Nemertes Research Awards ShoreTel Best IP Telephony Provider for Seventh Year in a Row

ShoreTel Customers Rate Its Technology, Customer Service, and Value Highest in the Industry

| Source: ShoreTel ShoreTel

SUNNYVALE, CA--(Marketwire - September 15, 2010) -  ShoreTel® (NASDAQ: SHOR), the leading provider of brilliantly simple IP phone systems with fully integrated unified communications (UC), today announced that for the seventh consecutive year, it has received the highest ratings for IP telephony products from IT decision makers in Nemertes Research annual benchmark. Nemertes, an independent research firm based in Illinois, received ratings for 37 IP telephony vendors and determined the award solely on the views and experiences of more than 2,000 actual users of IP telephony systems.

ShoreTel continues to win by a significant margin in all areas evaluated, beating all providers, including Cisco, Avaya, and Mitel, in all categories. "ShoreTel has maintained its first-place standing, with more authority than ever," the report states. "This year, ShoreTel is the winner with an impressive 4.22 overall score." The next highest overall score from a competing vendor was 3.90.

NEWS HIGHLIGHTS

  • Customers rated their providers on a scale of 1 to 5 in the following categories: Technology, Customer Service, and Value. ShoreTel was the only vendor to score above a 4 rating in all categories. Nemertes analysts also conducted in-depth conversations with a subset of IP telephony decision-makers to understand the reasons behind the results.
  • Technology: This year, ShoreTel received its highest rating yet for technology, 4.33, surpassing last year's 4.08. "From a technology perspective, participants rating ShoreTel also say the system is easy to understand and not overly complex like some of its competitors," the report states.
  • Customer Service: ShoreTel received a 4.10 rating for customer service, another jump over the previous year. One research participant, a CIO of a $100 million K-12 school district, is quoted in the report as saying of ShoreTel, "They are sterling relative to their peers." ShoreTel was the only vendor to score above 4 in this category.
  • Value: The value rating measures what customers think about what they get for their money. With the top value rating of 4.24, ShoreTel far surpassed the competition, beating out vendors such as Cisco, Avaya, Mitel and Microsoft.

QUOTES

"We are honored to earn this highly prestigious award for the seventh year running. Clearly, ShoreTel customers value our commitment to product and service excellence. ShoreTel's all-in-one UC system was designed to eliminate complexity by offering a brilliantly simple solution to help our customers align business communications with business goals, improving efficiency, reducing costs and increasing productivity.  Our partners and employees understand how important it is to our customers that the decision to bring ShoreTel into the business is the right decision. Our consistently high marks in the Nemertes PilotHouse Awards indicate that we continue to deliver on these promises."
- John W. Combs, CEO, ShoreTel

"ShoreTel is the only vendor in any technology category to have received the highest scores since Nemertes started tracking IT decision-maker ratings seven years ago. ShoreTel's customers continually rate its customer service, technology and value ahead of all of its competitors."
- Robin Gareiss, Nemertes' executive vice president and senior founding partner

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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.

Contact Information:

Press Contact:
Eastwick Communications for ShoreTel
Suzanne Chan
Tel: 650-480-4018
suzanne@eastwick.com