ShoreTel Blog
Smarter, Cheaper, Greener VoIP for Government
Posted by ShoreTel on Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Authored by: Tom Perry, Director of Marketing EMEA
The recent announcement of the UK Government ICT Strategy, which predicts savings of £3.2bn per year from 2013-14 has been described as a step towards a "smarter, cheaper and greener public sector ICT infrastructure." As part of the overall plan, the Cabinet Office aims to replace many of the government's physical phone lines with voice over IP (VoIP) systems by 2017.
It’s interesting because the pressure on public spending generally, and major IT projects specifically, is challenging the whole industry together with the government to deliver the very best value for the taxpayer, and find alternative ICT solutions that are just as good (if not better) as the old solutions. Our work with UK education organisations, such as Richard Huish, Coleg Glan Hafren, and Trafford College are great examples of how public sector companies can reduce costs.
VoIP technology offers an affordable and extremely efficient alternative to legacy telephony systems and can transform communication systems in the public sector to achieve greater accessibility and availability of civil servants. Its great to see that the UK government is taking notice of the savings VoIP can offer.
Labels: EMEA, Market Perspective
Telecom Trends: The Future is Calling
Posted by ShoreTel on Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Authored by: Jeff Ridley, Director of Product Management
It’s time to follow-up on my earlier post on my talk at IT expo. At that session, I was asked to talk through the trends in telecommunications that are shaping where we are, and where we are heading.
In my last post, I went through some key trends from the past. This time, let’s look at current trends and where they are taking us.
First, you can’t even start a conversation about trends without quickly moving to discuss the mobility revolution. It’s not just that everyone is getting a cell phone, it’s the implications of continuous connectivity.
As new generations enter the work force, the expectations for communications are changing. This generation expects always-on information.
As they went through high-school and college, they had the luxury of being able to look down at anytime and know what’s happening in the world, who’s available to chat, and what their entire circle of friends is up to at that moment in time.
They now bring this expectation to work and demand a continuous connection to their work communications, their key data, their co-workers and more. This moves all of us toward delivering an experience that enables the mobile device with the same work experience as is available at the desk.
The interest in open integration is trend number two. Integrating communications and business systems isn’t new. It’s been around for a long time in call centers. What we see today is renewed interest in improved technologies, such as presence, Web 2.0, and unified communications, as well as the economic push that drives for increasing productivity.
Bring your information into your communication processes and you get smarter workers. Workers who have the information they need at their fingertips while they are talking to the caller. Workers who know who else is available to help them at a moment’s notice. The result? Workers who get things done quicker and make your customers happier.
The third trend that is shaping where we are going in telecommunications comes from the clouds. It’s the increasing trend businesses have to consolidate their infrastructure and make key business services accessible anywhere in their network – or even anywhere on the Internet.
This trend is driven, again, by both the enabling technology and the business claimant. Technologies such as improved networking and virtualization make it possible for companies to create highly available, highly concentrated data centers that are connected via high performance networks.
Organizations can now build their own “private cloud” if you will. This, in turn, allows them to respond to ongoing business pressures, including consolidating resources, reducing equipment, and reducing space.
This pressure was apparent in an article I noted this morning discussing how the state of California has announced a new initiative to reduce its data center footprint by 50 percent. This is a goal that many private businesses share as well.
It’s shaping up to be an interesting era in communications. Whether the organization is large or small, optimizing results is now squarely on everyone’s mind and we are seeing that today’s forward-thinking IT teams are looking to new solutions and architecture to give employees the communications tools they need to meet the challenge.
Labels: Market Perspective
ShoreTel Video Contest: Eric's life untangled!
Posted by ShoreTel on Monday, February 08, 2010
Authored by: Eric Velting
See how Eric became a hero thanks to ShoreTel.
Labels: Customer Experiences
ShoreTel Video Contest: Doing More with Less
Posted by ShoreTel on Wednesday, February 03, 2010
Authored by: Thomas Partners
See how San Francisco firm, Thomas Partners, has untangled complexity and is now doing more thanks to ShoreTel.
