All UC is Not Equal: Comparing Cisco and ShoreTel Solutions

Unified communications (UC) helps organizations of all sizes reduce expenses while increasing employee productivity and supporting today’s mobile lifestyle. But all UC solutions are not created equal. The ability to fully realize the benefits of UC is largely dependent on selecting the right solution.

When it comes to the best all-around UC solution, an organization should be able to meet all of its business-critical communications needs in the most cost-effective way. A recent side-by-side comparison of Cisco and ShoreTel solutions is conclusive: ShoreTel not only delivers brilliantly simple unified communications solutions, but ShoreTel does it for less total cost than Cisco. ShoreTel’s all-in-one UC solution is not only designed to provide the communications capabilities you need in the most straightforward manner possible, but it does it all while delivering a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than Cisco.

ShoreTel’s Unique Approach to UC Eliminates Complexity

The flagship Cisco Unified Communications Manager solution was assembled with technologies accumulated from several corporate acquisitions, resulting in a complex solution that provides multiple user interfaces and requires extensive time and resources to manage. Further complicating matters is that Cisco offers multiple UC platforms, each with a distinct capacity limitation. Since moving from one product to the next can be disruptive and expensive, organizations bear the burden of gauging their current and future needs with great accuracy – not an easy task for many growing small- and midsized businesses.

ShoreTel, however, was designed from the ground up for IP, and IP alone, to provide voice, video, instant messaging and videoconferencing with advanced tools for mobility, presence, and collaboration. As a result, ShoreTel is brilliantly simple to use for both users and IT administrators. And unlike Cisco, ShoreTel offers a single platform that meets the needs of organizations of all sizes, and which scales modularly to accommodate more users, additional sites, and new geographic regions – all within the same environment.

Lower TCO with ShoreTel

Among the many benefits of this different approach to UC is that ShoreTel has a lower overall total cost of ownership (TCO) than Cisco. And ShoreTel delivers streamlined deployment and management, and easier scalability. ShoreTel UC is easy to learn and use, simple to manage, and cost-effective to operate. With ShoreTel, businesses can capitalize on the benefits of unified communications without getting tangled up in costs or complexity.

The ShoreTel UC system can deliver a TCO that is nearly 35 percent lower than Cisco (10-year TCO for 1,600 lines).

A Unified Purpose-Built Solution Lowers TCO

A UC solution must be more than a loose collection of products. It should:

• Allow people to move seamlessly among different modes of communication, including video, voice (wired or wireless) and instant messaging
• Be designed for rapid deployment
• Have a single, easy-to-use management console to simplify administration
• Have a resilient architecture with built-in redundancy to mitigate the effects of failures
• Allow organizations to grow at their own pace, without having to rip and replace their previous environment
• Provide streamlined upgrades so organizations can quickly and easily capitalize on the latest capabilities
• Keep the lid on the cost of add-ons with integrated applications

Contact PTS Communications, ShoreTel's First Australian reseller to learn how ShoreTel's UC solution delivers all that, and more, with a lower total cost of ownership than a Cisco solution.