Today we’re pleased to announce that ShoreTel, the leading provider of brilliantly simple premise and cloud-based business IP phone system and communication solutions with fully integrated unified communications (UC) and contact centre capabilities, has completed its acquisition of M5 Networks. With the [...]]]> ShoreTel positioned to Lead in the Emerging Cloud Services Market

Today we’re pleased to announce that ShoreTel, the leading provider of brilliantly simple premise and cloud-based business IP phone system and communication solutions with fully integrated unified communications (UC) and contact centre capabilities, has completed its acquisition of M5 Networks. With the addition of M5’s hosted Unified Communications to its portfolio, ShoreTel is in a unique position to offer both on-premise and hosted VoIP and UC solutions. The outlook is bright for ShoreTel, who have  the ability to attract new customers, at a time when companies are increasingly on the look-out for cloud-based services.

“Purchasing an established provider of hosted communications and contact centre services is a game-changing move that promises to differentiate ShoreTel significantly from its traditional competitors in the market for UC and contact centre solutions,” said analyst Brian Riggs of Current Analysis.

ShoreTel now has an advantage over its competitors, in the emerging hosted VoIP and UC marketplace by acquiring M5’s established hosted business model and expertise. This will accelerate Response Data Communications ability to enter the cloud market as ShoreTel’s only Gold Exclusive Partner here in EMEA, enabling the team at RDC to offer a value added service to our customers, that are already looking to deploy IP communications with all the benefits a hosted model provides. For customers that are committed to premise-based solutions, ShoreTel continues to offer IP telephony and UC solutions with the lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and highest customer satisfaction in the industry. And for companies that are still evaluating whether a hosted or on-premise solution is best for their needs, ShoreTel is the only vendor able to give unbiased advice to help them find the ideal solution.

“When I joined the company just over one year ago, I outlined a strategic plan that included three priorities: continuing to grow market share in our core premise-based business both domestically and internationally, launching ShoreTel Mobility for integrating smartphones and tablets with IP PBX systems, and introducing a cloud-based hosted solution. Now, with M5 as our hosted VoIP and UC solution, we are successfully delivering against these strategic imperatives. ShoreTel is in an excellent position to deliver unmatched value to our customers,” said Peter Blackmore, CEO of ShoreTel.

Effective from today, M5 is the ShoreTel Cloud Division, based in New York, led by Dan Hoffman as President and General Manager. “We pioneered hosted VoIP and UC 12 years ago and are proud of the successful track record we’ve achieved with more than 2,000 customers in the U.S.,” said Hoffman. “Now, as part of ShoreTel, we’ll have the chance to build a global brand known for an exceptional customer experience in an industry that lacks one. This will fortify our leadership position in the hosted VoIP and UC marketplace and help take ShoreTel’s overall business to new heights.”

About ShoreTel, Inc.

ShoreTel, Inc. (NASDAQ: SHOR) brings unmatched flexibility, choice and value to brilliantly simple business phones systems and unified communications (UC). With its award-winning premise-based IP phone system with integrated unified communications, contact centre capabilities, and its proven hosted VoIP services, organizations of all sizes can select the best option for their needs. ShoreTel’s ongoing mission is to eliminate costly complexity and give customers the 24/7 freedom to leverage rich voice, video, data and mobile unified communications capabilities they need. ShoreTel is based in Sunnyvale, California, and has regional offices in Austin, Texas; New York, New York; Maidenhead, United Kingdom; Sydney, Australia; and Singapore. For more information, visit www.shoretel.com.

Related Links & Conversation

• Subscribe to ShoreTel’s blog
• Follow ShoreTel on Twitter and Facebook
• #ShoreTel, #UC

The ability to virtualise [...]]]> The ShoreTel UC solution is unique in that it is built on a highly reliable distributed architecture that performs exceptionally well around possible outages in a customer network, thus ensuring a high level of application availability. For additional robustness, customers have the option of deploying server components in a virtual environment.

The ability to virtualise key applications complements ShoreTel’s distributed architecture and allows customers to take advantage of virtualised infrastructure benefits, such as server consolidation, increased security, operational flexibility and higher applications availability during planned and unplanned downtime in order to achieve cost savings and business continuity objectives.

