Syntech

Why Shoretel? Part 5 of 5

Syntech — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 07:10:06 +0000

The final measure of success in a phone system deployment is how happy the users are. If the users are happy then usually the adminsitrators are happy, and happy users are more likely to use features that make them more productive and effecient. Shoretel leads the industry with a customer satisfaction rating that exceeds 90%. Personal Call manager, Shoretel’s CTI product, is adopted at more than twice the rate of the competition. After every installation an independent research firm follows up to determine satisfaction with the system and verifies that deliverables and expectations have been met. This commitment to the customer puts Shoretel in a unique position in the industry. Syntech values our client relatiosnhsips in the same way. Syntech’s partnership with Shoretel allows us to deliver a telephony platform that will help reduce costs, increase employee productivity, and enhance customer satisfaction.

Contact Syntech to find out more about Shoretel’s commitment to customer satisfaction!

Why Shoretel? Part 4 of 5

Syntech — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 07:09:45 +0000

One of the best features Shoretel offers is their management interface. A single web interface allows for all management tasks! All Shoretel equipment is administered through this interface including the switches, phones, users, groups, auto attendant, voicemail, and call detail reports. Even the user guides and manuals needed for administration are available through the web interface. The interface is intuitive and easy to navigate. For administrators that are new to the management tasks related to phone systems the interface is very easy to navigate to find what your looking for. For experienced administrators the interface is designed to present all options and configuration steps on a single page which allow for quick configuration. There’s no need to connect to multiple systems for administration and new user setup. When a new user is created all options are defined by predetermine defaults, next available extention is pre-populated, and voicemail is automatically setup and configured for the extention.

Contact Syntech today to see a live demo of the management interface and see why Shoretel ranks first in customer satisfaction.

Why Shoretel? Part 3 of 5

Syntech — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 07:09:20 +0000

For many organizations the decision to look at a VoIP solution is a cost saving measure. There are several ways that a VoIP solution can reduce costs. Routing internal calls through WAN connection rather than the PSTN, a single cable run to each station rather than separate data and voice, migrating to PRI or SIP and moving away from analog trunks can all provide significant cost savings especially when analyzed over a 5 year period. In addition to these benefits, which are available with most VoIP solutions on the market today, Shoretel brings several important additional benefits that make them stand out from the competition. Some I’ve discussed in earlier posts such as a single scalable platform that eliminates the need to forklift upgrade to accommodate growth or new features. The management of a Shoretel system also helps to keep costs down. Many organizations are able to support a Shoretel system internally with existing staff which significantly reduces or eliminates the need for outside phone system support. Shoretel has one of the highest adoption rates for its personal call manager software which provides CTI functionality. This enables users to be more efficient and effective and reduces the reliance on IT support for end user requests.

Telephony costs come primarily in two forms, upfront costs and management/administration costs. Shoretel excels in both of these areas. They offer all the benefits listed above, their solution is deployed faster, with less resources and comes with a lower upfront cost than most of their competitors. Long term costs are reduced by the intuitive managment interface, reduced telco spending, and by eliminating the need for outside phone system support.

Why Shoretel? Part 2 of 5

Syntech — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 07:08:45 +0000

After years in the IT business I’ve found that sizing a technology deployment can be a real challenge. Working with products like Shoretel, that scale well, help to avoid a couple common deployment dilemmas.

One of the first steps in system design is to understand the scale and scope of the deployment. When a voice solution is deployed in phases or the company plans on growth during the life span of the technology there’s a challenge with having the resources to deliver foreseeable growth while staying in a reasonable spending level for today’s needs. In the voice world designing a system that will support the extensions, voicemail capacity, and trunking requirements for 5+ years is the standard. With many telephony manufacturers a decision has to be made; Deploy a branch office system that has a built in limitation and becomes a management silo or look to an enterprise solution that is far and above what is needed for today but will be required to accommodate planned growth. A common occurrence is a patchwork of small branch systems that each require individual management and cannot scale to deliver the requirements of an enterprise system. Alternatively, the thought of deploying an enterprise system in preparation for a migration is often cost prohibitive and a hard sell to the CFO. This conflict causes several things to happen. The patchwork design is a management challenge and tends to prohibit a fully integrated phone system. We see the patchwork design makes tasks like intersite transfers difficult, no unified company directory, paging and groups are site based rather than enterprise enabled. When an enterprise solution is deployed in preparation for other roll outs the upfront cost can often be a deterrent, and spending today’s money on a technology investment for the future is rarely a wise choice. IT equipment is not a commodity that rises in value! If you can identify with these issues you might also be familiar with the term “forklift upgrade” which is not a friend to any of us.

