- Who is Teledata?
Teledata Communications is a premier systems integration company located in Kansas City providing consulting, design, engineering and implementation of turnkey business communications solutions. Teledata Communications provides a partnership with its clients to evaluate how technology can provide your company with a competitive edge. As your trusted partner, Teledata Communications can implement comprehensive solutions including network assessments, project management, IP telephony, LAN/WAN implementation, and 24/7 support.
More reasons to make Teledata your partner:
- Ranked by Telecom Business Magazine as one of the top 500 firms in the competitive communications marketplace
- Who is ShoreTel?
ShoreTel is a leading provider of Pure IP Unified Communications. The ShoreTel IP Unified Communications (UC) system offers complete feature transparency across your enterprise. Gone are the days of multiple PBXs and separate systems for voicemail, automated attendant and Automatic Call Distribution. With ShoreTel’s UC system, the phone system is distributed, the voice applications are integrated, and the management interface is best in class.
ShoreTel’s solution enables companies of any size to seamlessly integrate all communications-voice, video, data, and messaging-with their business processes. Independent of device or location, ShoreTel's distributed architecture eliminates the traditional costs, complexity and reliability issues typically associated with other solutions. ShoreTel continues to deliver the highest levels of customer satisfaction, ease of use and manageability while driving down the overall total cost of ownership and yielding a superior return on investment. ShoreTel is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, and has regional offices in the United Kingdom, Sydney, Australia and Munich, Germany.
To learn more please click here.
- What is VOIP and what benefits does it offer?
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology offers businesses an unbeatable proposition: streamline telecommunications while reducing total cost of ownership. VoIP integrates business communications into a single infrastructure: the data network. From small businesses to large enterprises, VoIP users report increased productivity, flexibility, and lower bills.
Voice over IP systems promise to increase productivity while lowering costs--a win-win situation for businesses. The basis of this claim is the technology’s convergence of voice and data onto a single unified network. Users enjoy easier access to information, greater flexibility, and more advanced functionality. And the streamlined infrastructure is easier and cheaper to maintain.
- How is the ShoreTel easier to use and manage than other solutions?
Any vendor can say their platform is easy to use and manage.
With a perceptive design and plug-and-play implementation, ShoreTel systems live up to their reputation as the industry's easiest solution to deploy, use and manage. ShoreTel systems remain flexible, so if companies want to change locations, employees can just pick up their phones and move. The minute the phones are reconnected, ShoreTel Smart systems know who users are and the features they want - automatically.
With a single management interface users will spend very little effort managing this streamlined system. And because ShoreTel technology requires almost no staff training or support, it saves both time and money.
This ease of use has earned ShoreTel varies awards including Best in VoiceCon three years in a row, the “Easiest to Use IP-PBX, Large Systems” by Miercom and BCR and TechWorld’s VoIP/Convergence Product of the Year.
- How reliable is ShoreTel’s platform?
Unlike competitors who opted for expediency and cost shaving, ShoreTel instead chose the path that led to greater reliability. And it is because of this path that you find only one moving part inside a ShoreTel IPBX: a fan. The IPBX also operates on the mission critical operating system called VX Works. This real-time operating system can be found in products such as the Mars Lunar Lander, pacemakers for your heart and the anti-lock braking system of your car. With few moving parts, a mission critical operating system, and more importantly, no spinning media, ShoreTel is able to provide customers with maximum reliability that exceeds expectations.
Since competing products typically use an architecture that has either evolved from traditional PBX platforms or traditional data-switch platforms, these systems require additional equipment at each site, or multiple clustered servers to achieve acceptable levels of reliability. However, in both cases, this means additional complexity and expense. Either you have to manage a web of marginally reliable disk drives that are responsible for providing mission critical telephony functions, such as dial tone, or you're stuck with a labyrinth of management interfaces that have to be configured at each site. In some cases you might have both. One minor configuration error and isolating the fault can feel a lot like looking for the blown bulb in a huge strand of Christmas tree lights.
With today’s ShoreTel IP telephony system, an estimated Mean Time Before Failures (MTBF) of around 540,016 hours can be achieved, with one hour of time required to repair each failure, providing customers with a 99.9998% availability range. In other words, a ShoreGear switch will, on average, be down for one hour every 61 years. Yet, ShoreGear products installed in the field routinely exceed their predicted availability. For example, though the ShoreGear 60 switch has a MTBF of 91,000 hours, its demonstrated MTBF is actually in the neighborhood of 519,359, which yields an availability of 99.9998%.
- In the case of a system outage, does ShoreTel’s platform provide failover?
Since call control in the ShoreTel system is distributed, redundancy is delivered cost effectively with N+1 rather than Nx2 which is required in other centralized systems. For example, if a voice switch supporting IP phones fails or is isolated by a network fault, the phones will automatically failover to another voice switch at the site providing complete redundancy. Additional levels of redundancy can be configured by simply adding additional voice switches.