Virtualised IP PBX components

ShoreTel applications, such as unified messaging or system administration, can be installed on dedicated or shared general purpose hardware resources located in a data centre or on-premise. This allows customers to choose the implementation model that best fits their business. While supporting flexible deployment options, ShoreTel system is managed through a single Web-based user interface, which further contributes to the operational effectiveness and brilliant simplicity of ShoreTel’s UC solution.

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 Virtualised Enterprise Contact Centre

Running ShoreTel Enterprise Contact Center in a virtual environment benefits customers in many ways. When deployed on a shared hardware resource in a data centre, VMware Ready certified Enterprise Contact Centre not only provides complete multimedia and outbound capabilities but also ensures high level of application availability, improved operational effectiveness and reduced hardware and energy costs thanks to its virtualised desktop.

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Virtualised Desktop

ShoreTel Communicator delivers unified communications (UC) to boost users’ productivity and is supported in diverse virtualised environments including Citrix XenApp and other thin-client environments. Using desktop virtualisation and leveraging the simplicity of ShoreTel’s user applications, customers are able to on-board employees or contractors in short order. It also enhances the overall UC TCO by eliminating client-specific installation and configuration, while cutting application helpdesk support cost due to reduction in application conflicts.

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 ShoreTel Business VoIP Benefits:

• Ease
• Absolute reliability
• Return on investment
• The support you need

Response Data Communications – Awarded ShoreTel Gold Exclusive Champion Partner Status for EMEA

Brilliantly Simple technology; delivering award winning unified communications, voice mobility, enterprise contact centre and virtualisation solutions.

Call today for more information: 020 7871 0800

The US Company Nimble Storage founded by and led by storage industry veterans, recognised this growing gap [...]]]> The growth of virtualization and server consolidation has compounded the need for storage to simultaneously deliver superior performance, increased capacity, and simplified data protection. Traditional storage architectures are unable to comprehensively meet these demands.

The US Company Nimble Storage founded by and led by storage industry veterans, recognised this growing gap in the marketplace and quickly became the fastest growing storage vendor in history. Their patented Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL™) is the first storage architecture designed from the ground up to seamlessly integrate SSDs with high-capacity disks, delivering affordable performance, integrated backup and disaster recovery, and pain-free operations. Nimble Storage solutions are built to eliminate the compromise among performance, capacity, ease of use, and price.

Performance and Capacity Efficiency: Nimble’s CASL architecture coalesces random writes into a single RAID stripe, improving write perfor­mance by 10x -100x compared to traditional systems. Hot data is served from flash which responds to workload changes within milliseconds instead of hours or days. Their variable block-based compression technology delivers capacity savings of 30%-75% with no impact on system performance. Combined with highly efficient snapshots, thin provisioning, and zero-copy clones, Nimble offers the industry’s best primary storage density, all in a 3U form factor.

Instant Backups and Restores: Nimble Storage eliminates the constraints of traditional backup solutions. Thousands of snapshots can be stored with minimal space consumption, eliminating backup windows, allowing for more frequent recovery points, and enabling quick and efficient replication over a WAN. Nimble integration simplifies application-consistent backups for Microsoft, Oracle, and VMware. Backups and restores can be completed in seconds, improving application-level recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives.

For more information on Nimble’s CS-Series converged storage array, technical highlights and specifications call our team on 020 7871 0800.

Enterprise cloud deployments are growing in popularity, but the wide area network (WAN) is often overlooked as more applications and data are moved into the cloud. Unlike hardware-based WAN optimisation, Virtual WAN optimisation makes it easy to optimise application and data access between enterprise data centres, the cloud, and branch offices.

Silver Peak’s VX appliances (Virtual WAN Optimisation Solution) are software versions of the company’s award winning NX physical appliances. It supports Silver Peak’s complete spectrum of real-time optimisation techniques, which optimise Wide Area Network performance by overcoming common bandwidth, latency and network quality challenges.

