Bapatla Engineering College Creates Virtual Classrooms With Cisco Digital Media System

BANGALORE, INDIA--(Marketwire - July 23, 2007) - Bapatla Engineering College, situated in Bapatla, Guntur District, AP, India, today announced that it will deploy the Cisco Digital Media System to extend the classroom environment and create anywhere, anytime learning experiences. Founded in 1981 and affiliated to the Nagarjuna University, the college is the first educational institute in India to adopt the Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) solution for desktop video.

The Cisco Digital Media System will virtualize Bapatla's classroom environment with remote broadcast and viewing of lectures and on-demand video and other materials. The college will stream live sessions conducted by visiting professors and subject matter experts to the classrooms. Lectures can be viewed online in 15 classrooms and 40 "e-classrooms" simultaneously.

The Cisco Digital Media System will enable Bapatla to also simultaneously record and archive classroom sessions. This will help students access classroom sessions at their convenience from any location. The archived classroom sessions are presented to the students via the Cisco Video Portal, a Web-based component of the Cisco Digital Media System that allows students to quickly browse, search, and view digital media interactively, as well as save favourite videos to their own customizable playlist. The Cisco Video Portal also allows administrators to link relevant documents for students to use and access along with each classroom video.

"Being a premier institute, we have lectures by several senior professors and subject experts regularly. Providing access to all and archiving these lectures was proving to be a challenge and so we were looking for an E-learning solution that would provide benefits beyond the classroom environment," says Seshagiri Rao, President, Bapatla Engineering College. "The Cisco Digital Media System provides anywhere, anytime learning experiences not traditionally available to all students and thus delivers its benefits beyond the classroom environment."

"Although video offers a powerful way to communicate with and educate students, colleges have struggled with how to effectively deploy high-quality video to the desktop. IT departments worry about the impact of video on network quality, reliability, and availability," says Jagdish Mahapatra, Regional Manager (West)-Commercial, Cisco India & SAARC. "The Cisco Digital Media System is a solution that integrates rich digital media creation, management and access for compelling video communications anywhere, anytime. The Cisco Digital Media System takes advantage of Cisco's best practices from more than a decade of video and internet initiatives and makes it easy for organizations to deploy video effectively and efficiently."

Cisco introduced the Cisco Digital Media System as a new Emerging Technology in 2006 to enable organizations to quickly and easily create, manage and publish video to a variety of end points such as the desktop and digital signs. Because it is an easy system to use, the Cisco Digital Media System allows organizations of all sizes to take advantage of compelling digital media for viewers and users anytime and anywhere.

Cisco is partnering with its Premier Partner Shell Networks to deploy Cisco Digital Media System at Bapatla Engineering College. The DMS solution to be deployed includes Cisco Media Encoder 2000, Cisco Digital Media Mgr Base V4.0, Cisco Video Portal V4.0, Cisco Wide Area Application Engine 512, Cisco IP Conference Station and Cisco License Call Manager 5.1. The system is expected to be deployed and go online by July 2007.

For more information about the Cisco Digital Media System, visit http://www.cisco.com/go/dms

About Bapatla Engineering College

The Bapatla Engineering College, one of the six educational institutions sponsored by the Bapatla Education Society, was established in 1981 with affiliation to Acharya Nagarjuna University. This college is one of the 17 colleges out of nearly 240 Engineering Colleges in Andhra Pradesh, which is accredited by the National Board of Accreditation (NBA) of the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), New Delhi. The college has been selected as a Network Institute for the Technical Education Quality Improvement Programme (TEQIP) of the Ministry of Human Resources Development and the World Bank.

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Contact Information: Contact: Vishak Gopinath Cisco Systems India Pvt. Ltd. +91 22 40434122 vigopina@cisco.com Balakrishnan Text 100 India +91 80 2554 8811 balakrishnanps@text100.co.in