Research Finds ShoreTel Has Lowest 1st Year Costs
Analysis undertaken by independent research-adversity and strategic-consulting firm Nemertes has shown that ShoreTel ranks the lowest in first-year telephony costs (for both up-front and ongoing investments) for all-sized company deployments at $669 per endpoint, compared against the median of $935 across all vendors in the study.
Nemertes specialises in analysing and quantifying the business value of emerging technologies. Through their Annual Benchmark study they conduct in-depth interviews with more than 200 IT service leaders comprising a wide range of verticals and sizes.
In this particular study, the report for which is entitled “Minimizing Costs, Maximizing Value of IP Telephony”, Nemertes spoke with nearly 200 organisations to gather real-world cost data for seven leading IP telephony and unified communications vendors. Seven vendors received enough responses for Nemertes to analyse their solutions as part of the study – these were Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft, Mitel, NEC and ShoreTel.
The organisations surveyed were primarily in North America and responses were used to develop a first-year TCO analysis of on-premises, cloud and hybrid deployments. The research findings show that ShoreTel ranks the lowest in first-year telephony costs (for both up-front and ongoing investments) for all-sized company deployments at $669 per endpoint, compared against the median of $935 across all vendors in the study.
The Nemertes research also looked at the size and complexity of the roll-out in their analysis. For installations greater than 350 endpoints, ShoreTel’s first-year overall costs are the lowest at $411 per endpoint, compared to a median of $706 across all vendors. The report also found ShoreTel systems require lower staffing levels than other vendors.