Silver Peak’s VX appliances leverage all the benefits of server virtualisation, including:

Ease of deployment / mobility

•  Instantly deploy Silver Peak’s WAN optimization technology anywhere in the world; easily re-locate appliances as needed

Reduced IT costs

• Consolidate different applications onto common hardware platforms

High availability

• Leverage existing high availability tools inherent in virtual solutions (e.g. VMware / VMotion)

Flexible platform options

• Deploy WAN optimisation on any hardware platform of choice, including industry standard x86 servers or other custom platforms.

This video shows how Silver Peak’s virtual WAN optimisation can quickly and easily be deployed to optimise Verizon’s Terremark cloud.

Silver Peak Virtual Acceleration Open Architecture and virtual WAN optimization enables and optimizes cloud deployments.

For more information on Silver Peak’s VX appliances speak to Response Data Communications Team

Response Data Communications Product Portfolio Suite Includes; Senetas ethernet encryption, Silver Peak data centre class WAN Optimisation, Isilon Systems scale-out storage, AeroHive enterprise Wifi, Arista Networks data centre switching, Network Instruments network protocol  analysis and trending tools, Paloalto Networks next-generation firewalls, ShoreTel’s unified communications, voice mobility and enterprise contact centre solutions.

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There are some perennial IT trends that crop up each year about this time, and in networking, IPv6 always seems to be in the mix.  Well, after many years, I think IPv6 is moving from a check-box item which “I’ll promise to do one day,” to being [...]]]> Courtesy of David Hughes, Silver Peak Systems Inc.

There are some perennial IT trends that crop up each year about this time, and in networking, IPv6 always seems to be in the mix.  Well, after many years, I think IPv6 is moving from a check-box item which “I’ll promise to do one day,” to being something where customers are now saying “you guys better be nearly finished because we want to start testing.”

2012 is going to be an interesting year from an IPv6 point-of-view. I think most enterprises are a long way from deploying IPv6, but a few are being forced down-the-path, in particular, in the “Web” vertical. If you look at the big Internet companies and service providers, it is those types of environments that require a lot of IP addresses, and perhaps even more in parts of the world outside the United States.  Those are the places where things are moving towards IPv6 more rapidly.

For the average medium-sized enterprise in the US, we are still a few years away from where IPv6 matters.  However, there is a cohort of companies in the US where it’s becoming important and something they need to move on now.  A few years ago, it was predicted that the Federal space would drive the adoption of IPv6.  And while they are still asking for it, I am not sure that is the first place we will see widespread deployments of IPv6.  It will start with the Web companies.

IPv6 support comes naturally with Silver Peak’s architecture.  Because we already utilize tunnels for optimization, our architecture is ideally suited to help customers migrate from IPv4 to IPv6.   Today, Silver Peak carries and optimizes IPv6 traffic that is being tunneled in IPv4, which is the majority of IPv6 traffic today.  Even though there are a number of different flavors of IPv4 and IPv6 inter-working, WAN optimization appliances can certainly play a critical role.  If you are looking at native IPv6 clients and you want to get them across the network between two islands of IPv6, Silver Peak will be able to carry IPv6 native packets across our IPv4 tunnels to the other side.

So as you plan for IPv6, keep WAN optimization in mind.  It may turn out to be a valuable part of the solution, rather than yet another networking device to IPv6 enable.

Why? Because we’re PASSIONATE about RAISING much needed MONEY to help THOUSANDS of suffering CHILDREN across the country, every penny helps prevent [...]]]> On 7th October team Response Data Communications are sleeping outside, yes outside with no shelter. Expecting the worse of our British weather it will certainly be cold and maybe wet and windy – eek!!

Why? Because we’re PASSIONATE about RAISING much needed MONEY to help THOUSANDS of suffering CHILDREN across the country, every penny helps prevent innocent youths from ending up with dismal lives on the streets.
By taking part in this notably crazy exercise Byte Night 2011, team RDC are hoping we can convince you all to please sponsors us! Please DIG DEEP and help us to raise £2,500 in the next 2 weeks!!! Thank you, thank you, thank you!! PS. If you’re rich please don’t be shy ;-)

Byte Night - So what’s the plan? 

