided to administrators and staff so that everyone knew how to use the new platform. “I think all the work we did up front really paid off in the end,” Leuthardt says. “People seemed to get comfortable with it really quickly. I don’t think they miss the way things were.”
Today, with Webex Calling, ATCC employees can dial out or receive incoming calls just as they did with their old phone system. The main difference? With the Webex app, they can also handle calls through their computers or any mobile device.
Leuthardt says she’s received feedback from teachers who’ve told her they like being able to make and receive calls from anywhere while using their office extensions. The service has freed people from their desks and added videoconferencing to their communication options.
The service has also made life easier for ATCC’s IT staff, Leuthardt says. She doesn’t worry about 911 calls from the classroom because she’s confident that the campus dispatch center can easily identify a caller’s location, and she doesn’t miss the servers she used to manage and maintain when the phone system was on-premises. Today, instead, she simply logs in to a management dashboard, and everything she needs is at her fingertips. The back-end work is no longer her problem; Cisco has that covered in the cloud.
“I’m happy and actually proud and excited that we went in this direction,” Leuthardt says. “I admit, I didn’t want to change. But now that we have, I’m glad that we did.”