Contact Information: Press Contact: Rachel Shelton Eastwick Communications Tel: +650-480-4069 rshelton@eastwick.com
ShoreTel Receives an A+ for Performance and Savings in Education
ShoreTel's Easy-to-Use, Easy-to-Manage UC System Drives Costs Down While Creating an Advanced Communications Infrastructure
| Source: ShoreTel
SUNNYVALE, CA--(Marketwire - November 4, 2009) - ShoreTel® (NASDAQ : SHOR ), the leading
provider of brilliantly simple IP phone systems with fully integrated
Unified Communications, is getting straight A's when it comes to providing
educational institutions with an advanced communication system that
facilitates classroom teaching and administration while driving down
telecommunications costs.
Recent ShoreTel deployment success stories in the education sector include
the Amarillo ISD in Texas, the Perkiomen Valley School District in
Pennsylvania, Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio, and the Spring
Branch Independent School District in Houston, Texas.
Current economic conditions have put the squeeze on school district budgets
across the country, adding tremendous pressure to reduce costs. But
lowering costs without cutting educational programs requires taking a hard
look at reducing infrastructure and administrative costs.
The ShoreTel UC system easily helps schools make the grade -- for example
by reducing the number of required phone lines schools must pay for, and by
eliminating costly charges for having consultants perform moves, adds and
changes (MACs). Meanwhile, The ShoreTel system is qualified under E-rate,
which allows schools to acquire productivity-boosting UC systems when
budgets are tight.
SELECT EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS USING SHORETEL
Amarillo ISD, Amarillo, Texas
With 53 campuses and two other facilities, an, easy-to-manage
communications system was a must for the Amarillo Independent School
District. With its ShoreTel UC system, the district has established a
single receptionist for the entire district, dramatically improving call
management, while the ability to perform MACs in-house has reduced
administration costs. The district also plans to assign a phone number to
every instructional staff member. While they won't have handsets, they can
use ShoreTel voicemail boxes as communication hubs. Voicemails are
delivered by the ShoreTel system to Microsoft Outlook email inboxes,
allowing staff to easily respond by email or any phone.
Perkiomen Valley School District, Pa.
Prior to deploying its ShoreTel UC system, the Perkiomen Valley School
District, which serves about 5,800 students, faced rising costs and hours
of frustration related to its hosted Cisco voice over IP (VoIP) system.
With the highly reliable ShoreTel UC system, the district has estimated it
is saving approximately 75 percent of the cost of the hosted system,
enabling it to reallocate budget toward additional educational resources.
In addition, easy system management from anywhere on the network frees up
time for the IT group to focus on other mission-critical projects without
requiring additional headcount.
Sinclair Community College, Dayton, Ohio
Out of 1,200 community colleges in the nation, Sinclair Community College
is one of 20 board member colleges of the League for Innovation in the
Community College. With its current PBX system no longer supported by the
previous vendor, the college sought a state-of-the-art platform that would
improve communications between students and faculty and support a call
center that can reach 20,000 calls a month. Sinclair chose the ShoreTel UC
system because of its distributed architecture, support for analog phones
and the ability to deploy in phases -- which meant it could leverage
existing equipment -- ShoreTel's lower TCO, and the system's ease of
administration and maintenance.
Spring Branch ISD, Houston, Texas
Prior to deploying its ShoreTel UC system, the Spring Branch Independent
School District faced a daunting communications challenge: each of its 46
campuses and eight other facilities had its own aging, independent phone
system. After an extensive RFP process, the district selected ShoreTel
based in part on its ease of use and management, the resilience of its
distributed architecture, and the system's communications features. With
the single system in place, it's now easy and cost-effective to manage the
entire system, including MACs, from a single location. The E911 emergency
notification application is connected to the local police department and
the county, and in the event of an emergency call, they will know exactly
where the call originated. Spring Branch is also using a custom application
developed by ShoreTel Professional Services that keeps outside calls from
ringing classroom phones during school hours, but still allows principals
to call the teachers when required.
QUOTES
Gary Allen, CTO, Amarillo ISD: "The ShoreTel UC system has brought
communications sanity to our large and geographically distributed school
district. It's extremely reliable and easy to use and administer, which has
significantly reduced our ongoing costs. And integration with Microsoft
Outlook has enabled us to introduce new capabilities that make it much
easier for our teachers to communicate with parents, administrators and
other teachers."
Mike Balik, IT Manager, Perkiomen Valley School District: "The ShoreTel UC
system is not something I spend very much of my day on, and that peace of
mind is very important. The system is always up and running and that has
meant many other intangible benefits, such as time savings, increased
efficiency and faster responses. The schools can always get a call in or
out -- for a public education service like ours, this level of continuity
is vital."
Scott McCollum, Director of Information Technology Services, Sinclair
Community College: "The distributed architecture and features of the
ShoreTel UC system make it ideal for an educational institution. ShoreTel's
Enterprise Contact Center solution has enhanced our ability to manage our
call center, and easily satisfies the call volumes we experience, so we did
not need a separate solution. The distributed architecture has also meant
we can phase in the deployment across our new sites, while leveraging the
investment in our current hardware. The ability to develop a cost-effective
deployment strategy was vital to our decision."
Venu Rao, CIO, Spring Branch Independent School District: "Everyone likes
their new phones and the features available through the ShoreTel Call
Manager. Most users don't see how easy it is to deploy a ShoreTel UC
system, and how resilient and reliable the system is. They also don't see
how easy and cost-effective a ShoreTel UC system is to manage. All of this
adds up to a very low TCO. We love our new phone system!"
Kevin Gavin, Vice President, Marketing, ShoreTel: "Educational institutions
across the country and around the world face many of the same challenges as
today's businesses: improve communications efficiency and reliability, and
add modern communications capabilities that make staff more productive, but
do all this in the face of tighter budgets and with lower recurring costs.
ShoreTel makes this possible, and that's why more and more school districts
have become ShoreTel raving fans."
For detailed information on ShoreTel products and features, click here.
RELATED LINKS & CONVERSATION
-- ShoreTel
Customer Success Stories (videos and case studies)
-- ShoreTel
Features
-- ShoreTel blog
-- ShoreTel Twitter
-- ShoreTel awards
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 Munich, Germany. For
more information, visit www.shoretel.com.