Unified Communications Featured Article

If you’ve paid attention to the PBX (News - Alert) industry at all, you’ll have a consistent flow of customer wins by ShoreTel. The VoIP industry is doing well, and despite current market challenges, ShoreTel seems to be as well. ShoreTel CEO says the key to success in VoIP and Unified Communications solutions today is simplicity – vendors that make installation, management, and use easy are going to find widespread success. I took the opportunity to ask Combs about the VoIP market and how ShoreTel is approaching it in advance of ITEXPO (News - Alert). This is what he had to say.  You can hear John's thoughts first hand at his keynote addess at ITEXPO on September 1, at 4:30pm.

 

 

JC:       By far, the biggest challenge facing the industry today is keeping it simple. As IP-based communication technologies continue to rapidly evolve, vendors struggle to integrate their communications solutions into the data network in a clean, simple and easy-to-manage way. The result is complexity upon complexity that frustrates the end users and requires highly skilled IT experts and certified technicians to manage and support. Nowhere is it more important to keep it simple than in the hands of the end user.

 

Technology that is not easy to use, simple to understand and that works for the user, rather than demanding more work to figure it out, simply will not be adopted. No organization wants to see a growing mountain of help desk tickets, and a phone system that everyone hates. This also impacts those who manage the systems. Upgrades become major overhauls, draining valuable IT time, additional resources and cost, and introducing risk into operations. This complexity stands out vividly when you review the time and cost associated with training your technicians to support the systems. 

 

Complexity also compromises reliability and disaster recovery, adding even more cost, time and resources that could be focusing on core business projects. Regardless of size, organizations today need communications solutions that are easy to install and deploy, and that don’t further strain space, energy and server management requirements in the data center.

 

JC:       Keeping it simple is less of a challenge for ShoreTel and more of a mantra. The ShoreTel UC system was built from the ground up for IP networks, and is designed to be brilliantly simple to deploy, manage and use. From day one, we focused on taking out complexity and meeting business needs with features and functionality that are easy for end-users to adopt. The system is easy to manage from a singe Web-based console, even across multiple sites spanning multiple geographies, resulting in the lowest total cost of ownership in the industry.

 

Modern tools, such as instant messaging, video, voicemail and e-mail are instantly accessible through an intuitive user interface, and readily interchangeable depending on the business need at the time. Employees decide the best way to communicate, and are provided with all they need to make communication happen quickly and easily so they can be more responsive, and ultimately more productive. And with phones designed both for ergonomics and elegance, ShoreTel continues to turn highly satisfied customers into raving fans. The primary driver of ShoreTel’s superior customer satisfaction is the Personal Call Manager which acts as the communications dashboard for each end user. It is easy and intuitive to use and enables your clients to maximize their communications productivity.

 

JC:       As the workforce becomes ever more mobile and organizations look to save costs and support green initiatives by providing flexible work environments, the broadband stimulus plan will help increase the number of remote employees who can work out of their homes or from other satellite locations, over inexpensive yet reliable broadband connections. As a result, organizations will increasingly turn to the communications market for products and services that enable them to reach this expanded pool of skilled workers and bridge the location gap. In turn, these users can take a ShoreTel phone over a secure VPN connection, and have access to all of the functionality they need to serve customers as though they were physically located at the corporate office. It’s an ideal solution for roles such as virtual contact center agents, mobile professionals, and other functions that don’t need to be at a central location to do their jobs.

 

JC:       Increasingly, today’s UC solutions must offer business agility through ease of interoperability and integration, as organizations seek to eliminate the traditional costs and risks of locking in on proprietary systems. Choice, based on an open ecosystem and the richness of unified communications, is vital to organizations that are looking for flexibility and performance to stay competitive today.

 

The ability to communicate with other business constituents effectively and efficiently should be the goal of all UC solutions, and only those that are open to newer technologies, for instance session initiation protocol (SIP) and best of breed applications, will be adopted. Open interfaces, standards-based solutions and innovative ecosystems are a reality and we’ll see an increasing demand for them from IT professionals and end-users alike.

 

JC:       Since we are not encumbered by either legacy solutions or a monolithic mindset, we have the agility to deliver upgrades and easy-to-use new features quickly as UC technologies continue to evolve. We’ll continue to see ShoreTel being selected by larger enterprise businesses in excess of 1,000 lines, as organizations increasingly look for powerful yet easy to manage solutions that deliver a low total cost of ownership and productivity gains. ShoreTel just passed our 10,000th enterprise customer engagement, and are looking forward to serving the next 10,000 as we extend our global reach and partner with industry leaders such as Telstra (News - Alert) in Australia.

 

It’s this growing reputation for product excellence and world-class service that means you’ll see more deployment of ShoreTel applications with legacy PBXs from Nortel (News - Alert), Avaya and Mitel, as these customers seek to migrate to all IP solutions, and ShoreTel continues to focus on delivering applications that help our customers reduce costs and boost performance.

 

JC:       As I have stated on numerous occasions, the biggest impact of Avaya’s bid for Nortel, if it goes through, will be on existing Nortel customers. Indicators so far lead me to conclude that existing Nortel customers will get the short end of the stick when Avaya no longer invests in the engineering resources required to maintain two separate products, and eventually forces Nortel customers to migrate to a new Avaya platform.

 

Another major concern is around the financial viability of one huge struggling company taking on another. It’s common knowledge that Avaya has had its own share of financial issues recently, and by taking on more debt to buy Nortel, the question becomes whether the resulting megalith will have the resources and long-term stability to satisfy its expanded, and probably very nervous, customer base.

 

JC:       Brilliant simplicity. Something that most IT leadership finds exciting is discovering solutions that leverage technology to deliver real solutions so they can do more with less. By delivering solutions for telephony, unified communications, and contact center that are easy to deploy, manage, and use, ShoreTel does just that. A ShoreTel UC system enables the IT team to be more effective and end users to be more productive.

 

Attendees can see this in action at the show, as we demonstrate our award-winning ShoreWare Professional Call Manager, an advanced UC interface application for end users that takes the most advanced and sophisticated UC functionality on the market today and presents it in an easy to use, intuitive application that has converted even the most hardened technophobe into a desktop communications aficionado.

 

JC:       Well, most people would go with the odds-on favorites — frontrunners like either the Yankees or the Dodgers. However, as a big Giants fan, I'm still hoping ShoreTel’s home team will add a power bat to their lineup, especially with all the savings they’re realizing with their new ShoreTel UC system, and win the wild-card. If that happens, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see some astonished faces in the playoffs. The Giants picked ShoreTel as the nimble new innovator in a major-league line up of all the usual faces, so I'm going with a nimble player, too — the San Francisco Giants.