ShoreTel Blog
ShoreTel defines UC: brilliant simplicity
Posted by ShoreTel on Friday, June 19, 2009
Authored by: Kevin Gavin, VP Marketing
Any conversation about the future of communications has to include a discussion about unified communications (UC). Surprisingly, although a growing number of companies are now experiencing the productivity and connectivity gains achievable from UC deployments, the industry itself still seems to be conflicted as to what UC actually means.
Undoubtedly, UC today features many different forms of communications—including voice, video, instant messaging—and powerful applications that extend beyond the telephone to break down communication barriers and help people connect and access the information they need as quickly and as easily as possible.
And therein lies ShoreTel’s definition of UC: brilliantly simple solutions designed to help people communicate anywhere, any time and in any way they choose.
For a UC solution to follow through on its promises of productivity gains, reduced costs and improved collaboration, it has to be simple to deploy, simple to maintain and simple to use. Introducing complexity into the network only requires more sleepness nights from overstretched IT folks, puts additional strain on already tight budgets, and increases the risk of unplanned downtime.
Complexity and clunkiness also increase the likelihood that end users won’t take advantage of the feature-rich collaboration tools, mobility features and workflow applications that hold the keys to a rapid ROI, improved customer service and productivity boosts.
At the same time, these applications and tools must be easily customized to the individual business environment—rather than the other way around. Businesses need the flexibility to respond to market shifts and challenges quickly and cost-effectively. We witnessed this recently as the economic downturn led to a huge reduction in business travel, and an increase in online conferencing.
As a result, today’s UC solutions must offer business agility through ease of interoperability and integration, and eliminate the traditional risks of locking in on proprietary systems with roadmaps to obsolescence.
Since ShoreTel was designed from the ground up for IP networks, we’ve been able to focus on an approach that optimizes the potential of IP, including newer technologies such as session initiation protocol (SIP), and delivers UC solutions that anyone can use. Not only do our simply brilliant solutions take communications to a whole new level of ubiquity, but they give businesses the freedom to innovate in which ever direction they choose.
And for the majority of cash-strapped, competitive businesses today, any other definition of UC is completely irrelevant.
Labels: Market Perspective
ShoreTel’s Brilliant Simplicity Rocks Colorado
Posted by ShoreTel on Monday, June 08, 2009
Authored by: Robert Clarke, Area Manager, Rockies
One of the biggest challenges government faces today is how to expand information-sharing and services for constituents within a system that is built on transparency, public participation, and collaboration.
Opening lines of communication continues to be a priority for cities, states and agencies throughout the country. However, government offices and agencies also face the same challenge as businesses: how to do more with less.
For the City of Lakewood in Colorado, this meant replacing a 22-year-old phone system that was increasingly dropping calls, causing costly, time-consuming and embarrassing fire drills, and that at the end of the day offered limited features to the two dozen or so offices across the city. And this needed to be completed within budget, on schedule and under close taxpayer scrutiny.
After a comprehensive and meticulous evaluation process, and a pilot system that took less than a day to set up and learn, the City of Lakewood team chose ShoreTel.
With more than 1,000 ShorePhone IP Telephones across the city, lines of communication have never been more open—from recreation centers, public works and other departments that can handle more calls faster to hotlines that give out advice to citizens during snowstorms and other emergency events.
In fact, the City of Lakewood IT team is so impressed with the capabilities and ease of management of the ShoreTel UC system that representatives recently spoke at a seminar offered by ShoreTel partner OCx.
At the seminar, staff from school districts, city governments and public health departments from up to 300 miles away gathered to hear how the reliability, brilliant simplicity and low total cost of ownership of the ShoreTel system is helping the City of Lakewood leap mountains.
Read the full City of Lakewood success story to find out more.
Labels: Customer Experiences
ShoreTel: Conceived in an IP world
Posted by ShoreTel on Wednesday, June 03, 2009
Authored by: Kevin Gavin, VP of Marketing
I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Erik Linask of TMCnet at Interop to discuss how ShoreTel has simplified the deployment, management and use of UC solutions to offer organizations of all sizes and across all sectors, the capabilities, performance and TCO they need to compete in today’s business environment.
ShoreTel has been able to achieve this feature-rich set of advanced UC capabilities combined with brilliantly simple management ease because we took a unique approach to our architecture right at the beginning. Unlike many of our competitors, who were saddled with legacy TDM designs when the IP world took off, ShoreTel started with a blank slate and designed a fully distributed, IP-based architecture built with five-nines availability, low TCO, management ease and effortless scalability.
Since then, we’ve been able to take that single-image, distributed platform to the next step, and open up our interface to integrate with third party UC application vendors, such as Microsoft and IBM.
For more information on how ShoreTel’s brilliantly simple UC solutions can meet your current business needs, contact a ShoreTel partner or see a ShoreTel demo, and decide for yourself.
Labels: Market Perspective