ShoreTel Attracts Growing List of Government and Education Customers

Low total cost of ownership, ease of management and use, and increased visibility through new purchasing contracts all contribute to ShoreTel’s exponential growth in the public sector

SUNNYVALE, Calif., April 12, 2011 – ShoreTel® (NASDAQ: SHOR), the leading provider of brilliantly simple IP phone systems with fully integrated unified communications (UC), today announced that it continues to see significant growth in the government and education verticals, with public-sector business now accounting for approximately 20 percent of ShoreTel’s overall sales results.

For the past two years, ShoreTel has seen close to a 60 percent growth in business in this segment and has added hundreds of new customers from the government and education verticals. This includes more than 500 school districts across the country and numerous local municipalities and state agencies that have joined ShoreTel’s growing list of loyal customers.

KEY NEWS HIGHLIGHTS

• A large portion of this growth is due, in part, to successful awards of new public sector purchasing vehicles such as MICTA (Michigan Collegiate Telecommunications Association), PEPPM (Pennsylvania Educational Purchasing Program for Microcomputers), OETC (Organization for Educational Technology & Curriculum), TIPS/TAPS (Interlocal Purchasing System) and the State of Maryland.
• ShoreTel also is growing business through existing contracts, such as Texas (DIR), Ohio (STS), California (CMAS), New York (OGS) and our GSA Schedule 70.
• ShoreTel is seeing increased success in public sector sales through a number of its national resellers, including AT&T, Qwest, Blackbox and CDWG, and continues to add more public-sector focused partners such as PCMallGov and Govplace.
• As ShoreTel continues to build relationships and spread its anti-complexity message, it also is actively participating in national associations such as NASPO (National Association of State Procurement Officials), NACo (National Association of Counties), and NASTD (National Association of State Technology Directors), as well as many state and regional associations, such as CCISDA (California County Information Services Directors Association), CIMA (Colorado Information Management Association), and TAGITM (Texas Association of Governmental Information Technology Managers).
• A key benefit for budget-strapped government agencies is the system’s ease of management and use, which helps agencies save money by eliminating unnecessary resources, training costs, infrastructure costs, and support for moves, additions and changes.

QUOTES

“Times are tough right now for public sector customers struggling with reduced budgets and fewer resources. Effectively implementing newer, cutting-edge technology is now a critical element in helping government and education customers do more with less. Public Sector customers are a very loyal bunch and when they find a good product, they enjoy sharing those solutions with peers from neighboring jurisdictions. These customers are realizing they have an alternative to complexity, and that choice is ShoreTel.”

–       Troy Parish, National Director, GOV Programs, ShoreTel, Inc.

“The City of Sioux Falls has been running on the ShoreTel phone system for over six years now and we have been very happy. ShoreTel is an easy-to-manage, very flexible phone system with lots of features. We are able to combine more than 20 remote city sites onto one phone system across fiber, leased lines, and point-to-point wireless, giving us four-digit dialing and presence information at all sites. The integration of Microsoft Outlook contacts into the ShoreTel personal call manager is a feature our users would never give up.”

–       Jon Klemme, IT Manager, City of Sioux Falls

“When we first proposed the ShoreTel system, we projected about a four year ROI. However, we’re saving so much on our phone bill, the ROI is even better than we anticipated – current figures indicate about three years. ShoreTel’s reliability and flexibility means that communication just happens – when, where and however it needs to. Thanks to ShoreTel, every part of our city government can focus on serving the public and take the phone system for granted.”

–       Steve Schmidt, Information Technology Manager, City of San Luis Obispo

“With ShoreTel, we have been able to realize several core IT objectives simultaneously. We have been able to reduce complexity in our environment while boosting functionality and reliability. Not only can we manage our telephony environment more easily, quickly and with fewer resources, but we have been able to provide cutting-edge features that are also easy to use to all of our users. This all adds up to operating more transparently and being able to provide better service for our citizens and customers.”

–       Ari Piotrkowski, Senior IT Technician, City of Santa Rosa

RELATED LINKS & CONVERSATION

• ShoreTel Customer Success Stories (videos and case studies)
• ShoreTel Features
• ShoreTel Awards
• Follow ShoreTel on Twitter and Facebook.
• Subscribe to ShoreTel’s blog.

About ShoreTel, Inc.

ShoreTel, Inc. (NASDAQ: SHOR) is the provider of brilliantly simple Unified Communication (UC) solutions based on its award-winning IP business phone system. We offer organizations of all sizes integrated, voice, video, data, and mobile communications on an open, distributed IP architecture that helps significantly reduce the complexity and costs typically associated with other solutions. The feature-rich ShoreTel UC system offers the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) and the highest customer satisfaction in the industry, in part because it is easy to deploy, manage, scale and use. Increasingly, companies around the world are finding a competitive edge by replacing business-as-usual with new thinking, and choosing ShoreTel to handle their integrated business communication. ShoreTel is based in Sunnyvale, California, and has regional offices in Austin, Texas, United Kingdom, Sydney, Australia and Munich, Germany. For more information, visit www.shoretel.com.