ShoreTel scales up with latest unified communication offering

ShoreTel has announced the latest version of its unified communication (UC) platform as the firm seeks to capitalise on the growing use of UC within businesses of all sizes.

Core to the ShoreTel 12 update is the addition of its own platform for web conferencing, audio conferencing and instant messaging, the firm having severed its ties with Alcatel-Lucent whose products were used in earlier versions.

Tom Perry, director of marketing for Europe at ShoreTel,  told V3.co.uk that the company had created its own product for a number of reasons, including to help improve its financial performance.

"By making our own system we can fully integrate it with our products to simplify deployment and management, and won't have to wait for the original manufacturer to add features that customers are demanding," he said.

"It means we have complete management of the tool. End-users and our channel partners expect collaboration tools as standard, and it's important for us to manage this functionality ourselves."

ShoreTel has also increased the scale of the product from 10,000 to 20,000 users so that large enterprises can deploy it on a single system, rather than having to combine two systems which raises more issues for IT staff.

The company has also added Outlook and Exchange integration for users on Windows 7 to facilitate conference calls, and is beta testing mobile applications for the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android platforms.

"Android is growing all the time, recently passing Apple as the most shipped mobile operating system, so it's a market we want to make sure we can serve. We expect it to be fully available some time in July," said Perry.

The firm has also added its ShoreTel Communicator tool to the product to work on Apple Macs, as the firm sees growing numbers of users on these devices.

ShoreTel 12 is available to order from today, and the company expects to start shipping products around July. An upgrade to the new platform is free of charge for existing customers, although the new conference product carries a small fee.