Ring in Savings by Virtualizing Communications

Virtualization technology has taken a firm hold in organizations. Most IT departments have virtualized applications and servers as a way to drive cost savings and more efficiently use resources. Virtualizing your IP PBX and call centers can help you ring in more savings.

Thousands of customers successfully run their core ShoreTel software on VMware. ShoreTel’s brilliantly simple unified communications (UC) platform has been certified VMware Ready since 2010, and now customers can extend the benefits of virtualization to their call centers.

ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center is certified to run on VMware, which means customers can be assured of stability and reliability. With Enterprise Contact Center, organizations can tailor their customer experience and deliver the right calls to the right agents and services at the right time – and do it more efficiently and flexibly with virtualization.

ShoreTel offers customers a choice of implementation models that best fit their individual needs – whether organizations prefer a virtualized model or the more traditional dedicated server approach.

Lower Costs

Virtualizing ShoreTel unified communications and Enterprise Contact Center helps companies manage IT costs, simplify administration, and improve system availability.

Virtualization helps companies lower their IT costs by reducing the number of physical servers. Companies can run their systems and applications on fewer, more powerful servers, rather than dedicating servers to each and every application and system – a practice that leads to wasted resources. VMware estimates that customers typically save 50 to 70 percent on overall IT costs by consolidating resources with VMware vSphere.

In addition to freeing up considerable space in the server room or data center, virtualization lets companies cut their power and cooling bills. Fewer physical servers means less power is consumed and less heat is generated. Those operational savings add up and contribute to a greener environment.

The Easy Way to High Availability

Having highly available systems was once the purview of large enterprises with fat IT budgets, but virtualization puts high availability within reach of small and midsized businesses. Running ShoreTel on VMware makes it a snap to do backups and enhance ShoreTel’s built-in disaster recovery capabilities that protect the phones and call center.

If an outage does occur, the ShoreTel workload can be moved automatically to a different virtual machine. For example, if a caller is using the automated attendant when the system goes down, the call is automatically moved without dropping. VoIP is truly ready for virtualization.

Simplified Administration

Virtualization can also simplify management, adding to ShoreTel’s brilliantly simple administration. Administrators can use a single interface to manage all of its headquarters and remote branches from a single console – across the core ShoreTel platform capabilities, as well as Director and Enterprise Contact Center.