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

ShoreTel Reaches One Million Phone Milestone With Shipment to Non-Profit Community Health Center Company Ships One Millionth Phone to Clinica Romero, which works on behalf of the underserved population of Greater Los Angeles

The leading provider of brilliantly simple IP phone systems with fully integrated Unified Communications (UC), is pleased to announce that is has shipped its one millionth phone to Clinica Romero in Los Angeles as part of an initial deployment that includes more than 180 phones in three locations.

"We're thrilled to be the recipient of the one millionth phone since ShoreTel is one in a million when it comes to phone systems," said Robert Desmond, CFO at Clinica Romero. "The ShoreTel solution provides a solid platform for future growth and enables us to deploy a single phone system across all of our three sites, and manage them from a single point without requiring additional IT resources. Plus, the easy to learn features create a highly efficient call center to better serve our community."

As a private, nonprofit, federally qualified community health center, Clinica Romero operates in East Los Angeles neighborhoods, serving disadvantaged patients, including the homeless, from more than 140 Southern California zip codes. ShoreTel features such as workgroups, hunt groups and office anywhere, help Clinica Romero ensure that no call goes unanswered, and that patients are routed to the most qualified staff member as quickly as possible.

Despite the economic downturn, ShoreTel has maintained a steady growth over the past few years, in part due to its management simplicity and obsessive focus on customer satisfaction. In April 2009, independent analyst firm, Synergy Research, announced that ShoreTel had achieved the No.1 market-share position worldwide in the small and midsize market for its desktop application, ShoreTel Call Manager. In November, Nemertes Research awarded ShoreTel Best Overall VoIP Provider for the sixth year in a row, based on independent surveys of IT professionals.

It has been said before that the "first million is the hardest". We are glad to have ShoreTel as a Premier partner. Let's get the 2nd million!

Managed services is a big part of the IT industry these days. Accent's managed services product (AMS) is a large part of our forward looking business plan and is a service that many of our customers are evaluating as a way to ease the burden of the internal IT staff (if one exists at all).

NetworkWorld.com has an article up about the IT managed services market and its continual growth through 2012. The article states "the global market for managed services will deliver revenues of $66 billion by 2012."

The Cisco commissioned study was performed by Ovum, a consulting firm that specializes in telecom and software consulting. Ovum "finds that the managed services generating the most interest among corporate users are managed metro Ethernet, managed IP, VPNs, managed VoIP and managed security."

"IP VPN services are the largest global managed services market, with revenues totaling $17 billion, the study finds." However, VoIP looks to be the biggest growth area in the coming years with an expected growth percentage of near 40%.

The article is pretty good and can be found here.

Credit: SC MagazineUS.com

The Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) products of Avaya, Cisco and Nortel are filled with more than 100 vulnerabilities, according to a report from VoIPshield Laboratories, the research arm of security startup VoIPshield Systems.