With ShoreTel, organizations need not worry about a single point of failure like you find in other competitors’ solutions. In ShoreTel’s distributed architecture, each unit is a peer, with intelligence built right in and system load shared across all units. With ShoreTel’s unrivaled distributed architecture, workload is automatically transferred across the remaining units, without affecting the rest of the phone system. Users whose IP phones are networked with each of those units may continue to work unaffected. Dial tone is available continuously. Voicemail comes back on after the appointed backup server takes over.
ShoreTel also supports PSTN failover in order to provide seamless and complete call control at remote sites even when a WAN fails.
- How does ShoreTel’s call quality compare to other platforms?
Based on independent tests conducted and published by Nemertes Research in March 2007, ShoreTel consistently earned top marks for superior IP telephony call quality when compared to other vendors’ platforms. ShoreTel’s technology leadership in dynamic echo cancellation, jitter buffering and lost packet handling results in low latency and toll-quality voice communications.
To read more information about this study please click here.
Mature IP telephony is a stable communications platform today. Users and their callers won't be able to tell the difference between phone calls over traditional landlines or phone calls over the local and wide area network if the solution is implemented correctly. With improvements in technology occurring at a rapid pace, IP telephony will continue to advance in quality.
- Is the ShoreTel platform proprietary?
ShoreTel’s underlying architecture has been designed from the ground up to offer a Pure IP solution built upon the commitment of incorporating open standards that are industry supported.
ShoreTel has proven this commitment to support industry standards through the use of:
Where accepted industry standards exist, ShoreTel will support them and, where possible, even give customers the option of multiple standards support. That's why ShoreTel systems integrate with switches and routers from all the leading data vendors. Customers are never faced with costly network upgrades mandated by proprietary vendors.
- Is the platform interoperable with Microsoft Windows?
As of release 8.1, ShoreTel is currently interoperable with these Microsoft products:
Windows XP Professional (with SP2 or SP3) |
Windows Server 2003 (Enterprise or Standard Editions only) with SP2 |
Windows Vista Business Edition (with or without SP1) |
Windows Server 2003 Release 2 (with SP2) |
Windows Vista Enterprise Edition (with and without SP1) |
Window Terminal Servers (with SP2) |
Internet Explorer 6.0 (with SP2), Internet Explorer 7 |
Live Communication Server 2005 |
Outlook 2003 (with SP2), Outlook 2007 |
Office Communication Server 2007 |
- How does the power usage compare to other vendors’ platforms?
Based on independent tests conducted and published by The Tolly Group in July 2008, the ShoreTel Unified Communications system held a clear advantage over the Cisco Unified Communications Manager, consuming up to 45 percent less power. Testing and analysis was conducted across three classes of enterprise deployments.
In addition to testing power consumption of VoIP communications in enterprise scenarios, The Tolly Group conducted a comparison test of monochromatic GbE-based IP phones. The ShoreTel phone required almost 60 percent less power than its Cisco counterpart in idle state, and 33 percent less power in active mode during a voice call.
By reducing power usage, you can lower cooling costs which translates into a lower Total Cost of Ownership.
To learn more about this study please click here.
- What would be the estimated Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and Return on Investment (ROI)?
Nemertes Research determined that for implementations of both up to and over 1,000 units, ShoreTel costs the least per user, further validating its high scores for ease of installation and value.
According to Nemertes Research, "ShoreTel customers feel they get good value with ShoreTel’s product line. The capital, implementation and operational costs are lower than most competitors. ShoreTel also includes its ShoreWare Personal Call Manager with every license, and customers place value on that because they receive features such as visual voicemail, directory integration, and click-to-call capabilities.”
With lower installation costs, lower infrastructure costs with a single WAN for voice and data, lower service and support costs, lower WAN connectivity costs, lower ongoing management costs, lower application development/interoperability costs and lower training costs it makes sense why ShoreTel can offer the best TCO/ROI.
To learn more about what the TCO/ROI would be for your organization, please contact our Sales Team today. They can assist you in the development process and arm you with the tools necessary for making the right decision.
- How good is ShoreTel’s customer service?
ShoreTel has a ten-year track record of focusing on response time, account service, RFP process, and warranty issues. Customers like that ShoreTel listens well to suggestions for upgrades and improvements. It is also with its network of dedicated partners, such as Teledata Communications, that it is able to provide responsive support to hundreds of successful enterprises. This outstanding level of customer service has won ShoreTel the Customersat.com award in 2007, the Best in Class for Customer Service in ContactCenterWorld.com's 5th annual Members' Choice Awards in 2007, as well as ranking #1 in Customer Service on the Nemertes Research Report five years in a row.
- Is the ShoreTel platform easily expandable?
Whether standalone or integrated, the ShoreTel platform easily expands up or down while automatically seeking and enabling new locations. Users' in-house administration can add phones, change extensions, alter voice mail and reconfigure options without help. If customers need a hand, local ShoreTel partners such as Teledata Communications can aid in installing new systems and enabling branch offices.
So whether you are starting with a branch office or corporate headquarters, ShoreTel technology is the easiest way to embrace IP telephony and remaining a step ahead of the competition. Start the conversion to this proven technology today and begin to see system-wide savings right away.
- How can I learn more about ShoreTel’s platform?
If you are interested in learning more about ShoreTel’s platform and want to experience it first-hand please contact us today. We can bring the system to you!
