PLNU chose a ShoreTel Unified Communications (UC) Solution that includes ShoreTel Communicator, ShoreTel e911 Notification Application, ShoreTel Enhanced Paging, 1,000 ShoreTel IP Phones, and the licensing and switching necessary to support the main campus and all remote locations. Benefits include:

• Cost Savings of US$533,000 over 5 years
• Simplified administration and no need to hire expert phone staff
• Broadcast capabilities and emergency 911 notification deployment
• Unified, reliable collaboration tools for better customer service

“After a thorough evaluation, we selected ShoreTel over the other vendors. ShoreTel really stuck out as the obvious choice for us because it met our needs for separating VoIP from network infrastructure, providing built-in redundancy, simplifying administration, and lowering initial and ongoing cost.”—Corey Fling, Director, Network Services / Telecom at Point Loma Nazarene University

ShoreTel was the only vendor to receive a Strong Positive, the highest rating in this report.

The report looked at 11 vendors, and focused on the premise-based UC market in North America for SMBs, defined for this MarketScope as firms with 29 to 499 employees. The ratings were summarized in the chart below:

Figure 1. Vendor Ratings

Source: Gartner, MarketScope for Unified Communications for the SMB Market, North America, M. Fernandez, J. Lassman, 10 August, 2012

For the August 2012 report, Gartner conducted customer and partner interviews, analyzed UC RFPs from each vendor, conducted vendor interviews and carried out financial ratings of vendors.

In its criteria for evaluation, Gartner said in its report that SMB requirements differ from large enterprises.

“SMBs require UC solutions that are easy to install, configure and manage and that do not increase demands on an already lean IT staff,” Gartner said. “Additionally, SMBs require straightforward pricing and exhibit greater preference for UC solutions that have integrated user and management interfaces.”

Gartner defined the Strong Positive rating thusly:

“Is viewed as a provider of strategic products, services or solutions:

• Customers: Continue with planned investments.
• Potential customers: Consider this vendor a strong choice for strategic investments.”

To see Gartner’s policies and guidelines, click here

The next step: solution demonstrations.The demo is often the “make it or break it” point for a vendor’s bid to provide a unified communications solution to an enterprise in need of better business communications.

What are the factors that contribute to a demo’s success? Several caveats are consistent whether or not a consultant is engaged in the process. It’s obvious that being on time, rehearsing and ensuring that all equipment is prepped and working, providing comprehensive information, and being sensitive to the client’s needs and pacing are prerequisites. But when  a consultant is directing the process, a VAR may want to modify their standard demonstration approach.

We got advice from four industry experts, each of them a member of ShoreTel’s Consultant Liaison Program,  who made these observations and recommendations.

“We have been to enough dog and pony shows to know that this is not the right approach, so  we no longer leave this important activity to a vendor’s discretion,” says Diane Halliwell, a Managing Director at Sperco Associates.  “We found the client’s specific needs were not addressed, and we needed more depth. So now we put together a tight agenda, specific for our clients, with calls ahead to let the vendors know what we’ll be covering, and what we expect.” Halliwell says she finds that demonstrations are much more fruitful for the client and for the vendor when they are tightly scripted.

Melissa Swartz, founder of Kansas City-based Swartz Consulting, agrees.  “We put together an agenda, with the timeframe and the topics. For example, we might ask for five minutes for a company overview, and twenty minutes to cover collaboration,” she says. “But vendors routinely switch the number and spend twenty minutes on their company and five on collaboration.” She points out that the purpose of the timeframe is to help the vendor focus on the acquiring enterprise’s priorities, and that those who do not follow the guidelines will be penalized. “When you don’t follow our agenda’s emphasis, and you were given this information up front, then typically this will be viewed by the client as a poor presentation.”

Chris Thalassinos, of Toronto’s Communications Intelligence Group, agrees about the importance that a vendor understand the client’s requirements, which were clearly iterated in the RFP. Vendors must stage the presentation to demonstrate their solution’s fit. “Just because you have a UC solution isn’t enough,” he says. Instead, VARs should be prepared to focus on the particular attributes of their solution that uniquely meet the client’s needs.

Ernie Holling, President and Chief Strategist of InTech,  points out a related possible point of failure: uninformed demonstrators. “The person actually doing the demo needs to clearly understand the points in question,” he says, recognizing that partners may have a demo team that is distinct from the account management side. “What answers to my client’s questions will be provided in the demo process?” he asks. “Instead of spending ninety percent of our time covering boilerplate issues, I want to see eighty percent of our time on target issues and maybe twenty percent on boilerplate.”

“If we tell you ‘no fluff,’ please don’t bring your marketing stuff,” says Halliwell.  “If we say we want a direct presentation, we mean a direct presentation.”

At the same time, however, vendors must be very sensitive to the different needs of different audiences.  “The number one mistake vendors make is not knowing their audience,” says Swartz, who recommends CPs make sure to know ahead of time who will be in the room so they can tailor their presentation approach.

For example, a buying committee will consist of “the consultant, the IT people and the business users. Often there will be more business users than the others, and they have the biggest voice,” Swartz says. To a business user, “the phone is the system. The server and the stuff behind it? Business users don’t live with it or do its care and feeding. The desktop client and the phone is their world–getting them comfortable with the app and phone is huge.”

