Ken Schindler,
Information Technology Services, Saginaw Valley State
University
Re: MiCTA
Programs, Sprint
Simply
put, MiCTA
has saved us time, effort, and money.
SVSU
has made a significant commitment to install basic or
advanced Classroom Technology in most of its classrooms.
During the last few years, state-of-the-art presentation
technology has been installed or upgraded in 58 classrooms,
or 61% of general classrooms. During the winter of 2003
an additional 6 classrooms with presentation technology
will be added with the opening of the Macomb Graduate
Center. Finally, during the summer of 2003 an additional
17 classrooms with presentation technology will be added
with the opening of the SVSU Regional Education Center.
All
of these purchases and installations were made directly
from existing
MiCTA contracts. As a MiCTA member, SVSU saves staff
time and effort on repetitive bid processes. This typically
would include specification development, bidding and
proposal evaluations. In past positions, I have personally
spent months working through various RFP or RFB processes.
It was a great relief to me when I learned SVSU was
a MiCTA member and that once budgets were approved we
could move directly to purchasing and installation.
But in the final analysis, SVSU saved a great deal of
money by purchasing through MiCTA. SVSU could never
come close to getting the discount that a 15,000+ member
organization could obtain. Sometimes the discount offered
by MiCTA is twice the discount we used to get from previous
vendor relationships. So for a smaller university, or
educational entity, there is significant budget savings
from its MiCTA membership.
Further,
MiCTA staff have spent a considerable amount of time
working with SVSU to take advantage of our special circumstances
to curb the geometric cost of Internet Bandwidth. MiCTA
staff helped SVSU leverage the MiCTA bandwidth contracts
by negotiating a special co-location agreement with
Sprint
that eliminates the “last mile” or local
loop charges that greatly inflate the cost of Internet
bandwidth. Without MiCTA’s help, SVSU would not
have been able to enjoy the reduced cost of Internet
access.
|
