Shoretel To Use IBM Lotus Foundation For New UC Offering

ShoreTel, an IP telephony services provider, on Monday announced a couple of moves to ramp up its position in the unified communications (UC) domains.

In one of those moves aiming at the small and medium-sized businesses, the company has partnered with IBM to offer its IP telephony system come bundled with the latter’s Lotus Foundations Reach, which offers SMBs a system equivalent to IT infrastructure through a series of appliances built in it.

ShoreTel’s IP telephony equipment would function as an exclusive telephony module within the IBM’s Lotus Foundation box, which further incorporates emailing, instant messaging, as well as calendar features.

The VP of marketing at ShoreTel, Kevin Gavin, has touted that the addition of ShoreTel’s IP telephony equipment within the Lotus Foundation would save customers significant costs on adding an extra hardware.

Along with this, Shoretel has unveiled the latest iteration of its UC software, dubbed as “ShoreTel 10”, which includes slew of advanced features, such as Bluetooth wayport capabilities, enhanced integration with multivendor environments, coupled with better reliability.  

With this new move, the company is gunning at Avaya in enterprises arena, as the latter acquired Nortel last year which gave Avaya an apparent edge over its competitors, particularly Cisco.

Gavin asserted that ShoreTel is seeking to persuade Nortel’s customers to migrate to ShoreTel products instead of going for Avaya’s technology.