Switching to VoIP should create enough savings to finance the switch, she said. BC is planning to add 1 million square feet of new building space over the next decade. Based on recent college construction, BC expects to save hundreds of thousands of dollars by using Ethernet and coax for VoIP rather than also having to run copper phone wire. But figuring out backup power to ensure handsets are always dial-tone ready, and bringing VoIP reliability up to the 99.999% uptime of TDM networks will remain key challenges.

Video services will be supplied probably by means of a hybrid solution, Moore said. When the cable TV contract expires in mid-2009, BC will shift to digital IP video, and likely contract with a distributor for a satellite or land-based digital feed. The college may deploy hardware and software to stream live and pre-encoded MPEG video over IP networks to PCs and televisions. Finally, Moore wants to outsource IPTV, tiered services, and subscriber management.

UMass Amherst CIO John Drubach told the audience that IT planning more than ever before needs to be intimately linked with the institution's mission. That focus seems to be one driver for moving toward an institution-wide single sign-on infrastructure, based on the LDAP-based directories created for its Oracle Peoplesoft finance and human resources applications. "We need to know who and where people are," he said.

The Amherst university partners with five other nearby institutions, so students from these others schools are often on campus taking UMass courses. A federated directory model will make it possible to track and provision them in coordination with their home campus.

Drubach frankly acknowledged the uncertainty around assessing new technologies, and how, or even whether, they will pay off for the institution. His solution: raise "dabbling" to a strategic inititiative. "I never met a pilot [project] I didn't like," he said. UMass has been dabbling in an wide array of technology projects: VoIP, integrating voicemail and e-mail, downloading updated student class schedules via iPods, expanding Wi-Fi, and an Apple program called "," which uses the iTunes Store as a clearing house of university-created content which can be securely accessed at anytime by students.