ShoreTel

The telephony market has been historically dominated by traditional telephony and IP stalwarts. Yet, ShoreTel possesses the reputation of currently being the fastest growing vendor in this highly competitive market.

ShoreTel’s leverage in the market is its start from a "clean sheet of paper". The market is inundated with traditional telephony vendors that have tacked on IP capabilities and data-centric vendors that worked backwards to tack on telephony capabilities. ShoreTel has designed its solution with specifically IP-centric telephony in mind. Thus, compared to many incumbent suppliers, ShoreTel offers price competitiveness and ease of system installation, management and use.

ShoreTel’s product fills the requirement for customers with a need for economic distributed communications across multiple facilities. One of ShoreTel's major strengths is its superior product architecture that delivers reliability well beyond competitive alternatives with no single point of failure. A unique capability of ShoreTel’s system is that a single product targets small businesses all the way up to large businesses with 10,000 employees.

"Having a distributed approach, ShoreTel offers the perfect solution to businesses that need efficient multi-site solutions," says Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Krithi Rao. "Further, ShoreTel is able to succeed due to its superior return on investment based on competitive capital costs and dramatically lower operating and administration costs.

ShoreTel’s IP telephony system delivers feature-rich IP PBX functionality across an entire organization of 10 to 10,000 employees while also providing key system emulation to branch offices, all integrated into a single enterprise-wide platform. Most competing vendors have not focused on the "key system" functionality in their IP-PBX line.

The company also has an excellent distribution method. It sells and services the ShoreTel product through selected channel partners around the globe. As part of its Lifecycle Support Model, ShoreTel partners sell, install and support the product with ShoreTel supporting them. This also includes a major accounts program to service and support those customers with geographically dispersed location requirements.

Finally, one of ShoreTel’s best practices that has enabled the company to display explosive growth in a highly competitive market is its customer-centric business model. The company continually measures customer satisfaction based on objective in-depth customer interviews by an independent third party. ShoreTel employee bonuses, starting from the CEO, are directly tied to customer satisfaction, and the company rewards its channel partners who provide top-notch service and support to their customers.

"ShoreTel has demonstrated that it fully understands the value of developing an eco-system to survive in the North American enterprise communications market and compete with communication giants that have end-to-end solutions of voice and data," says Rao. "Accordingly, to ramp up its offerings, ShoreTel has developed partnerships with Extreme Networks, Foundry and Juniper – IP network infrastructure providers – to deliver complete voice and data solutions to its customers."

As a result, ShoreTel is likely to continue to increase its presence in the enterprise telephony market with its feature rich and easy to manage product portfolio, growing customer base, strategic alliances, high customer satisfaction levels, and growing brand name recognition.

Each year Frost & Sullivan presents this Award to a company that has demonstrated excellence in capturing market share within its industry. The recipient has demonstrated strategic excellence in product innovation, marketing, and sales strategies that have resulted in the largest gain in market share over the past 2-3 years.

Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis, and extensive secondary research in order to identify best practices in the industry.

ShoreTel is the fastest growing IP PBX company worldwide and the leader in customer satisfaction. The company has shipped its groundbreaking solutions since 1998 and continues to outpace the rapidly expanding VoIP market with technological advances and sales that are doubling year over year. ShoreTel voice systems are designed to make businesses smarter, setting new standards for usability and manageability while reducing telecommunications costs. A uniquely distributed architecture extends enterprise-class voice services to every office and outpost, keeping employees fully connected wherever they go. A select, worldwide group of channel partners provide top-notch service and support. For more information, visit http://www.shoretel.com/ or call 1-877-80SHORE

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