Cistera's GoVertical Education Solution Enhances Security at Texas University

Customer Needs

Trinity University, located in San Antonio, Texas is an independent liberal arts and sciences university with 2,500 students. Trinity University is one of the nation's top private undergraduate institutions. In addition to strength in the liberal arts and sciences, these majors include professional programs in communication, education, business administration, engineering science, and computer science.

Trinity needed to find a way to improve communcations on campus especially to improve campus safety and emergency alerting and notification.

Solution

Trinity deployed a Cisco IPT solution across the entire campus including a Cisco 7960 phone in every dorm room, with each student being assigned a personal extension. They selected Cistera's popular enterprise application platform for IPT, the Cistera ConvergenceServer,(TM) and licensed QuickRecord(TM) to enable on demand recording of malicious or important calls, and RapidBroadcast(TM) for its capability of paging to the IP phones.

A security enhancement available with RapidBroadcast has proven especially valuable. When anyone dials 911 from a Cisco phone, campus security and the IT Director are automatically notified via their own IP phones at the same time as the San Antonio Police Department. All alerts include the dorm and extension location of the call's origination, which allows for immediate follow-up to provide assistance if needed.

Results

According to Cynthia Littles, ITS Telecommunications Manager, Trinity is very pleased with the Cistera solutions, "The security enhancement is incredible, as response time is much faster," she said. "We use this feature every day. Security is a big issue for administrators, parents and students -- with this capability we feel that we are providing a best-in-class solution for everyone."