As a company founded in the Boston area, Cambridge Computer has extensive experience meeting the needs of academic clients. Harvard is one of our oldest clients and we work with MIT, Boston University, Boston College, Tufts University, Cornell University, Carnegie Mellon University, Brandeis University, Princeton University and Yale University as well. Today we have close relationships with central IT as well as individual divisions, departments, and professional schools in academic institutions around the country. We have been similarly successful with the DOE national laboratories, such as Brookhaven, Lawrence Livermore, Lawrence Berkeley, and Sandia.

Navigating the Budget
We are very familiar with the budgetary and technological pressures unique to higher education. We have assisted colleges and universities around the country in fitting large solutions into small budgets, designing modular solutions around small influxes of grant money, and figuring out palatable ways to pool the resources of multiple research groups to make better use of collective funding. We have special relationships with most of our vendor partners to ensure special pricing for academic institutions. We are also particularly creative when it comes to incorporating legacy equipment and refurbished gear.

Technology Challenges
Technologically, we understand that universities often have to manage thousands of home directories, as well as research projects that may be of a highly scientific nature or have other characteristics that differ from typical corporate data.

Implementation Challenges
Many of our academic customers have very talented people available to assist with projects or even carry out entire implementations. While we have a full service professional services organization, we are very flexible and are able to provide selected subject matter expertise to complement our clients' in-house talent. In some cases that means that we manage the project with their assistance or perform selected parts of the implementation. In other cases that means we are simply on call to provide assistance while they execute the implementation.

We also appreciate that universities are often on a different time schedule than our corporate customers. Often projects run into the evening and more often than not work has to be performed when students are on vacation.