ShoreTel® the leading provider of brilliantly simple unified communications platforms, including business phone systems, applications, and mobile UC solutions, today announced the availability of the ShoreTel Small Business Edition 100 (SBE 100), a unified communications solution tailored to meet the needs of small businesses, while still providing the benefits and functionality that are usually only available to large enterprises.
ShoreTel SBE 100 is an integrated hardware and software package that provides organizations with up to 100 users at five or fewer locations with the benefits and functionality that characterize ShoreTel's award-winning solutions — reliability, scalability, and ease of use, setup and management. Most standard functions, such as adding or changing phones, and moving users, can be done by anyone with basic IT knowledge and skills, making it an ideal fit for small businesses that often lack dedicated IT staff.
"With the right set of tools businesses are able to compete effectively in the marketplace regardless of their size," said Peter Blackmore, ShoreTel CEO. "The ShoreTel SBE 100 brings enterprise-class benefits to small business environments, helping owners empower their employees with productivity-boosting UC applications, while delivering exceptional ease of management and low total cost of ownership."
For small businesses focused on growth, the ShoreTel SBE 100 can be easily integrated with their current communications infrastructure and can also scale seamlessly. With just a software upgrade, the SBE 100 can go from a small system to a large system with thousands of users — no hardware change required.
"Because the ShoreTel SBE 100 is based on the same modular architecture and software used by every ShoreTel customer with up to thousands of users, we only need to focus on a single product across all business sizes," said Rob Wiles, head of channel for APSL, Proximity Communications, a ShoreTel reseller.
The SBE 100 also provides a variety of productivity-boosting capabilities, including desktop call control and Unified Messaging that delivers voice, fax and email messages to a single application, such as Outlook® inbox. Mobile and remote workers benefit from convenient features like call handling modes, message notification and Follow Me Find Me, which allows a user to receive calls anytime, anywhere. Additional applications, including Contact Center functionality and complete collaboration solutions, can be added as businesses' needs change.
"Providing quality advice and client service is the basis of our success so it is critical that we have the right communication tools in place to better enable our consultants," said Mark Patterson, managing director at Nexus Risk Services, an Australian-based insurance broker that is rolling out the solution to five sites and 66 users. "The new ShoreTel SMB offer is a complete, out-of-the-box unified communications solution that gives us enterprise-class functionality at a price-tag that meets our requirements as a growing medium-sized company."
"The release of the ShoreTel Small Business Edition 100 solution provides an excellent opportunity for channel partners and customers to benefit from a single unified solutions architecture, with inherent ease of use and management of the wide UC capabilities, which can scale from as small as 10 users to tens of thousands of users," said Stephanie Watson, general manager at MZA Ltd. "This solution provides ShoreTel resellers with improved opportunity to sell into the 10-50 user space, which continues to account for a significant proportion of overall demand."
