"We consider them part of the RCC team,": Riverside Community College's telecommunications manager reflects on an 11-year partnership with NEC.Kathy Paschke is network specialist for voice at Riverside Community College In addition to the main campus located in downtown Riverside, there are also satellite campuses located in Moreno Valley, Norco, Ben Clark Public Safety Training Center, and the Rubidoux Annex in Rubidoux. in Riverside, California Riverside is the county seat of Riverside County, California, United States and is also a focus city of the Greater Los Angeles Area. The city is named for the nearby Santa Ana River. As of 2006, Riverside had an estimated population of 293,741. . She manages a telecommunications Communicating information, including data, text, pictures, voice and video over long distance. See communications. system that serves the college's nine locations. Q: How long has the college been working with NEC (NEC Corporation, Tokyo, www.nec.com, www.necus.com) An electronics conglomerate known in the U.S. for its monitors. In Japan, it had the lion's share of the PC market until the late 1990s (see PC 98). NEC was founded in Tokyo in 1899 as Nippon Electric Company, Ltd. , and how did the relationship begin? A: We've been working with NEC since January 1995. We had an old legacy phone system that desperately needed to be upgraded or replaced so we went out to bid for new telephone systems. NEC was awarded the contract. Q: What are the NEC solutions that the school uses? A: We have their hybrid PBX (Private Branch eXchange) An inhouse telephone switching system that interconnects telephone extensions to each other as well as to the outside telephone network (PSTN). . It does both TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) A technology that transmits multiple signals simultaneously over a single transmission path. Each lower-speed signal is time sliced into one high-speed transmission. and Voice-over IP. We have their unified messaging Having access to e-mail, voice mail and faxes via a common computer application or by telephone. For example, unified messaging may send faxes and digitized voice mail to a mail server that turns them into e-mail attachments. voicemail system and their OpenWorX Business Attendant System application. Q: What kind of guidance did you get from NEC to help identify these solutions? A: Our legacy system was not supported anymore by the vendor, and that was a big issue. We were very new at PBX applications. So NEC helped us understand where we were and where we could go by using their PBX and voicemail systems. Q: What challenges did NEC help solve for you? A: One of the biggest challenges was when we went to a unified messaging voicemail system and a Voice-over IP-based PBX, we had to start working with our network department. Historically, at RCC RCC - An extensible language. , telecom and network didn't talk very much. NEC helped our network department understand what the Voice-over IP role was on their network. The biggest thing that NEC taught us was how to play together nicely. Q: Why did you decide to go with a hybrid PBX that uses both traditional TDM and Voice-over IP? A: It was time to replace our PBX. So we had to look to either replacing it with a complete Voice-over IP system or what NEC recommended, which was the hybrid product. The reason we chose that was because we could keep all of our investment and still deploy Voice-over IP at our discretion. Q: How is this hybrid system A hybrid system is a dynamic system that exhibits both continuous and discrete dynamic behavior — a system that can both flow (described by a differential equation) and jump (described by a difference equation). working for you? A: The hybrid system works so well for us because, as we deploy Voice-over IP, the features are seamless to the user. When we upgrade over the weekend, they come in on Monday, their phone looks different, but their features are the same. So the transition is seamless. It decreases the time we have to spend in user training as we deploy Voice-over IE Q: Has the Business Attendant operating software evolved into a productivity tool for RCC? A: Yes; it has made our phone attendants much more productive. The Business Attendant system is computer-based, so attendants can dial by name; they can do their directory look-ups and send a call out with just one click. They look up the person and send the call, as opposed to using the old paper directory, a giant pain before. When they're not as busy, they can also use their computer to do other things that they need to do throughout the day. Q: What kind of support do you get from NEC? A: What I found is, even the smallest of upgrades or the smallest of changes that I make, NEC is here with me until I'm comfortable enough for them to go about their business on other tasks. When we did the upgrades, NEC actually held classes for our users on the different campuses until we had educated everyone. Q: And when there are problems? A: Well, first of all, since 1995, when we installed the very first NEC system, I have not been down one time. Not once in 11 years. Period. Of course, sometimes there are problems. When we had some issues with some Voice-over IP deployments, NEC actually sent my normal engineer and a higher level engineer to our site, and they set up a duplicate system to replicate rep·li·cate v. 1. To duplicate, copy, reproduce, or repeat. 2. To reproduce or make an exact copy or copies of genetic material, a cell, or an organism. n. A repetition of an experiment or a procedure. the problem. They worked in an office behind me, with both myself and the network team, until they resolved the issue. I had these resources until the issue was resolved. Q: How has it been to work with NEC? A: I've dealt with the same people since 1995. I have the same engineer, the same sales group, the same everything, and that just speaks for itself. When I call and I need something, I don't have to give somebody 45 minutes of history on what RCC actually has so they can go and ponder Ponder - A non-strict polymorphic, functional language by Jon Fairbairn <jf@cl.cam.ac.uk>. Ponder's type system is unusual. It is more powerful than the Hindley-Milner type system used by ML and Miranda and extended by Haskell. on it and decide what it is I want. They know the history, and we consider them part of the RCC team. |
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