After a day in the office on Friday 7th October, team RDC are leaving work early to head to Cambridge for 6.30pm to join the other fundraisers in the Cambridge Byte Night 2011. On arrival we’ll need to look out for our ARM sister team – as it’s thanks to them we’re taking part is the awesome fundraiser. We’ve heard via the grapevine that it’ll be a long night but with a hugely positive buzz. We shall be fed warm food, to aid a peaceful night’s sleep but we all cant stop thinking that’s a bit of a luxury – unlike other not so lucky homeless youths. The most important fact is that this simple exercise will allow us to experience what it’s like to be homeless and the longing they must feel for a warm and cosy home. We hope to feel humbled by this unusual adventure and ask that you can please support us and the charity Action for Children in any way you can.

You can also sponsor us by texting via your mobile phone to: 70070 text: HELP 52 then the £amount. Thank You!

Gavin’s Story 

“Action for Children have done so much for me and thanks to Byte Night, they can keep helping me and 1000′s of young people like me.” Action for Children’s Youth Support Team has been working with Gavin for over a year. Without the Youth Support Team’s help, Gavin doesn’t know where he would be now. The team has helped him sort out his flat, made sure he can pay bills and most importantly they are always there if he needs to have a chat or some support. Gavin now has the opportunity to look to the future and has the chance to fulfil his life ambition to become a chef, his dream job.

The Youth Support Team in South Wales, works with local young people aged 16 – 21 who are setting up their first homes after leaving care, or because they can no longer live at home for whatever reason. They try to support young people to develop their independence, helping them with a wide range of issues such as budgeting, debt management and health as well as employment, training, education and even parenting skills. It is very common for the Youth Support Team to meet young people at a time of crisis for them, often when they’ve become homeless. So it is essential for them to be extremely flexible and sensitive to their individual needs while ensuring that they are finding the young people the best solutions to their problems.

About the charity – Action for Children

Action for Children meets the needs of the children and young people who most need support to achieve their full potential. Through our work and through speaking out, we seek to break the cycle of deprivation. We challenge injustice and empower children to overcome the obstacles in their lives that hold them back. We tailor our work to local circumstances, in partnership with children and young people, families, communities and local organisations. Charity Registration No. 1097940

About Just Giving

Donating through JustGiving is simple, fast and totally secure. Your details are safe with JustGiving – they’ll never sell them on or send unwanted emails. Once you donate, they’ll send your money directly to the Action for Children charity and will make sure Gift Aid is reclaimed on every eligible donation by a UK taxpayer. So it’s the most efficient way to donate – we’ll raise more, whilst saving time and cutting costs for the charity.

The VX-Xpress is the industry’s first FREE fully functional, Virtual WAN Optimisation appliance for the masses. Leveraging Silver Peak’s award winning VXOA technology, the entry level VX appliance is an easy and simple to use solution for mid to large sized organisations wanting to experience the benefits of a virtual WANOp system without the costs.

Made available over the internet, business users can download Silver Peak’s free WANop application without even registering their corporate details. Silver Peak have recognised that more and more organisations are moving into cloud based architecture; applications running over the wide area, and are discovering the need for WAN optimisation. Using the same core structure as their paid solution it’s certainly not a watered down version and has all the benefits including; deduplication, network integrity and network acceleration. It’s simply been moved over to work on a hypervisor in a virtual environment, making it the perfect first step to discover the power of data centre class WAN optimization.

Silver Peak’s VX-Xpress Solutions:

-          Remote File Access

-          SharePoint Collaboration

-          VoIP and Video Quality

-          Disaster Recovery

Optimize File Transfers (CIFS) with Silver Peak VX-Xpress – It’s a challenge maintaining synchronized files across a distributed enterprise and it can be costly to deploy and manage file servers in remote and branch offices. Silver Peak’s VX-Xpress Remote File Access eliminates file sharing blues, from Microsoft (CIFS) and Apple (AFS) to Network File Systems (NFS) and File Transfer Protocol (FTP). There are numerous advantages to centralizing enterprise file servers including faster data transfers, quicker access and the process is far more cost effective. Read More…

