ShoreTel Receives 2010 CRN Networking Vendor of the Year Award

LONDON--(Marketwire - November 24, 2010) - ShoreTel® (NASDAQ: SHOR), the leading provider of brilliantly simple IP phone systems with fully integrated Unified Communications (UC), today announced it has been recognised by 2010 CRN as the Networking Vendor of the Year. The award was made at a ceremony in London attended by more than 1,900 channel representatives and is widely recognised as the UK's most prestigious IT industry award.

Receiving the 2010 CRN Networking Vendor of the Year Award reflects ShoreTel's ongoing commitment to developing a strong channel programme and the success of initiatives such as ShoreTel Financial Services, the Accelerate Marketing Bureau Service, the fully supported on-boarding packages and ShoreTel's strong incentives and promotions programmes. ShoreTel also has an award-winning and unique approach to customer satisfaction, and has been ranked best IP telephony provider for seven years in a row by Nemertes Research.

Following the introduction of a new two-stage judging process this year, the CRN panel of judges, comprising both resellers and distributors, assessed that ShoreTel's entry was of the highest quality in the Networking Vendor category. ShoreTel won over entries from vendors such as Cisco, Extreme, Netgear, Emulex and ZyXel.

"The aim of the new judging system was to bring gravitas back to the awards and level the playing field -- just because you are a big player doesn't guarantee you will win," explained Sara Yirrell, editor of CRN. "Now it is decided by the quality of entry."

ShoreTel stood out as a clear winner in this category due to its extremely strong case studies and customer testimonials and strong UK focused entry, according to the panel of judges. The panel was also impressed with ShoreTel's customer satisfaction programme detailed in the entry. ShoreTel is one of the few IP phone system manufacturers to deliver 100 percent of its business through the channel.

"Our partners are an extension of ShoreTel and a core part of our success. We're delighted to have received the CRN Networking Vendor of the Year Award which acknowledges our efforts and gives us an additional drive to continue building our channel momentum," said Tom Perry, Director of Marketing, EMEA, at ShoreTel. "We look forward to further strengthening our partnerships and introducing innovative channel incentives which will increase our market share in both the UK and EMEA."

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:
Kathryn Darling
AxiCom (for ShoreTel)
Tel: +44 (0)20 8392 4076
Email: shoretel@axicom.com