Making partnership with a leading company to teach Information Technology systems

Once upon a time, in a French technical institute, some people wanted to improve their way of teaching Information Technology systems. The main difficulty was knowing how to act with current materials and technologies. Because of the prohibitive costs of modern devices, it would be necessary to build a partnership with an industrial leader. Starting in January 2009, we made an appointment with Aastra France. Aastra is a major company acting especially in unified communications. Aastra is a leading company at the forefront of the enterprise communication market around the world. Aastra develops and delivers innovative communication products and applications for businesses. The choice of Aastra takes its origin in the 2005 Matra/EADS takeover. Matra/EADS was a french leader in digital telephony solutions and a long time ago, I was acting as an IT manager in a local administration, using Matra products. I will describe how we built this partnership, how we trained our team of teachers, and how we are going to massively certify them first, and how we are going to continue student training with Astra certifications.