Partner Voices: Making the Grade

This past week, I had the opportunity to speak with Dawn Kerwick, Vice-President of Marketing at ePlus. She had some great insight into what ePlus has been doing in the education sector, and I wanted to share that with you as part of the Partner Voices series. Rather than hear me blather on, I’ll just turn it over and let you hear what Dawn had to say, in her own words:

If you talk to any school district today, you’ll hear a common goal.  They want to give students the skills they need to thrive in the 21^st century.  Putting the latest technology into the hands of students and their teachers—and equipping schools with a leading IT infrastructure—are key.  Working together, ePlus and Cisco have been doing just that,  and earning rave reviews in the process.

ePlus has a long history serving the K-12 and higher education markets.  We understand their challenges.  We have experience under our belt helping them achieve their technology visions.   And we’ve been successful at transforming classrooms into collaborative learning environments—allowing students and teachers to interact without boundaries.

We have a great story to tell, and some pretty neat videos to prove it!  Please take a few minutes to check out the videos here, and hear directly from our joint customers about how ePlus helped them leverage Cisco technology to create a first-class learning experience for their students.

Take the Essex North Shore Agricultural and Technical School for example, they needed to merge three high schools into one state–of-the-art facility.  What that required was an easy to use collaboration solution.  The video says it all.

Building a City within a Technical High School

• Customer: Essex North Shore Agricultural and Technical School
• Project: Merge three high schools into one facility
• Cisco Solutions: VoIP Phone System, Emergency Responder, Singlewire Paging, Network Switching, Wireless, TelePresence, and Servers
• Results: One-to-one learning environment and flawless wireless network to support Essex’s unique curriculum—including culinary arts, cosmetology, collision repair, dog grooming, and robotics

Preparing Students for Today—and Tomorrow

• Customer: Methuen Public Schools
• Project: Network and infrastructure replacement
• Cisco Solutions: Network Switching and Routing, Meraki Wireless, ACE, and PRIME
• Results: Technology at the fingertips of every student and every teacher, catapulting Methuen ahead of other districts

Revolutionizing Communication Campus-Wide

• Customer: Surry County Public Schools
• Project: Cisco Extreme Collaboration Makeover and communication infrastructure
• Cisco Solutions: VoIP phone system based on BE6000, Unity, e911 capabilities, custom paging/emergency broadcasting, and Unified Communications server including Jabber/Unified Presence
• Results: Enhanced classroom instruction, improved collaboration, and increased safety and security

Wow. Just as Dawn said, that’s three great examples of how ePlus and Cisco have worked together to solve some real world problems and offer customers the business outcomes they need to improve security, provide world class technology to students and support one-on-one eduction programs. These are exactly the types of stories we like to share via the Partner Voices series here on the Cisco Partner blog.

If you are a partner with a great Cisco story to tell, let me know and let’s share it with the rest of the Cisco Partner Ecosystem!