ShoreTel Goes to the Extreme to Serve Its Customers

SUNNYVALE, CA--(Marketwire - October 6, 2009) - ShoreTel® (NASDAQ: SHOR), the leading provider of brilliantly simple IP phone systems with fully integrated Unified Communications (UC), is proving the solution of choice for organizations needing reliable and affordable communications to help ensure business continuity in harsh and extreme environments.

The plug-and-play functionality and centralized management capabilities of ShoreTel's distributed architecture mean that organizations can easily leverage an extended wide area network (WAN) to achieve high-quality voice communications in remote locations -- such as ships at sea and the distant mines of Canada -- where traditional telephony is both costly to implement and unreliable. ShoreTel takes advantage of dynamic voice traffic compression technology to ensure consistently excellent voice quality, even in low bandwidth conditions.

ShoreTel also helps drive down total cost of ownership and delivers a quick return on investment because moves, adds, and changes (MACs) can be implemented easily from a company's headquarters or a remote location. This completely eliminates the long delays and high costs related to sending consultants into isolated and harsh environments for on-site maintenance.

A growing number of companies, including Glacier Fish Company, Grande Cache Coal Corporation of Alberta, Canada, and InfoBunker LLC, have turned to ShoreTel to help protect valuable business investments by solving communication challenges and by ensuring business continuity. In addition, ShoreTel's fully integrated UC platform combines rich communication media and presence with the ability to streamline business processes, enhance collaboration and improve efficiency.

SHORETEL IN EXTREME ENVIRONMENTS

Glacier Fish Company, Seattle, Wash.

Glacier Fish Company produces high-quality, frozen-at-sea fish products in the North Pacific. Facing the same exceptionally unreliable and expensive ship-to-shore communications that plague the entire industry, Glacier opted for a ShoreTel UC system. ShoreTel enabled Glacier to set up each ShoreTel switch as a SIP device in a single SIP trunk group, so calls between the ship and shore go out through a VPN WAN link to a satellite. The resulting sound quality is extremely good, even when bandwidth is limited, and the calls are easily initiated with four-digit dialing, a true breakthrough for ships at sea. With ShoreTel, it is now easier than ever for Glacier to communicate with key personnel on the ship and influence the real-time production decisions that are critical to the company's commercial fishing business.

Grande Cache Coal Corporation, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Grande Cache Coal Corporation has mining operations on the Eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains in Central Alberta. The company's mines are 25 kilometers from the small town of Grande Cache. These remote mines have no Telco connection. The company's highly reliable ShoreTel UC system delivers high-quality voice communications between the mines, Grande Cache offices, and the Headquarters in Calgary, and has eliminated the frequent periods of downtime that could cost the company in excess of $1 million per day. In addition, the ability to perform MACs remotely from Calgary has eliminated an exorbitant $700 per visit charge for callouts.

InfoBunker, LLC, Des Moines, Iowa

InfoBunker has a highly secure co-location facility five stories below ground. With 65,000 sq. ft. of space and only three staff members to service customers, the company uses its ShoreTel UC system to move staff extensions to cordless phones that the staff can take anywhere in the building. ShoreTel helps ensure staff members are always available when their customers need them. And ShoreTel is so easy to manage that InfoBunker now allows customers whose own office communications systems are down to set up a temporary call center in the InfoBunker facility so they can keep their businesses running.

QUOTES

"Ship-to-shore communications have always been a challenge in our industry, but market and competitive forces require that we optimize our operations, including the ability to cost effectively remain in constant communication with our ship. The unique technologies of the ShoreTel UC system, the ability to leverage SIP devices to create a VPN WAN link to a satellite and have dynamic voice traffic compression automatically adjusting sound quality means we can now communicate with our ship at sea as easily as we can with our distributors and customers. This is leading to a quantum leap forward in business efficiency." - Jonathan Lockwood, technology manager, Glacier Fish Company

"With mines in remote, frigid locations where the terrain is rough and there's no infrastructure for data communications and telecom, we faced a no-win situation. Our communications were highly unreliable, and the Canadian government shuts down mining operations when our communications go down, resulting in significant financial loss. Meanwhile, our vendor was charging us exorbitant fees for onsite maintenance, and it once took three weeks to get a new extension installed. With ShoreTel, all these problems are in the past. Our phone system is more reliable and stable, and with remote management, the need for an onsite visit is rare. By eliminating mining stoppages and maintenance fees, ShoreTel is directly improving our bottom line." - Thayer Ramahi, senior infrastructure engineer, Grande Cache Coal Corporation

"Our goal is to provide our clients with the most secure, robust and flexible data center environment attainable, and deliver exceptional service. ShoreTel helps us achieve this goal with a flexible and secure communications system. The reliability, ease of maintenance and use, and the consistent high quality of voice communications means our staff is able to provide better service to each customer, and we have been able to introduce new services that give us an edge over our competition." - Jason McGinnis, president and founder, InfoBunker

"The ShoreTel system has been engineered from the ground up to be highly reliable and easy to manage, and to deliver consistent, high-quality voice communications. That's why it's long been a favorite in several verticals, including education, government and healthcare. But now, companies are discovering that the technologies that deliver these capabilities, including a fully distributed architecture and dynamic voice traffic compression for optimizing voice quality over low bandwidth, make ShoreTel the ideal solution for environments that traditional telephony has never served well. While we like to say that modern communications has made the world smaller, some locations and settings have always been left out. Not anymore. With ShoreTel, great voice quality can go where it has never gone before." - John Combs, Chief Executive Officer, ShoreTel

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

ShoreTel Goes to the Extreme to Serve Its Customers

Underground, at Sea, or Miles From Telephony Infrastructure, ShoreTel's Easy-to-Manage System Delivers High-Quality, Cost-Effective Unified Communications in Extreme Conditions

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