So back to sizing the technology…This is where scalability is key. Being able to deploy the system that supports your needs for today with the ability to grow and accommodate future requirements. Shoretel leverages a building block design(Legos if you will) that allow resources to be added as needed. Shoretel has a single product line of switches that allow for adding trunk, extension, analog capacity on demand. Shoretel’s system allows for us to design a system that starts with what you need and allows you to grow it as your business grows. There is no need to purchase upfront for future demand. As a Shoretel system is scaled up existing management infrastructure is leveraged to deploy and manage new assets. This allows for all your locations to viewed as a single system, managed from a single web interface. Redundancy is accomplished with N+1 design and doesn’t require like hardware on standby. Redundant systems can even be located across the WAN for centralized enterprise hot sparing. Best of all Shoretel allows for redundancy as part of the base system license.

Contact us today and speak to one of our Shoretel Engineers to see how Shoretel can provide these benefits to your organization.

Why Shoretel? Part 1 of 5

Syntech — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 07:08:10 +0000

A major reason we’ve chosen Shoretel as our VoIP vendor of choice is the technology. OK I know what you’re thinking… Nobody’s going to deploy a VoIP solution because the technology is cool. I agree, and Shoretel is way more than cool. They have designed their system to adopt the best features of the PBX systems from yesteryear while eliminating the characteristics that make these systems a management challenge. As we’ve looked at making the migration away from legacy systems a major concern is performance and reliability of a converged phone system. We’ve all had plenty of experience with servers and network gear to know that any critical system that is based on a server best have a good DR plan behind it. Combine this with more traffic and work load on network devices and the idea of putting voice traffic on top of existing data keeps many organizations running the same way they have been. With two separate networks, one for data and one for voice. This is where choosing the right technology makes all the difference.

Starting with reliability, Shoretel systems use appliances for call processing. The appliance based model provides the most reliable platform by eliminating all moving parts (except a cooling fan), running a time proven VxWorks operating system that doesn’t require weekly patches and specialized console administration skills to maintain.

Shoretel uses a distributed call processing architecture. This means that we can locate the call processing resource (the Shoregear Switch) as close to the user as possible. This reduces WAN utilization, protects against outages caused by WAN and site failures, and because we are using an appliance based architecture our distributed equipment is nearly maintenance free.

In contrast to the distributed call processing architecture Shoretel’s system management is centralized. All locations in a Shoretel environment are managed and viewed as a single web interface. When I need to add new users, or a new phone, or a new Shoregear switch I log into the Shoretel server’s web interface and make my changes. This is true for any management task in any of my locations. I have one place to go for all my management tasks. For many organizations this is significant cost reduction measure. You’ll no longer have to call the phone guy to come out for MACs.

While technology itself isn’t reason enough to choose a solution, having the peace of mind that you have a system that will deliver the reliability you demand and the manageability you wish for just may be.

Stay tuned for part 2 where we’ll dive into the scalability of the Shoretel system.

Why Choose Shoretel?

Syntech — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 07:07:45 +0000

That’s a question we love to answer. From the top, Syntech partnered with Shoretel as our Vendor of choice in the VoIP market segment. We evaluated solutions from several top tier manufacturers including Avaya, Cisco and Shoretel. We discussed with our clients who had deployed VoIP solutions from a variety of manufacturers; what features and benefits had provided the most benefit and what didn’t work as hoped for. We summarized this list into our 5 important factors that led us to choose Shoretel. First is the technology, and this technology works. Shoretel has designed this to be a VoIP system from the ground up. A close second on our list was scaleability. Shoretel uses a common equipment that is scaleable from small to enterprise environments. Third place is total cost of ownership. Everyone talks ROI and TCO. In many cases shoretel can sinifigantly reduce telephony costs. Manageability comes in fourth place but ranks at the top for many orginizations because of their need for flexibility and ease of configuration. Tying everything togehter is Shoretels commiment to the customer. Shoretel has maintained the highest customer satisfaction rating in the industry for 5 years running according to Nemereties Research.