
Data and voice technology is transforming at a remarkable pace and JMARK has the strategic foresight to be on the front of technology changes in order to serve our customers best. For a number of years JMARK has been an active reseller and integrator of Cisco phone systems. There used to be a saying among technology professionals, “You’ll never get fired for recommending Cisco.” Well that is no longer an accurate statement of the advances in data and voice technologies. While we still love Cisco, we are moving to a different platform for phone systems.
Those two things, Data and Voice have been dating for many years, yet over the last decade that dating has progressed to a rocky marriage with lots of ups and downs. Now we are in 2014, the world is different, the proliferation of bandwidth has put the marriage on solid ground. Then as these things happen with married couples, Data and Voice gave birth to a child that has genes from both parents. They named this new child: Unified Communications. Unified communications was a beautiful manifestation of tight integration between the world of computers, servers, cell phones, telephony, business phone systems, chat technology, and much more.
Now is the Perfect Time for VOIP – ShoreTel VOIP
JMARK has determined that now is the perfect time in the evolution of unified communications and the growth of our business to bring out a new and better communications offering to our client base. We looked at a lot of solutions from many vendors and the one that consistently came out on top, even surprising to me, was ShoreTel.
ShoreTel has been around for many years, but about 3 or 4 years ago they had a major transformation of their business model. They dedicated resources to moving the organization in a new direction. They made strategic acquisitions to position themselves for the future. They came out with innovative new products, services, and models to help those of us that sell and support voice and data solutions.
ShoreTel VS. Other VOIP Competition
There are 3 main things that separate ShoreTel from the competition and ultimately swayed us to choose them. One of them is HUGE for you!
- Superior Architecture – Being a strategy and operations kind of guy, I just want the darn thing to work. The architecture of the system provides better redundancy and fail-over than many systems do. It’s reliable and proven for branch offices and telecommuting. I won’t pretend to know all the ins-and-outs, I’ll just say it works!
- Highest Customer Satisfaction – There is a system of customer satisfaction scoring called Net Promoter Score. ShoreTel is on the top bar of the Net Promoter Score model; along with Apple, Harley Davidson, Google, and Amazon. They top the voice industry with a score that is almost 40 percentage points higher than nearest competitor, and 50 percentage points more than Cisco.
- Lowest Cost of Ownership – This one is the biggest take away for you. The graph below shows the total cost of ownership for the top competitors in the voice industry. ShoreTel BLEW AWAY the rest of the competition! If you are going to own a phone system, you want it to be worth your hard-earned money. See the chart below to see the gap between ShoreTel and others.
JMARK is dedicating a lot of resources into selling and supporting ShoreTel solutions. We would not do this if we were not confident in the solution. Even if you are not in the market for a new phone system, you should take a look at the capabilities of ShoreTel; because phone systems are not just about dial-tone anymore. New unified communication solutions can improve collaboration, improve communication, bring people closer together, and create efficiency and cost savings that you would never expect.
Contact us for a free analysis of your communications and to learn more about the ShoreTel/JMARK advantage.