Spanish University Solves Phone System Pitfalls with 3CX

Escola Universiària Salesiana de Sarrià (EUSS) in Barcelona, Spain, trains and educates its students to become engineers. EUSS works to provide students with the best possible skill sets, to meet future demands for engineering in Spain, while also actively employing them to gain more experience in the field. However while student success was increasing so were the university’s telecom bills.

The Challenge

César Latorre, the university’s IT Coordinator, decided it was time to find a more cost efficient, not to mention less archaic phone system to satisfy the communication needs of EUSS.

The Spanish university consists of 70 employees and 700 students. And, because the university looks as if it’s bound for continued growth, Latorre added flexibility and scale to the checklist of phone system requirements. In addition, Latorre felt that if the university expanded, in both staff and students, it would need a much more advanced phone system to replace its current one, which was becoming obsolete and more of a cost center than a hub for seamless communications. In fact, the legacy Siemens Hicom 150 that the university operated on, cost approximately €6,600 per year, which Latorre found to be far too exorbitant for a phone system that didn’t cater to his organization’s needs.

3CX Ticks All the Boxes on the University’s Checklist

Checklist in hand, Latorre and his IT staff researched the best possible solutions on the market to replace their current system. For organizations that are moving on from a legacy system to IP-telephony, choosing the right providers can be quite difficult due to the saturation of the IP-telephony market. But once Latorre landed on 3CX, he knew that the search was over as this solution ticked off all of the requirements on his list.

3CX Partner, Telinformática, completed the new phone system integration, using 70 IP phones and a SIP trunk with 20 connections. This new configuration helped EUSS to greatly reduce its telecom bills as SIP trunking allows for complete IP connection. This means phone calls are routed through the Internet rather than through on-premise copper wires. What’s more, the IP foundation of the university’s new phone system enables it to adopt the sophisticated features associated with today’s modern phone system, such as unified communications (UC).

3CX Phone System configuration at EUSS is also highly redundant, as it is backed-up in more than one location, so Latorre and his staff can rest assured their phone system will never fail unexpectedly.

EUSS - school of engineering

“3CX allows us to have an integrated telephone system with a high level of flexibility and access to new features that, until now, we did not have. In addition, we gained higher redundancy as the telephone center runs on a virtual machine on the 3CX virtualization infrastructure. The cost and maintenance are greatly reduced.”

César Latorre, IT Coordinator, EUSS

The Results

The university is now experiencing significant cost savings while gaining more functionality and features than its previous, and more expensive, phone system offered. The advanced features, scalability offered by IP phone lines, cost effectiveness, and added redundancy mean that the university’s new phone system is one that will withstand the test of time. Today, Latorre and the rest of the staff at EUSS are worry and restriction free, and able to communicate simply and seamlessly.

The Customer

The Escola Universiària Salesiana de Sarrià (EUSS), based in the scenic and culturally vibrant city of Barcelona, Spain, is a part of a tradition in Spanish education that dates back to the late nineteenth century. It originated from the Salesian vocational schools of Sarrià that were formed in 1884 by professionals in graphic arts and carpentry. More recently, the university started to offer further choices in the areas of mechanics and electronics.