ShoreTel takes the Contact Center virtual
by Best in UC on 13/12/11 at 10:00 am
ShoreTel has expanded the ability to run its products in a virtualized environment by completing VMware certification for the company’s Enterprise Contact Center solution.
This extends the company’s virtualization strategy, which enables customer to create cost savings, easier administration and increased system availability by deploying ShoreTel in a virtualized environment.
ShoreTel Contact Center is an all-in-one contact center solution that provides complete multimedia and outbound capabilities. By leveraging ShoreTel’s unified communications solutions, contact center agents can work anywhere—in one location, across multiple sites, or at home. The routing engine routes calls to the right agent based on specific criteria, such as need, status, service level, location, and wait-time. An integrated powerful graphical scripting engine provides a customized call experience and self-service automation.
When agents receive a new contact, they also receive key information about the caller that helps them to deliver the best customer experience. If expert advice is required, the agent’s desktop application indicates exactly who is available at that moment for consultation. Finally, supervisors have all the tools they need to view the center’s historic and real-time performance, so they can manage with maximum efficiency.
“ShoreTel support for VMware extends beyond the core IP PBX UC and now includes the Contact Center as well, so customers can leverage their VMware environment even more broadly,” said Kevin Gavin, chief marketing officer at ShoreTel. “The inherent brilliant simplicity within the ShoreTel solution is further enhanced by the additional reliability and scalability benefits of a VMware platform.”
More than 1,000 customers in 26 countries have already deployed ShoreTel software in a virtual environment.
“We have seen more than half of our new deployments utilizing virtualization since ShoreTel began supporting it over a year and a half ago – especially in larger deployments where virtualization infrastructures are already built out,” said Kurt Wright, director of technical services at IPC Technologies, Inc. “Because ShoreTel does not limit supported hardware to select vendors, customers are able to leverage their existing server infrastructure, thus reducing the total cost of deployment and maintenance.”
The additional certification of ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center as VMware Ready means resellers and customers can be confident that the mission-critical contact center has been fully tested to run on VMware. This assures stability and reliability.
“Virtualization is important to contact center management as corporate IT departments increasingly embrace data center deployments and virtualization of both infrastructure and applications,” said Sheila MCGee-Smith, president and principal analyst of McGee-Smith Analytics. “Few, if any, competitors can match the simplicity of ShoreTel’s single image contact center virtualization; most involve complex management of multiple virtualized images.”
The ability to virtualize key applications complements ShoreTel’s distributed architecture and allows customers to take advantage of virtualization benefits, such as better server utilization, centralized deployment for more efficient applications management, and improved business continuity.
“Virtualization gives IT departments the ability to increase their visibility and control of their resources, all while driving a richer and expanded role for automation and management,” said Parag Patel, vice president, alliances, for VMware. “Empowering customers to minimize their IT operational expenses by reducing both planned and unplanned downtime is a vision we are proud to share with ShoreTel.”
