ShoreTel customers rate its technology, customer service, and value highest in the industry

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Sept. 15, 2010 –ShoreTel® (NASDAQ: SHOR), the leading provider of brilliantly simple IP phone systems with fully integrated unified communications (UC), today announced that for the seventh consecutive year, it has received the highest ratings for IP telephony products from IT decision makers in Nemertes Research annual benchmark. The high ratings earned ShoreTel the Nemertes PilotHouse Award for Best IP Telephony Provider–Market Challengers. Nemertes, an independent research firm based in Illinois, received ratings for 37 IP telephony vendors and determined the award solely on the views and experiences of more than 2,000 actual users of IP telephony systems.

ShoreTel continues to win by a significant margin in all areas evaluated, beating all providers, including Cisco, Avaya, and Mitel, in all categories. “ShoreTel has maintained its first-place standing, with more authority than ever,” the report states. “This year, ShoreTel is the winner with an impressive 4.22 overall score.” The next highest overall score from a competing vendor was 3.90.

 

NEWS HIGHLIGHTS

• Customers rated their providers on a scale of 1 to 5 in the following categories: Technology, Customer Service, and Value. ShoreTel was the only vendor to score above a 4 rating in all categories. Nemertes analysts also conducted in-depth conversations with a subset of IP telephony decision-makers to understand the reasons behind the results.
• Technology: This year, ShoreTel received its highest rating yet for technology, 4.33, surpassing last year’s 4.08. “From a technology perspective, participants rating ShoreTel also say the system is easy to understand and not overly complex like some of its competitors,” the report states.
• Customer Service: ShoreTel received a 4.10 rating for customer service, another jump over the previous year. One research participant, a CIO of a $100 million K-12 school districts is quoted in the report as saying of ShoreTel, “They are sterling relative to their peers.” ShoreTel was the only vendor to score above 4 in this category.
• Value: The value rating measures what customers think about what they get for their money. With the top value rating of 4.24, ShoreTel far surpassed the competition, beating out vendors such as Cisco, Avaya, Mitel and Microsoft.

 

QUOTES

“We are honored to earn this highly prestigious award for the seventh year running. Clearly, ShoreTel customers value our commitment to product and service excellence. ShoreTel’s all-in-one UC system was designed to eliminate complexity by offering a brilliantly simple solution to help our customers align business communications with business goals, improving efficiency, reducing costs and increasing productivity.  Our partners and employees understand how important it is to our customers that the decision to bring ShoreTel into the business is the right decision. Our consistently high marks in the Nemertes PilotHouse Awards indicate that we continue to deliver on these promises”

-          John W. Combs, CEO  ShoreTel

 

“ShoreTel is the only vendor in any technology category to have received the highest scores since Nemertes started tracking IT decision-maker ratings seven years ago. ShoreTel's customers continually rate its customer service, technology and value ahead of all of its competitors."

-          Robin Gareiss, Nemertes’ executive vice president and senior founding partner

 

Sinclair Community College is the largest regional provider of online education, with more than 180 different online courses and a mission that focuses on providing accessible, high quality, affordable learning opportunities. As a commuter college that depends on the telephone to ensure smooth communication with students, Sinclair College needed to replace a legacy phone system from a manufacturer that had dropped out of the picture. ShoreTel was Sinclair’s choice for the future.

Sinclair Community College encompasses five remote campuses covering a forty-mile radius from its Dayton Oh campus, and servers more than 27,000 commuter students. The largest regional provider of online education, its' mission is to provide accessible, high quality, affordable learning opportunities. Of the nearly 37,000 calls it handles during peak registration periods, most concern financial aid and require the expertise of agents with very specific training. As the economy drives more people to move towards new careers and qualifications, Sinclair expects peak call rates to top 46,000 in 2010.

In 2002, Sinclair's legacy Fujitsu PBX manufacturer went out of business. Although the PBX system met current needs, college staff recognized that the system ultimately needed replacement. With a knowledgeable IT staff active in organizations such as the Association for Information Communications Technology Professionals in Higher Education (ACUTA) which has a well established VoIP special interest group, Sinclair was well prepared to evaluate VoIP and IP-PBX solutions against the specific needs of higher education settings. After talking to Accent Information Systems, a ShoreTel partner, two IP-based communication systems made it to Sinclair's short list, Avaya and ShoreTel.