Optimize SharePoint with Silver Peak VX-Xpress – Does slow access to remote SharePoint files have you cursing Microsoft daily especially when dealing with large files? SharePoint Collaboration is a robust platform for information exchange, however real-time collaboration via SharePoint can also be painfully slow across a WAN – and a hazard to any non SharePoint users sharing the same network infrastructure. With the VX-Xpress, SharePoint benefits from the full range of Silver Peak’s WAN optimization techniques, so you can maximize your investment in SharePoint without overhauling your entire network infrastructure. It’s fast, free and effective, so what are you waiting for. Read More…

Optimize VoIP and Video Quality with Silver Peak VX-Xpress – Frustrated with dropped links on your videoconferences and video streaming? Does a mobile phone call sound better than VoIP over your corporate network? These and other real-time applications currently account for approximately 30% of enterprise WAN traffic, and are expected to grow significantly over the coming years. Too much latency, jitter and packet loss across the WAN causes conversations to be dropped, garbled, or pixilated. Silver Peak’s high quality WAN infrastructure makes conversations sound crystal clear and provides a strategic enabler for unified communications with the VX-Xpress. Read More…

Optimize Your Live Replication and avoid Disaster Nightmares with Silver Peak VX-Xpress – Are you one disaster away from losing all your company’s data? WAN optimization is an indispensible component of offsite disaster recovery projects. The VX-Xpress, not only reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) for critical offsite data protection, but enables easy remote backup and offsite replication at an affordable price.  Give it a try – your storage team will thank you! Read More…

Register for Silver Peak’s VX-Xpress Community – The peer-driven community forum, moderated by Silver Peak product managers, eliminates costly maintenance fees. The VX-Xpress Community is a network to help IT managers configure and deploy their VX-Xpress virtual appliances. Register for the Forum now to swap stories, view documentation and videos or to speak to Response Data Communications; Silver Peak’s leading EMEA reseller.

Get started in 6 steps - Learn how to deploy a VX-Xpress, your path to WAN Optimisation.

Contact Center 7 can now be managed through an intuitive Web based management interface that makes the administration and management of the ECC brilliantly simple.

The new management interface is supported on Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox browsers. Contact Center Director [...]]]> Web Based ShoreTel Contact Center Director

Contact Center 7 can now be managed through an intuitive Web based management interface that makes the administration and management of the ECC brilliantly simple.

The new management interface is supported on Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox browsers. Contact Center Director makes it easy for administrators to search for records and keywords, copy configurations quickly. Advanced error checking and inline help further makes the administration simpler.

A “favorites” section allows each supervisor to bookmark their most frequently used configuration to show up in the top of the navigation panel making it even more easier to locate and configure.

Quick navigation links also enable supervisors to go back and forth between different configuration entities.

Helpful hints show up at every level of configuration giving indications of pre-requisites

Key areas such as shifts have detailed descriptions that enable administrators to visually see how the shift work better.

Extremely useful tips on errors and on screen validations guide the administrators through the process

Advanced searching and sorting makes configuration “brilliantly simple”

Finally keyboard shortcuts for those “younger generation admins used to  SMS like actions.”

Response Data Communications Product Portfolio Suite Includes; Senetas ethernet encryption, Silver Peak data centre class WAN Optimisation, Isilon Systems scale-out storage, AeroHive enterprise Wifi, Arista Networks data centre switching, Network Instruments network protocol  analysis and trending tools, Paloalto Networks next-generation firewalls, ShoreTel’s unified communications, voice mobility and enterprise contact centre solutions.

Follow RDC on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and the RDC Blog

This will be instrumental in helping customers “future-proof” the WAN for cloud and virtualisation architectures [...]]]> Here is a great video of Silver Peak vice president of product management Damon Ennis talking about the new NX-10K appliance, the industry’s first multi-Gigabit WAN optimisation appliance for next generation data centres and the industy’s highest-capacity WAN optimisation appliance.

This will be instrumental in helping customers “future-proof” the WAN for cloud and virtualisation architectures in the data centre.