Edith Cowan University brings voice to the cloud

As an educational institution in Perth, Western Australia, Edith Cowan University (ECU) understands how critical the ability to easily share information and ideas is. But with their voice communications based on an ageing on-premise PABX VOIP solution, they were struggling.

What they needed was a platform that reflected their status as a progressive with a reputation for excellence in teaching and state of the art facilities.

Together with Optus Enterprise, ECU leveraged its relationship with Microsoft augmenting its existing deployment of solutions including Teams, Exchange and SharePoint through their Office 365 subscription. Being able to integrate this functionality gave them a compelling reason to choose Microsoft’s Office 365 Teams solution over other voice platforms.

Equally important were the capabilities offered by Ensyst, an Optus company and award-winning cloud experts. Working together, ECU were delivered with an end-to-end solution from a single provider, simplifying and shortening lead times for implementation.

Technologies used included the Optus Evolve service, Audiocodes Session Border Controllers (SBCs), Poly handsets and headsets.

“[We] attribute the high acceptance levels and staff engagement to both Optus and Ensyst’s support and guidance in developing and delivering our change management plan.” – ECU project staff

To ensure minimal disruption to the organisation and users, the system was designed to co-exist with the incumbent telephony solution while the phased approach to the migration continued to completion.

The project was completed prior to COVID-19 so ECU was able to benefit from the adaptability and flexibility offered by Microsoft Teams Calling during lockdown.

Upon completion, the solution provided ECU with a production ready, fully hosted, 3^rd Level Managed Microsoft Teams Cloud Voice solution that will help the university reduce IT costs, improve productivity and better manage risks.

Today ECU have boosted user productivity, reduced costs and hardware footprint all while meeting their current and future business requirements with an IP-based, Microsoft Teams UC platform. 

Download the PDF below and find out more about the project and the additional benefits the university are now reaping.