Alamo Colleges

Country: United States Of America
Industry: Education
Solution: Digital Age Networking

Alamo Colleges in San Antonio, TX supports more than 65,000 students and 7,000 staff. Its five campuses and smaller regional learning centers connect students and staff, expanding the reach of learning for the community.

The Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise products are reliable and just work. What I like best about the partnership with Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise is they’re always there for us.

Christopher Delgado, Sr Manager of Network Operations, Alamo Colleges

Challenges

Alamo’s challenges included leveraging technology to support its high standards of safety and security as a priority for its campuses. They were tackling a technology gap among users across the diverse landscape of the larger San Antonio area and also wanting to support an effective work-life balance by transitioning faculty and staff from desktop to mobile devices.

Action

A long-time customer of Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, Alamo Colleges has stayed focused on providing a secure, reliable and accessible network for learning. To ensure accessibility for all, Alamo deployed secure, high-performance Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitch® platforms and Alcatel-Lucent OmniAccess® Stellar wireless networking across its campuses. They expanded the reach of the OmniAccess Stellar Access Points to develop Park and Learn, enabling students to connect and complete their studies from the parking lots without the need to physically be on campus.

Security and safety are of the utmost concern, and Alamo has leveraged its Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX® phone system to make emergency calls to Alamo Colleges dispatch, 911 and local Bear County authorities. They recently added the Alcatel-Lucent Visual Notification Assistant (VNA) solution, which can pick up a call from a user on a mobile device and provide their location, expediting response time.

To manage all these systems, Alamo uses Alcatel-Lucent OmniVista® Network Management. With one view of all the networks, Alamo’s IT staff can monitor the network during ongoing construction of centers and provide maintenance remotely across its far-reaching network.

Results

Technical benefits

Delivers redundant, reliable network and high data transfer rates with OmniSwitch layer 3 and chassis solutions
Provides consistent and complete Wi-Fi across campuses and parking lots with OmniAccess Stellar wireless network
Advanced phone system supports 911 calls and notifies college security and county authorities with Alcatel-Lucent VNA solution
Simplifies monitoring with a unified viewof the network and visual of maps showing status of switches in all college facilities

Financial benefits

Saves on recurring services costs with the ALE solutions
Network Management single view shows how many switches and how many ports are in use, which helps in decision-making

User experience benefits

Provides messaging notification services, conferencing capabilities and broadcast alerts during a crisis on campus with VNA connected with Rainbow™ by Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise
eSports popularity with students is growing thanks to high performance network