Portage Township Schools to Use $420,000 in Government E-Rate Funding to Deploy Mitel Cloud Solution

Mitel-PTSMitel, a leading provider of cloud and premises based unified communications (UC) software solutions, announced a cloud contract with Indiana's Portage Township Schools (PTS) to support the delivery of education services to more than 8,000 students across the district. With this deployment PTS is able to take advantage of federal government E-Rate funding, which is designed to help schools deploy advanced communications solutions and Internet access.

"At PTS, we truly believe that each child is unique, and that it is our responsibility to provide the best education possible in an environment that is challenging and employs the most stimulating technology to support learning," said Dr. Frataccia, superintendent of PTS. "This is why we are so pleased to introduce this new technology into our education environment. Faculty, staff and students will all benefit from having advanced collaborative instruction tools and high-speed access to additional learning materials accessed through the cloud."

Mitel Business Partner Gibson Teldata will utilize a MiCloud hosted UC solution to replace PTS' legacy Avaya/Lucent system. The new solution consists of more than 1,000 MiVoice phones that will be deployed across 17 locations. PTS is also deploying MiVoice Video, an all-in-one multimedia collaboration tool that provides multi-party audio and video conferencing, in-room presentation display, and remote collaboration.

"In today's economic climate when schools are asked to do more with less, this Mitel Cloud solution provides a flexible and cost-effective option for school districts to advance their services and offer an enhanced learning environment for their students," said Scott Egan, director of Business Development, Gibson Teldata. "This solution eliminates the need for constant and costly infrastructure repairs and upgrades of the legacy system, and at the same time qualifies for significant government funding that saves even more for PTS."

With an installed base of more than 260,000 cloud users, Mitel's unique three-pronged cloud strategy delivers comprehensive and uniform support for public, private and hybrid cloud models. Through a single software stream, Mitel is able to equip service providers, such as Sprint, to deliver their own cloud offerings and enable end users to deploy Mitel Cloud Solutions in their own private cloud. In the United States, Mitel also offers its own public cloud offering.

About Mitel

Mitel is a global provider of unified communications and collaboration (UCC) software, solutions and services that enable organizations to conduct business anywhere, over any medium with the device of their choice. Through a single cloud-ready software stream, Mitel's Freedom architecture provides customers in over 100 countries the flexibility and simplicity needed to support today's dynamic work environment. For more information visit www.mitel.com.