Find out more about the solution by clicking this link: http://www.shoretel.com/resource_center/success_stories/Sinclair_Community_College.html

Network World has posted an article about the ShoreTel 8 release that was reported here back in April. The article gives an overview of the new ShoreGear switches and Personal Call Manager software. You can find some of it below and the remainder here.

Credit: NetworkWorld.com

ShoreTel earlier this week announced several software and hardware upgrades and two new voice switches. Included in the announcement are enhancements to the ShoreWare Call Manager product line, more open interfaces for integration, and adds two new voice switches: the ShoreGear 24A and the ShoreGear 30.

The ShoreWare Personal Call Manager has been upgraded to provide more intuitive interfaces. Added features include an integrated client user interface with a main display for calling features and tabs for messages and history; simplified access to features designed to be easier to use and find; quick and easy dialing with exchange and phone directory along with just in time telephony presence; and a simplified, single-level user interface with personal and advanced merged options.

The ShoreWare Professional Call Manager has added improvements to its basic voice communications and it now provides automatic and on-demand video communications. The Instant Messaging interface upgrades include easy sidebar conversations; on the phone communications; and interfaces for a third party presence server. The unified communications suite has added improved call control, video calling and IM access and a rich presence integration; the suite now also supports a softphone

Credit: NetworkWorld.com

Enterprises are starting to use the BlackBerry in a new way: as a means of taking their desk phones mobile.

Research In Motion, known mainly as a mobile e-mail vendor, is making a surprising effort to leverage the voice side of the BlackBerry smartphone, positioning its server software as a way to blend cellular and corporate voice networks by linking the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) with the corporate PBX.

The result is a set of capabilities, achieved without major infrastructure changes, that many enterprises probably will find compelling. They include a single corporate telephone number that rings on a cell phone, an office phone, a business phone at home, or on a BlackBerry, extending PBX features to the BlackBerry. (Compare unified communications products.)

Fayetteville State University (FSU) in North Carolina experienced the power of RIM's Mobile Voice System (MVS) when a key storage-area network suffered a catastrophic failure, says Joseph Vittorelli, the university's director of systems and infrastructure. Within minutes, he connected to every staff member he needed -- regardless of where they were -- via the conference feature, made assignments and got the team working together on very short notice.

FSU, Dell and Chicago-based produce-wholesaler Anthony Morano Co. were panelists at this week's annual BlackBerry user conference, discussing fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) and MVS.

Another change at FSU is that voice mails -- a product of people's inability to connect -- have dropped to zero in many cases. Vittorelli recently got a call from a user who returned from lunch, found she had three voice mails and demanded to know why the calls had not reached her BlackBerry smartphone.

"Enterprises are realizing as they look at fixed-mobile convergence and unified communications that mobility is a big part of this," says David Heit, director of software product management, who focuses on MVS, server software introduced in 2007 and based on a product acquired when RIM bought Ascendent Systems.

MVS links the BES to a large number of PBX brands, forging voice- and call-control links between the BlackBerry cellular world, corporate telecom systems, and an array of carrier-base landline and wireless networks. Users get a new corporate phone number that overlays their cell-phone number. All inbound calls are made to that one number, ring on all of the user's phones, and connect on whichever phone the user answers. "I now have the concepts of call routing and call control [with the BlackBerry devices]," Heit says.

Heit demonstrates on his own BlackBerry, selecting a five-digit corporate extension at a desk in RIM's Waterloo, Ontario, headquarters and pressing a button to connect over AT&T's Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution network. For the first time, the BlackBerry becomes in effect the user's mobile desk phone, not just his mobile e-mail device.

It's all done without wading into what Heit calls the "thick soup" of the complexities of VoIP infrastructure deployments, of FMC architectures, and the like. "The trend to all-IP converged infrastructures will take years," he says.

You can see the whole article here.

Here's an interesting article from TechRepublic blogger Bill Detwiler regarding the price of oil effecting demand for teleworking and the impact on corporate networks. As oil prices rise, businesses will take a harder look at allowing employees to work from home instead of incurring the cost of commuting on a daily basis.

This is an article from Networkworld.com regarding LifeSize Communications.