Contact Information: Press Contact: Rachel Shelton Eastwick Communications Tel: +650-480-4069 rshelton@eastwick.com
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
| Source: ShoreTel
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.
RELATED LINKS & CONVERSATION
-- ShoreTel Customer Success Stories (videos and
case studies)
-- ShoreTel
Features
-- ShoreTel blog
-- ShoreTel awards
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.