IBM And ShoreTel Introduce "UCC-In-A-Box"

The new ShoreTel for IBM Lotus Foundations is a unified communications and collaboration package intended for SMBs.The solution is built on the IBM Lotus Sametime UCC platform, which provides voice, data, and video services. Those services include "rich presence" (status and location awareness), instant messaging, and VoIP telephony. Then there's IBM Lotus Foundations, an appliance that provides e-mail and collaboration functions as well as backup and recovery. ShoreTel for IBM Lotus Foundations adds ShoreTel's IP telephony solution on top of all that to create an appliance-based "UCC-in-a -box" option for SMBs with fewer than 500 phone lines. The new solution is supposed to take only a few clicks to deploy without needing any on-site expertise.

"Small businesses don't have the same financial resources as larger enterprises, but they do expect the same reliability, flexibility, and powerful features from their communications system," said ShoreTel CEO John W. Combs. "We're offering the industry's first full-featured unified communications and collaboration solution at an affordable price point and without the overhead of other, more complex solutions."

The pricing breaks down like this: the IBM Lotus Foundations server starts at $3,279 -- the price depends on storage and memory options -- and the Foundation Server license is $229. A single client access license costs $149, and a ShoreTel license, which includes the mailbox, call manager, mobile call manager, and application dialer, runs $200 per desktop. ShoreTel hardware -- phones and switches -- are their normal prices.

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