ShoreTel Extends Virtualization Support to Enterprise Contact Center

ShoreTel Inc. (NASDAQ: SHOR), the leading provider of brilliantly simple IP phone systems with fully integrated unified communications (UC), today announced VMware certification for the Enterprise Contact Center (ECC) solution. An increasing number of enterprises are deploying ShoreTel in a virtualized environment not only for the significant cost savings but also for easier administration and increased system availability.

Key News Highlights

• ShoreTel empowers customers to choose the implementation model that best fits their business – whether customers prefer a virtualized model or a more traditional approach, the choice is theirs.
• Over 1,000 customers in 26 countries have already deployed ShoreTel software in a virtual environment. The additional certification of ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center as VMware Ready means resellers and customers can be confident that the mission critical Contact Center has been fully tested to run on VMware which assures stability and reliability.
• The ability to virtualize key applications complements ShoreTel’s distributed architecture and allows customers to take advantage of virtualization benefits, such as better server utilization, centralized deployment for more efficient applications management, and improved business continuity.

Quotes

"Virtualization is important to contact center management as corporate IT departments increasingly embrace data center deployments and virtualization of both infrastructure and applications. Few, if any, competitors can match the simplicity of ShoreTel’s single image contact center virtualization; most involve complex management of multiple virtualized images.”

- Sheila McGee-Smith, president and principal analyst of McGee-Smith Analytics.

"Virtualization gives IT departments the ability to increase their visibility and control of their resources, all while driving a richer and expanded role for automation and management. Empowering customers to minimize their IT operational expenses by reducing both planned and unplanned downtime is a vision we are proud to share with ShoreTel.”

- Parag Patel, vice president, alliances, VMware.

"ShoreTel support for VMware extends beyond the core IP PBX UC and now includes the Contact Center as well so customers can leverage their VMware environment even more broadly. The inherent brilliant simplicity within the ShoreTel solution is further enhanced by the additional reliability and scalability benefits of a VMware platform.”

- Kevin Gavin, chief marketing officer at ShoreTel.

"The tools we use to communicate with customers are crucial to our success. Deploying ShoreTel on our VMware platform has provided us numerous benefits including dynamic resource allocation. ShoreTel’s support for virtualization enables us to manage all of our headquarters and remove branches from a single console, resulting in savings upwards of 80 percent. It has made for a significantly improved ROI.”

- Brody Walker, vice president, IT manager at First Security Bank.

"From the start, one of our requirements for a PBX was that it could be virtualized. While other vendors supported it, the requirements were such that it was consuming an entire physical server host for the virtual operating system. The constraints simply weren’t feasible for the virtual environment. The benefit ShoreTel brought was the ability to completely virtualize the PBX management servers and not have to invest into server hardware initially or on a recurring basis when the maintenance schedule elapsed. This resulted in less hardware, less maintenance, and lower costs.”

- Corey Fling, director national services and telecom at Point Loma Nazarene University.

"We have seen more than half of our new deployments utilizing virtualization since ShoreTel began supporting it over a year and a half ago - especially in larger deployments where virtualization infrastructures are already built out. Because ShoreTel does not limit supported hardware to select vendors, customers are able to leverage their existing server infrastructure, thus reducing the total cost of deployment and maintenance."

- Kurt Wright, director of technical services at IPC Technologies, Inc.

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About ShoreTel

ShoreTel, Inc. (NASDAQ: SHOR) is the provider of brilliantly simple Unified Communication (UC) solutions based on its award-winning IP business phone system. We offer organizations of all sizes integrated, voice, video, data, and mobile communications on an open, distributed IP architecture that helps significantly reduce the complexity and costs typically associated with other solutions. The feature-rich ShoreTel UC system offers the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) and the highest customer satisfaction in the industry, in part because it is easy to deploy, manage, scale and use. Increasingly, companies around the world are finding a competitive edge by replacing business-as-usual with new thinking, and choosing ShoreTel to handle their integrated business communication. ShoreTel is based in Sunnyvale, California, and has regional offices in Austin, Texas; United Kingdom; Sydney, Australia; and Singapore. For more information, visit www.shoretel.com.