TORONTO, November 21, 2006 - 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."

Peel has also set up 12 internal service call centers, allowing the school board to offer caller self-service capabilities, route calls to specific agents and provide call-analysis functions to understand calling patterns and improve service.

"It's important to see the new platform not as a one-time investment but as a platform on which we can continue to grow services and deliver cost savings," Williams said. "We have achieved immediate benefits, but that's just the beginning. We are piloting a number of applications that can be added to our implementation which, together, will pay for the initial investment several times over."

Among the pilot projects the board is testing are:

• Giving schools increased access through "virtual" phone lines to handle peak calling periods. According to Williams, "Adding four phone lines per school would cost over $250,000 per year. The Cisco platform enables us to potentially add this capacity at a much reduced cost compared to more traditional dedicated phone lines."
• Using Cisco Unified messaging as an option for centralized voicemail for schools, with the ability to provide voicemail services at significantly less cost than a decentralized solution.
• Equipping some of Peel's itinerant "resource teachers" with Cisco IP SoftPhone technology, a state-of-the-art communications application designed for laptops. With Cisco IP SoftPhone, the resource teachers, who may travel to any one of the board's 230 schools, can take their phone extensions with them.

"Peel District School Board plans to ultimately extend our network foundation across all of our schools, benefiting our teachers, students, administrators and parents," Williams said. "We are excited about Cisco Unified Communications and the opportunity it presents to improve communications and provide significant cost savings."

About Peel District School Board

The Peel District School Board is Ontario's second-largest school district, with 230 schools located across 776 square kilometers. The organization has approximately 12,000 employees, including nearly 9,000 instructors, and 145,000 students. For more information, visit http://www.peelschools.org/