Shoretel: Unified Communications Is Real At Last

If it works, and the CIO delivers better communications than the old telecoms manager, it’s a big win, he says: “You can be a hero.”

For mobility, Shoretel offers a client that runs on popular mobile phones (including the iPhone and Blackberry devices). With this client, he says, “I can make any phone in the world my deskphone”. This can be the cellphone, or any other deskphone, at home or in a client’s office

The client also offers a visual list of voicemail – and previews them, playing a short clip which is enough for a family member to say “Help, I’m stuck on the motorway,” or a colleague waiting for a meeting to say “Where are you?” And because the outgoing number is your single company phone number, it can be used by people who work at home but don’t want clients to have their home phone number  – Combs mentions a Texas charity working with disturbed children, as a situation where this is a requirement.

This is not a “fixed-mobile convergence” product which lets wireless phones roam onto an in-house Wi-Fi network, and Combs is scathing about such systems. They are more trouble than they are worth, he says, as they add to the management overhead of the network. “A lot of our competitors say they can converge fixed and mobile, but it means another server, and another quarterly bill for maintenance,” he says. “We put no new servers on the network.”

The CIO might not be driven to make his users’ lives easier, Combs concedes (such a goal is pretty low on the list of many CIOs we have met), but controlling users’ mobile numbers is also good, to keep company phone calls in the company when any staff member leaves, he points out.

The technology costs about $550 (£367) upfront per client, and about 15 percent of that per year in service, support and licence fees.

Is UC a green technology?

Combs is keen to talk up Shoretel’s green credentials, pointing to a “recent” report from Tolly Group which found that Shoretel’s approach used about two thirds as much power as a unified communications solution from Cisco. It turns out to be about two years old – but given both companies’ rather slow product cycles, is probably still relevant.

Using a cloud-based version of the service is even better, he says, suggesting that telecoms switching outside the premises can be located somewhere where power is optimised and technical support is available 24 hours a day. Yhis can be in a company’s existing remote or cloud-based data centre, just by adding rack-space there for telephony.

There’s a downside, he admits: “The connection between the premise and the cloud is the weakest link. If that goes down, I can’t even phone the person in the next office.”

So Shoretel recommends users mix the two – putting administration, voicemail and incoming trunk terminations in the cloud, while keeping basic phone connections in the branch. “If the WAN goes down, I can route over the PSTN. We can take the best of the cloud and the best of premise-based operation and give the customer the best in class in both areas”.

A lot of companies already have backup data centres in the cloud – it’s just a case of adding rack space.