Northwestern College Improves Collaboration with NEC's Unified Communications & Collaboration Solution

NEC (News - Alert) Corporation of America (NEC), a provider of IT, network, communications and biometric products and solutions, revealed that Northwestern College, a private liberal arts college in St. Paul, MN., has deployed the UNIVERGE 3C unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) suite to improve collaboration between multiple sites.

The unified communications and collaboration suite also connects numerous radio stations owned by Northwestern College. It will be further adapted to support new buildings, additional radio stations and other areas of acquisition which then allows faculty and staff to focus on educating tomorrow’s leaders. Currently, the college has approximately 3,000 students and owns 14 radio stations at seven different sites throughout the upper Midwest.

UNIVERGE 3C has helped the college virtualize its servers, making it easier for the limited IT staff to maintain them. The college’s contact center also connects callers with a variety of departments including events, technology, institutional advancement and gift receipting.

“Northwestern College has been an NEC customer for 25 years and we knew NEC and our dealer Loffler could handle the job of integrating our radio stations’ communications with our campus system, while allowing them to be fully independent in the event of a failure,” said Sarah Grudzinski, Network/Telecom Team Lead for Northwestern College, in a statement.

“We now have a fully redundant system and no longer worry that communications will be down during a radio station funding call drive or important campus event. Additionally, UNIVERGE 3C and call center reporting functions have been extremely helpful in forecasting staff and call volumes for event drives,” she added.

NEC also expects to deploy the UNIVERGE 3C system to manage outgoing calls and help receptionists provide better student and parent services. The new system allows for improved visibility to now be accessible to all on-campus numbers.

“As the Northwestern College campus grows in the coming years, UNIVERGE 3C will help by accommodating the influx of a younger generation of faculty and staff, who are much more mobile and have grown up using Internet-style tools,” Larry Levenberg (News - Alert), vice president of Channel Sales and Marketing, Communications Technologies, NEC Corporation of America added.

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