New ShoreTel UC Product Aimed at Small Business Market

By Stephanie Jordan
in

Interested small- and mid-sized businesses can look forward to a unified communications (UC) offering coming later this quarter. Originally debuted at Lotusphere 2010, and formally launched at VoiceCon late last month, ShoreTel and IBM have partnered to offer ShoreTel for IBM Lotus Foundations.

According to the companies, the unique UC and collaboration offering combines a small business appliance, presence awareness, instant messaging, emailing, calendaring and IP telephony in an “out-of-the-box” solution.

“As unified communications and modern collaboration tools continue to deliver significant productivity and cost advantages to larger enterprises, ShoreTel is committed to delivering brilliantly simple solutions that also allow our SMB customers to quickly realize these benefits,” explains John W. Combs, chairman and CEO of ShoreTel.

Combs goes on to say that early deployments among customers with limited IT resources, including Raleigh, N.C.-based EnVision Solutions LLC have shown positive results and offers enterprise-class functionality in one easy to install, manage and use appliance.

“A large part of our business is conducted via telephone or through electronic communications like email, IM, and through interfaces such as portals and Web conferencing,” explains Douglas Henderson, president of Envision Solutions. “The ShoreTel and IBM Foundations integrated solution not only provides us with the continuity of communication essential to our business, but it has reduced our ongoing costs and greatly enhanced the way we communicate. With the ShoreTel business communication system, we have no single point of failure so that if any one office is struck by a disaster the entire company still maintains phone capability without interruption. No one in our company is ever in a black spot and unreachable, including when we are on the road or telecommuting. Although we are a small company, we have the same needs and expectations from our IT infrastructure as any large company. The ShoreTel and IBM Foundations solution has provided us with all these capabilities in a solution that is simple enough for us to manage without outside help and at a price that actually reduces our ongoing operational costs.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Last week Messaging News held its live Webinar—Unified, Secure and Compliant: Best Practices for Unified Communications. We discussed how UC platforms extend the communications borders of the modern corporate enterprise, increasing productivity while driving down costs, among other topics. The archived Webinar is available to view on our site.

Published April 9, 2010