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TO: Mayor John Laesch
FROM: Dave McCabe, Fire Chief
Mike Kaufman, Fire Assistant Chief of Support Services
Ram Tyagi, Chief Information Officer
Jeff Anderson, Deputy CIO
DATE: August 11, 2025
SUBJECT:
A Resolution authorizing the Director of Purchasing to purchase video conferencing hardware and services from Burwood Group, Inc., Chicago, IL, for a total amount not to exceed $280,000.
PURPOSE:
As part of a larger implementation of video conference capabilities in city-owned buildings, City staff seek to implement full-featured Microsoft Teams Room functionality in the City Fire Stations to replace the beyond end-of-life Cisco Telepresence system installed in 2010.
BACKGROUND:
In 2010, the Fire Department from the City of Aurora and City of Naperville received a grant to install a shared video communications platform that has been utilized successfully since that time. The core of this system has been hosted by Aurora and an Intergovernmental Agreement was put in place to share the costs of maintaining the system.
The Aurora Fire Department utilizes this system daily for leadership and personnel meetings, incident reviews and scheduling and planning meetings. In addition, this system has been utilized for remote education and training of fire personnel.
In June of 2020, Cisco stopped supporting this Telepresence Video Communication Server utilized by both cities. In 2022, Naperville stopped utilizing this system and moved to a Microsoft Teams-based platform (Teams). Several times since 2020, Aurora IT staff have purchased used parts and equipment from third-party resellers to keep the system running. It has become increasingly difficult to source parts.
After a competitive bidding process and subsequent discovery project, resolution R23-006 awarded configuration and migration of Microsoft SharePoint services and Microsoft Teams environment remediation to Burwood Group ("Burwood").
As part of the services included with R23-006 Burwood complet...
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