The Technology That Kept a City Open Despite a Pandemic
By 7:38 p.m., the UB team had confirmed with Heist that it had the infrastructure it needed to help the 311 call center transition to remote work. This included seven Cisco communication servers that are a part of the Cisco Unified Contact Center Express platform. With the endorsement of UB’s vice president and CIO, they began making preparations to move forward.
Heist had figured the plan wasn’t going to be a problem. After all, the university had recently scaled up from two Expressway-E collaboration gateways and two Expressway-C gateways to a five-by-six configuration. “During COVID, we scaled up our services when our users were going remote,” Heist says.
MORE ON EDTECH: See how IT innovation is helping campuses open safely.
Before the pivot to remote learning, UB had 4,300 phones connected. But Cisco Jabber allowed the university to quickly scale up to handle 10,000 users with 10,000 devices.
According to Heist, this is because UB’s Cisco voice infrastructure resides on VMware infrastructure connected to Cisco switches within two data centers. When a UB computer connects to the wired network on campus, it is connecting to a Cisco switch port as well.
“We knew we had the infrastructure to handle it. We built this architecture specifically for the purpose of scaling,” Heist says — and it paid off.