Visit the ShoreTel Untangle Complexity Video Contest for more details.
Labels: Customer Experiences
Telecom Trends: Past Dynamics Driving the Future
Posted by ShoreTel on Monday, February 01, 2010
Authored by: Jeff Ridley, Director of Product Management
Recently, I had the opportunity to speak on a panel at IT Expo looking at trends in telecommunications. Preparing for the panel gave me a great opportunity to think about some of the industry dynamics that shaped where we are today as well as new things that will influence where are going. I wanted to share some of these thoughts, beginning with the trends that have influenced where we are today.
Unified Communications. It’s clear that UC is no longer a marketing phrase but a real and integral part of the way people communicate. In the old days, it seemed a simply phone call was good enough. Today, we have rich communication options that we can access at any time and from any location making it far easier to get answers and results.
We no longer have to call and hope the person we need is there, because presence tells us before we dial. When someone you are speaking with doesn’t see what you mean, you can show them through Web conferencing. And yes, you can even see face to face on every call using video capabilities, though many of the more modest types are still not comfortable with this.
The thing I like the best is that we can communicate with people. No longer do we reduce everyone to a number associated with a device. Instead we type their name and are connected the way we want.
Open Systems. The openness in today’s solutions is a second key trend that shapes were we are today.
Initially, there were large main-frame like PBXs. Then businesses wanted to integrate systems, so hardware interfaces were thrown into the mix and the budget-rich could look at simple integrations like screen pops, but typically only in a contact center where every second could be counted measured, and monetized.
Now, with the integration of voice into the IP network, integration is brilliantly simple. Open APIs and interfaces let you tap into databases so people reach the right destination, automate everyone’s activities from the contact center agent to the front desk operator, and integrate disparate systems together quickly and easily.
Distributed Systems. The final major trend in the industry today comes from distributed computing.
Mainframe PBXs were essentially big computers with lots of inputs and outputs. Like traditional mainframes, they performed lots of different functions and each function worked with the others on the same machine.
This meant that you had to build big, monolithic systems for large organizations and wire in all of your users directly to the system. There is certainly not a lot of flexibility in that model!
Distributed computing turned that concept upside down and said you can take a function and run that one function on lots of computers at one time. The key is that you have to take all the different parts of the function and make sure they can communicate effectively. You take this one part, communications, add a high-speed IP network and suddenly you have a new paradigm for communications.
You can distribute your communication functions to lots of different processing boxes – each located at the far reaches of your enterprise - and then connect the users over the network.
The result is one system that runs its communications services on various hosts providing reliable services at every location to phones that are also located anywhere in the network. Brilliantly simple.
What about the trends shaping the directions of tomorrow? I'll visit those in my next post, coming soon.
Stay tuned!
Set Your Sites on ShoreTel Small Business Edition
Posted by ShoreTel on Monday, February 01, 2010
Authored by: Dieter Rencken, Senior Product Manager
Last week’s announcement that the ShoreTel Small Business Edition (SBE) now features expanded support for multiple sites is attracting huge interest from smaller organizations.
For many of these busy companies, small doesn’t necessarily mean that they only have one office. Some may have a warehouse location across town or a small satellite office to support sales.
With ShoreTel, size is no barrier to progress. The recent update to ShoreTel SBE means these businesses can now offer ShoreTel’s rich, enterprise-class UC capabilities to up to 50 users across three sites.
ShoreTel SBE is an integrated package that includes the hardware and software necessary to help empower small business owners with productivity-boosting UC applications.
ShoreTel can be easily integrated with current infrastructure to leverage existing investments while delivering exceptional ease of management and low total cost of ownership.
Most standard functions, such as adding or changing phones, and moving users, can be done by anyone with basic IT knowledge, and as the business grows, a simple software upgrade quickly scales the ShoreTel UC system — without a forklift upgrade or rip and replace.
For more information on how ShoreTel SBE can help your business grow, contact your local ShoreTel reseller.
Labels: Market Perspective, Product Updates