She cites a cultural difference within enterprises: “The IT guys don’t care about the phones. They care about user admin and servers;  the phones are the last thing they get to.  But to the business user, that’s the system. So make sure you know who you are presenting to. Know the makeup of the audience.”

Equally important: shaping the makeup of the presenting team.

Even the most experienced system integrators can benefit from inviting a manufacturer’s product development people to attend an important demonstration. “You want to have the right people in the room, and you need to make sure clients see live demos, as appropriate,” says Halliwell. If they need support, channel partners can source product development resources by approaching the manufacturer’s Consultant Liaison Program. ShoreTel’s CLP is an information and relationship resource that serves the needs of both consultants and the channel partners they work with.

“The first thing you want to avoid in a demo is ‘I’ll get back to you on that’,” says Holling. If the subject matter experts aren’t available to attend in person, “make sure they’re at the end of a cell phone,” he says.  “Have experts on demand and available so you can reach out and solve problems then and there. This technique conveys available resources, a knowledge base and respect for the client’s time.”

In effect, use your unified communications tools to sell your unified communications tools.

Of course, prepping this expanded demo team to understand the consultant’s perspective is important. “Here’s a big ‘no’,” says Thalassinos. “As a consultant I don’t want the partner or the manufacturer to try to convince my client that they should reconsider how the system should be designed. If I say I want two interoperable platforms, I don’t want to see the partner go against that.” Every demonstration detail should support the deployment presented in the bid. “I’ve been to demos where the room is full of phones,” says Swartz, “but the phone the client will get is not one of them.” Demonstrate the proposed solution. Anything less is disingenuous.

Ultimately, a solid demonstration will address “what the client is concerned about,” says Holling. “Vendor differentiation, product specs, pricing. I’ve never found price to be the most important, but it is never forgotten. I’ve never been there when the door is closed and the client said, ‘Who is the cheapest?’ It just doesn’t happen.  Feature, function and strategy play together, and cost becomes an arbiter.”

And if you want to put some icing on the cake? Halliwell has a suggestion. “If you want to sell a million dollar system,” she says,”pay for the client to come to the presentation” and meet your people and see your lab.

Did you find this blog helpful? Share it with your colleagues via your social networks

Did you miss the first four blogs in this series?  Here are links to:

• 9 Ways Telecommunications Consultants Benefit Channel Partners
• Consultants and Channel Partners: Best Practices for Client Satisfaction
• How Consultants Add Value During Discovery
• Make the Cut: Top 10 Tips for Answering an RFP

Our sources for this blog, members of ShoreTel’s Consultant Liaison Program Advisory Board:

Chris Thalassinos of Toronto’s Communications Intelligence Group has over 20 years experience in working with companies to strategize and realize innovative business and technology solutions. As an advisor, he focuses on project leadership, solutions development and client relationship management and guides organizations to effective deployments of emerging and converging technologies.

Diane Halliwell is a Managing Director at Sperco Associates, leading the Contact Center practice.  She has consulted in the telecommunications field for over 30 years and in the Contact Center arena for over 20 years.  She provides strategic direction for the evaluation, design and implementation  of voice systems including contact center solutions. She also identifies problematic workflows, processes, and gaps in communication within an enterprise and provides recommendations to address these issues.

Ernie Holling is President and Chief Strategist of InTech, which he founded in 1986.He specializes in providing crisis intervention at the enterprise level and in developing technology strategy for complex, multi-site/vendor environments and contact centers. He is a member of the Project Manager Institute, the Telecommunications Industry Association, the Utilities Telecommunications Council, and is a past vice president of the board of directors for the Society of Telecommunications Consultants.

Melissa Swartz has been providing telecommunications consulting for her clients since 1991.  She is the founder of Kansas City-based Swartz Consulting,  a firm that assists clients in managing telecommunications technology and costs. The consultancy provides a range of services from analysis, planning, acquisition, design, and implementation to ongoing support. She is currently the President of the Society of Telecommunications Consultants.

The clean interface of diagnostics and monitoring within ShoreTel 14 provides clear visibility and proactive monitoring of the quality of calls, bandwidth utilization, performance of system components, and other parameters of the system, with relevant information consolidated and collected in an easy-to-use format.

Let’s review Diagnostics and Monitoring in more details.

Easy access from the Web
Diagnostics and Monitoring is available from the ShoreTel Director main page. While working with Diagnostics and Monitoring you can easily adjust the time interval and the refresh rate of the information you are viewing. Many of the overview elements also drill down for fast and easy access to detailed information.

Status Bar
A quick-view status bar gives an immediate visual indication of the health of various key elements in the system, including connections, trunk groups, bandwidth, voice quality, switches and servers.

Dashboard
The Diagnostics and Monitoring dashboard give a graphical representations of the call volume, call quality, and bandwidth utilization, as well as usage of trunk groups, features and CPU, so you can easily and quickly have an overview of the overall health and performance of the system.

Topology
A visual map of the topology of the system is presented with color coding to quickly indicate if any issues are cause for concern.

