Sunnyvale, Calif.-based ShoreTel, Inc., a provider of unified communication solutions, reportedly announced that for the sixth consecutive year it has been named the Best IP Telephony Provider for 2009 by Nemertes PilotHouse.

 

The Nemertes PilotHouse awards program for IP telephony offers independent insight into performance of the vendors in the eyes of their business customers. The program’s results for this year were based entirely on the experiences of IP-telephony decision-makers. It rated 39 IP Telephony vendors based entirely on the views and experiences of 1,393 participants or customers.

 

The 2009 IP Telephony report reviews input from IP telephony decision-makers. These IT practitioners rated their vendors on a scale of one to five in the categories – value, technology, customer service, ease of implementation and troubleshooting and management tools.

 

According to this years’ Nemertes report, ShoreTel (News - Alert) was the only vendor to score above four and won the Best IP Telephony Provider award with overall 4.05 out of five across all categories.

 

ShoreTel said that it offers organizations of all sizes with integrated, voice, video, data, and mobile communications on an open, distributed IP architecture that facilitates in considerably reducing the complexity as well as costs that are typically associated with other solutions.

 

According to the report, “ShoreTel has scored at the top in every ratings category since Nemertes began tracking IP-telephony vendor performance six years ago. This year is no different as ShoreTel won every ratings category. ShoreTel’s key driver continues to be its value, with a 4.31 rating. Customers routinely praise their purchases of ShoreTel gear as providing an exceptional set of features and a highly resilient architecture at both lower upfront and ongoing costs than its competitors. Its distributed architecture provides for redundancy at an affordable price.”

 

ShoreTel scored 4.31 in the value category, which was far ahead of the competition, due to the fact that the next closest vendors managed a rating of only 3.77, ShoreTel officials said.

 

Moreover, IP phone system offered by ShoreTel is a completely integrated system that scales seamlessly from one to 10,000 users including PBX (News - Alert), voicemail and automated attendant functions. The system features distributed architecture, ShoreWare Director for single browser-based management, and unified messaging. In addition, the company’s Office Anywhere solution enables user to route calls from an extension to any PSTN phone or mobile phone, and then pass along a corporate caller ID for any outbound calls made from those phones.

 

Such technologies have earned the company with customers’ praises as well, thereby earning 4.15 rating in the technology category of the Nemertes report.

 

Furthermore, ShoreTel even topped customer service category, according to Nemertes. This analysis was based on customers’ experience about their vendors’ service, especially in the areas of response time to problems, account representative service, the RFP process and warranty issues.

 

ShoreTel’s “true plug-and-play” implementation provides ease of installation, which has contributed to its customer satisfaction, thereby positioning the company in top position in Ease of Implementation and Troubleshooting category with 3.92 rating

 

Ultimately, low prices, a broad set of features, scalability, strong customer service, and relatively less complicated deployment and troubleshooting requirements all contribute to ShoreTel’s success, said Nemertes.