dominoGuru.com

Your Development & Design Resource

I love hearing success stories on IBM Lotus Foundations!

IBM and ShoreTel Announce General Availability of ShoreTel for IBM Lotus Foundations SMBs Show Early Preference for "UCC-in -a-Box" Integrated Communications and Collaboration Solution

VOICECON, ORLANDO, Fla., March 23, 2010ShoreTel® (NASDAQ; SHOR), the leading provider of brilliantly simple IP phone systems with fully integrated Unified Communications (UC), and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that general availability of ShoreTel for IBM Lotus Foundations is planned for April, 2010. ShoreTel for IBM Lotus Foundations is a unique unified communications and collaboration (UCC) offering for small and midsize businesses.

This affordable, "UCC-in-a-box" solution is designed for the SMB budget and combines comprehensive enterprise-class UCC features, including mobility, security, email, presence, instant messaging and advanced IP telephony, in an appliance-based solution. With survival dial tone and built-in redundancy, ShoreTel for IBM Lotus Foundations contains integrated intelligent data backup for enterprise-level reliability. The solution is quick and easy to deploy in just a few clicks, and does not require on-site expertise, so SMBs can focus on running their business, not IT.

By leveraging ShoreTel's unique IP-based communication technology, IBM's Lotus Sametime's Unified Communications & Collaboration platform and IBM innovations such as autonomic self-healing and self-managing features, ShoreTel for IBM Lotus Foundations brings powerful, affordable and easy to manage communication features to the SMB market for the first time.

The ShoreTel for IBM Lotus Foundations solution has already been successfully deployed and used at several SMB customer locations.

"We were moving into a new office space and needed the features of an enterprise-level phone system that would meet the resource restrictions of a smaller company. ShoreTel for IBM Lotus Foundations met all of our requirements and reduced the amount of additional infrastructure required, while leveraging our existing infrastructure to reduce the total cost of ownership, said Jason Dill, Senior Technical Consultant, TeamCentric Technologies, Missouri. "Now we have all the enterprise-level features we need and full integration with IBM Lotus Notes applications and clients so our end users have everything they need at their fingertips to communicate and collaborate more effectively."

NEWS HIGHLIGHTS

ShoreTel for IBM Lotus Foundations delivers UCC to the SMB in an innovative, cost-effective and brilliantly simple manner. This breakthrough solution offers powerful and easy –to-manage UCC features to businesses requiring less than 500 phone lines, including:

  • Users are automatically added on the appliance and PBX
  • Basic PBX features and functions are autonomically configured
  • Users can self-configure phones by plugging into an Ethernet jack
  • A reduction in set up time

A growing number of resellers are already engaging with ShoreTel distributor, ScanSource Communications, to offer this solution.

"The solution from ShoreTel, Sametime and Foundations is a great fit for small and mid-sized businesses who want to deploy a unified communications and collaboration solution into their business quickly and securely," said Bruce Morse, IBM vice president of unified communications software. "It's clear that ShoreTel is an innovator in delivering UC solutions that measure up in terms of simplicity, cost, functionality, scale and reliability, and we are delighted to be moving forward together in this growing technology space."

"Small businesses don’t have the same financial resources as larger enterprises, but they do expect the same reliability, flexibility, and powerful features from their communications system," said John W. Combs, CEO and president, ShoreTel. "With the release of ShoreTel for IBM Lotus Foundations, we’re offering the industry’s first full-featured unified communications and collaboration solution at an affordable price point and without the overhead of other, more complex solutions."

VoiceCon 2010 attendees can view a demonstration of ShoreTel for IBM Lotus Foundations by visiting ShoreTel booths #909 and #917.

"Together, IBM and ShoreTel are delivering a solution that will allow for a comprehensive UC offering, enabling our reseller community to help improve the way end users communicate in a business setting," said Buck Baker, president, ScanSource Communications. "As the only source for this innovative UC solution, resellers will be pleased to know that ScanSource Communications can help configure and integrate the solution, as well as offer financing support, education and training opportunities and marketing services to help them better promote their business, all while the reseller focuses on enhancing and strengthening their sales and customer service."

For detailed information on ShoreTel products and features, click here.

RELATED LINKS & CONVERSATION

About IBM:
For more information about IBM Unified Communications & Collaboration, please visit www.ibm.com/software/lotus/unified-communications

About ShoreTel, Inc. 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 Munich, Germany. For more information, visit www.shoretel.com.

IBM and Lotus are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries or both.

IBM Lotus Foundations is an excellent product, and I'm always happy to see the SMB sector getting an affordable enterprise-level solution. ShoreTel's addition to Foundations is going to make the product even stronger.


About the author: Chris Toohey

Thought Leadership, Web & Mobile Application Development, Solutions Integration, Technical Writing & Mentoring

A published developer and webmaster of dominoGuru.com, Chris Toohey specializes in platform application development, solutions integration, and evangelism of platform capabilities and best practices.



More from dominoGuru.com


dominoGuru.com is powered by IBM Notes Domino XPages & hosted by Prominic.NET

Contact Us

Use our Contact / Feedback form or one of these email addresses:

Creative Commons License

Except where otherwise noted, dominoGuru.com by Chris Toohey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.