Status
The status section provides additional information on the system, switches, and servers, IP Phones, trunk groups, voice mail, conferencing and instant messaging.

Alerts
The Alert section provides a comprehensive and detailed view of all alerts in the system.

Call Quality
The call quality section provides detailed information regarding calls that occurred, including packet loss, jitter, delay and Mean Opinion score (MOS), for each call along with IP path trace information to help zero in on the specific portion of the network or device that may be causing problems.

System administrator can review IP Path Trace for each call in order to see the packets route between the end points as well as packets loss or delay.

Diagnostics
For advanced system analysis, system administrator can invoke remote packet capture directly from ShoreTel Director in order to further diagnose an issue.

Following ShoreTel’s Brilliantly Simple strategy, ShoreTel Release 14 will deliver easy to learn and easy to use system monitoring and diagnostics capabilities to enable proactive management of a ShoreTel system.

The firm surveyed 485 users of IPT (IP telephony) as well as legacy TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) from May to November 2012. The study covered the categories of initial capital costs, recurring costs, training cost, and planned versus unplanned downtime. Vendors in the survey were Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft, Mitel and ShoreTel.

Although organizations of every size were surveyed, the majority, 74 percent, were categorized in the small-to-midsize enterprise (SME) sector.

The results were clear:

ShoreTel costs per initial IP extension were $944, compared to $1,485 for all others.

ShoreTel also registered the lowest annual recurring costs, at $113 compared to $211, or 46 percent less than the industry average.

The survey reflected real-world results based on customers’ experiences, not laboratory tests as offered by others.

Aberdeen put the results in perspective in its conclusion, saying, “…ShoreTel’s users are clearly benefitting from a lower total cost of ownership and reduced system complexity.

“From more efficient use of network resources and requiring less staff for implementation, operation and maintenance – to lower hardware upgrade and software assurance costs – ShoreTel IPT is proving itself to be a good fit for the needs of the SME sector,” Aberdeen concluded.

The report, called “IP Telephony TCO for the SME: Think Beyond Equipment Cost,” can be accessed here.

DECT stands for Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications. It’s an industry standard that provides a device, such as a cordless telephone, with access to a fixed telecommunications network via radio. Unlike alternative cordless enterprise phones that sacrifice functionality and quality for mobility, ShoreTel users can step away from their desk without losing the ability to manage incoming inquiries or monitor shared extensions. The IP Phone 930D offers generous talk time and standby times that can easily cover a full day of calls.

Designed for use in the front office or corporate environments, the ShoreTel IP Phone 930D solution seamlessly adds cordless handsets to any ShoreTel 14 installation. DECT handsets use a dedicated frequency band that is less congested than alternative wireless technologies and provide secure communication with voice and data encryption. The ShoreTel IP Phone 930D delivers superior voice performance without the need to worry about radio interference with Wi-Fi or Bluetooth devices, avoiding possible voice quality issues.

You can check out the ShoreTel Dock on our website, or contact any of the more than 1,000 resellers around the world that will be offering this tremendous product for iPad and iPhone users.   Work is no longer a place.  It is service you provide for a company.  And ShoreTel just made it that much easier for you to be more productive with the devices you love to use every day. iCan use my iPhone in the office.  iCan use my iPad to deliver a presentation.  I just hope iCan make it to the airport for my flight in 2 hours!   Can the ShoreTel Dock change the way you work?  I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.

For three days at Interop in Las Vegas this week, the ShoreTel booth was a buzz of activity as conference goers came by in droves to checkout the ShoreTel Dock, the much-discussed business grade docking station that turns Apple iPads and iPhones into desk phones when paired with ShoreTel Mobility.

The message caught on that ShoreTel Dock fuses the convenience of Apple devices with the power of a business communications system to let users feel empowered to say, “iCan.”

ShoreTel customers and partners alike gave ShoreTel a thumbs up for the Dock.

And ShoreTel employees worked tirelessly to get out the message through the week in las Vegas.

San Francisco Giants CIO Bill Schlough spoke at Interop in Las Vegas Wednesday about how the ball club has pursued technology innovation to drive success and pointed to ShoreTel as a partner in that achievement.

“I gave ShoreTel a lot of love,” Schlough said of his keynote.

The Giants selected ShoreTel to provide unified communications at the team’s AT&T Parks four years ago and the relationship has prospered since.

In April, Schlough brought the Giants’ two, recent World Series Trophies to ShoreTel’s Sunnyvale’s headquarters to let the company’s employees get their pictures taken with them.

As the saying goes, “Three times a charm.”

Interop attracts the best and the brightest of the tech world and ShoreTel was there in full force at the opening Tuesday with an exhibit that featured the new ShoreTel Dock, the first and only enterprise-grade docking station that enables employees to undesk their desk phone.

ShoreTel attracted curious executives to its presentation as well as partners and customers happy to stay up to date with the dock and other ShoreTel innovations.

The action continues Wednesday at the ShoreTel booth and in keynotes at the conference  including a talk by ShoreTel’s friend Bil Schlough, the CIO of the San Francisco Giants, which uses ShoreTel’s IP communications solutions at AT&T Park.