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Case Study
The Almansor Center
 Originally founded in 1974 as a California, 501 (c) (3) non-profit organization, The Almansor Center later established the Institute for the Redesign of Learning as an umbrella organization that better reflected the mission of the agency. The mission of the Institute for the Redesign of Learning is to restore the capacity of children and adults with developmental, learning, behavior and emotional disabilities to take charge of their own learning process and become competent, caring and contributing members of society.
The cornerstone of the Institute is The Almansor Center, an innovative K-12 day school program, mental health, rehabilitation and training facility. The Almansor Center is in South Pasadena but our students are from more than 30 communities in the Greater Los Angeles area encompassing more than 900 square miles. Children and adults are referred to our day care, education, mental health and rehabilitation programs from over 40 government agencies; including 25 public school districts, five Regional Centers for the developmentally disabled, the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health, the California Office of Criminal Justice Planning, the California Department of Rehabilitation, Los Angeles County Children's Services, Los Angeles County Probation Department and Los Angeles County Juvenile Justice Subvention program. In addition, our Community Outreach, Professional Training and Parent Education Programs provide Head Start Intervention and Juvenile Diversion services and conduct training programs and workshops throughout California and the nation.
Problem:
In early 2001 The Almansor Center came to Metronome, Inc. with a set of problems that needed to be resolved with respect to their phone system and data connectivity. At the time the organization used Centrex for their 100+ phones and had a “Managed VPN” solution for data connectivity.
The phone system was extremely inflexible and was costing the organization $135-$150 each time the organization changed or moved a phone. Turn-around time for requested changes would take 2-3 weeks and sometimes longer as several of their locations had no more copper lines available from the street. Monthly cost for local calls and services was almost $10,000 and long distance charges were in excess of $4,000.
The “Managed VPN” services were slow and expensive and left much to be desired in the area of consistency. The company's 5 sites were often not able to reach each other and the response time from the managed Network Operations Center. Monthly cost for the system exceeded $10,000.
Solution:
After carefully evaluating all of the issues that the Almansor Center was facing, Metronome designed a high-speed, highly redundant network using Cisco 2600 and 3600 routers and 3500 switches. This network consisted of point-to-point T-1’s in a partially meshed environment. On top of this infrastructure Metronome designed an IP Communications system using Cisco CallManagers and Unity Unified Messaging. Metronome was able to collapse all of the voice services onto two digital voice circuits that were implemented at the two largest sites. In addition to the network redundancy Metronome implemented Survivable Remote Site Telephony to ensure that if connection to the CallManager is lost that phone services are still available.
The cost saving was impressive as Metronome converged the voice and data networks. The total cost of the data network, which was now the primary transport for inter-site voice traffic, dropped from over $10,000 a month to around $7,500 and the network reliability issues were solved. Voice costs dropped from over $13,000 monthly to around $1,500 a month. With an equipment lease the organization replaced ALL routers, switches and phones as well as added a voicemail system, conference phones, voice conference bridges and of course a highly redundant IP PBX. Even with all of this installed and configured at the customer site, the Almansor Centers total cost savings was still $7,750 per month! Due to the immediate cost savings there was no need for ROI discussions.
Result:
Currently the Almansor Center has been on the new system for over 6 months and has enjoyed not only the substantial cost savings but also a sharp increase in network reliability. In a recent growth spurt, one of the organization's divisions grew from 17 people to over 60 in 3 months. The organization was able to deploy new phones and accommodate a quickly changing environment by simply purchasing new phones and having support staff set them up. Turn-around was days instead of weeks and the many changes (sometimes multiple to the same station in the same day) were not a problem, even between sites.
This year The Almansor Center intends to implement a “Video on Demand” system for delivering educational content to students and teachers. This would not be possible with the converged infrastructure that they are now using.
“The Cisco IP Telephony that Metronome implemented for us is not only cost effective and reliable, but has also given us a great deal of independence from the large Telcos who are sorely lacking in customer services and pricing. We are now in a position where our growth is only limited by our business and not the constraints of other companies.”
Craig Arnold, Vice President of Operations
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Case Study
The Almansor Center |
Originally founded in 1974 as a California, 501 (c . . .
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Technology Showcase
Voice Over IP |
IP telephony refers to the technology for transmit . . .
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