Daniel Blanchard

"The evolution of IP voice communications has created both the need and the opportunity for an efficient and highly flexible campus network," said Daniel Blanchard, associate chief information officer for the University of Massachusetts.

"We're looking at a way for a student to own a phone number for the four years that they're with us and trying to add value with cell phones," said Daniel Blanchard, associate chief information officer at UMass Amherst."We'd like to play with dual-mode phones with Wi-Fi VoIP."

Refreshingly, Blanchard admitted "we're not really certain what we're doing ... but the mobile part of this is to try to engage more with our student population or add some value to their telephone experience while they're on campus."
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"There are a lot of things that we could explore, (but) really where we are now is installing it in a piece of our residence hall and expecting to roll that out," said Blanchard.
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In another case of bridging the practical with the leading edge, Associate CIO Blanchard is in the Internet2 movement, of which UMass Amherst is a founding member.Internet2 is a university-based effort to provide next-gen production services as well as a platform to develop new networking ideas and protocols via a variety of bandwidth-intensive applications under development in campus and research labs today.

"Cedar Point either has or is in the process of doing Internet2 as a corporate member, (and) we're very interested in working with other Internet2 members," said Blanchard.

Daniel Blanchard Director, Network Systems and Services University of Massachusetts Amherst

Daniel Blanchard Director, Network Systems and Services

Each student who completed the evaluation was entered into the drawing and the winner was Daniel Blanchard, a student at University of Massachusetts at Amherst who attended the CIEE Study Center in Santiago, Chile.Congratulations Daniel!