Source: HotWire

ShoreTel Solutions Let Nonprofits Do More Good Work With Less Overhead

Cost and Productivity Benefits of ShoreTel's Unified Communications Technology Allow Nonprofits Worldwide to Help More People With Fewer Resources

SUNNYVALE, CA--(Marketwire - December 6, 2010) - ShoreTel® (NASDAQ: SHOR), the leading provider of brilliantly simple IP phone systems with fully integrated unified communications (UC), today announced that nonprofit organizations around the world are using ShoreTel to dramatically cut their communications costs and increase operational efficiency and worker productivity in time for the holidays.

Organizations like Big Brothers Big Sisters of North Texas, Compassion Australia, United Way, and Heifer International, can focus more donations and resources on carrying out their missions to end hunger and provide more children with a quality education, thanks to ShoreTel's low total cost of ownership.

NEWS HIGHLIGHTS

Ending Hunger

  • United Way, one of the world's most respected charities; Compassion Australia, an international Christian child development and advocacy ministry; and Heifer International, a global nonprofit with a proven solution to end hunger and poverty in a sustainable way, are just a few charities leveraging ShoreTel's UC system to seamlessly carry out their causes. By deploying ShoreTel's single, converged platform managed from a central location, these nonprofits are now able to function more efficiently and cost-effectively.
  • With ShoreTel, United Way can more easily accommodate staff increases during campaign seasons because it takes only minutes to add ShoreTel's plug-and-play phones for temporary users. The system's ease-of-use reduces orientation time, and the ability to manage the system with non-IT staff allows the organization to focus IT resources on core mission technologies and projects.
  • Compassion Australia sponsors more than one million children in 25 developing countries. With ShoreTel, they expect a savings of $100,000 over three years by eliminating third-party conferencing, reducing complexity for the IT staff, and cutting out thousands of dollars in third-party service calls.
  • Since 1944, Heifer International has helped more than 50 million people, and now works in more than 50 countries. Using ShoreTel's UC system, Heifer keeps employees and volunteers connected wherever they are. The low total cost of ownership and the ability to integrate with legacy equipment has helped Heifer manage its communications budget more effectively and do more with its donations.

Fostering Education

  • Big Brothers Big Sisters of North Texas, the oldest and largest youth mentoring organization in Texas, and the Tiger Woods Learning Center (TWLC) in Anaheim, Calif., part of the Tiger Woods Foundation (TWF), depend on their highly reliable ShoreTel system to cut costs, improve responsiveness to their communities, and increase the number of children they can help.
  • ShoreTel's cost and call management benefits have helped Big Brothers Big Sisters of North Texas significantly increase the number of mentoring relationships it can support while decreasing the average wait time for a match and lowering the service cost per child.
  • TWF and TWLC's staff constantly need to move around to different classrooms, and with ShoreTel's mobility features, they don't have to worry about missing calls or messages. Built-in productivity tools facilitate collaboration among employees and volunteers, and the single, unified platform, scales as needed with plug-and-play simplicity across many sites.

CUSTOMER QUOTES

"ShoreTel improves our communications and relationships without breaking the bank. The system looks and behaves like a single, unified platform across our many sites, enabling employees to communicate quickly and easily with coworkers regardless of their location. And the ease of management and use saves our IT team more than 20 hours per week in administration, allowing them to focus on other tasks."
 -- Michael Macarthur, IT Manager, Compassion Australia

"Our ShoreTel system has been extremely reliable, with zero unscheduled downtime since deployment. We've seen productivity gains thanks to the ease of bringing new people onto the system and a number of features, including voicemail-to-email integration, the ability to quick-dial Outlook contacts from the Call Manager, and the set call handling mode based on Outlook calendar appointments."
 -- Len Francis, Director IT, United Way

"Keeping costs down is important to us, and our ShoreTel system has delivered a long-distance savings of several thousand dollars per year, allowing us to redirect those funds toward supporting more at-risk children in our community. We have also increased our reliance on at-home workers, reducing the need for office space."
 -- Sean Ryan, Director of Information Services, Big Brothers Big Sisters of North Texas

SHORETEL QUOTE

"We're honored to play a role in helping nonprofit organizations around the world do their vital philanthropic work. It's the most gratifying form of validation of our success as a technology provider that these organizations continually recognize that the direct cost and productivity benefits gained from their ShoreTel unified communications system allows them to help more people."
-- Kevin Gavin, Vice President of Marketing, ShoreTel

RELATED LINKS & CONVERSATION

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.

Contact Information:

Press Contact:
Eastwick Communications for ShoreTel
Suzanne Chan
Tel: 650-480-4018
suzanne@eastwick.com