Saying No to the Status Quo a Win for Melbourne Football Club

The Melbourne Football Club (MFC), more popularly named ‘The Demons,’ is a foundation member of the Australian Football League (AFL) and its predecessor competition, the Victorian Football League.

The club boasts 35,000 diehard members supported by 150 employees working from a CBD office and sites at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) and AAMI Park. A 10-year old POTS phone system was being used across three sites; it was unreliable and expensive to operate and maintain.

“Retaining the LG Nortel Aria phone system was simply nonviable,” noted Richard Arnott, IT Manager, Melbourne Football Club. “Users were unable to communicate within the same workspace or when in the field, which is critical to all organizations, not just a professional footy club. To add to the woes, the system kept crashing and lacked the basic reliability a phone system should possess.”

So, the club looked at various systems (including a Cisco offering) before deciding to say no to the status quo. They chose ShoreTel.

The ShoreTel offering stood out from competitors due to its ability to provide a unified approach to communications. It provided a simple to use, simple to maintain resource that was flexible enough to meet exacting requirements and accommodate individual needs.

“The ShoreTel rollout was fast, simple and effective. It was the ideal IT rollout,”
- Richard Arnott , IT Manager, Melbourne Football Club

Recent Service Experience Improvements From ShoreTel TAC

I am very excited to share two recent features we have implemented to improve the service experience with ShoreTel TAC (Technical Assistance Center).

On May 7, we announced TAC’s Call Me feature.

Call Me is a virtual queuing solution that provides the Service Request (SR) creator the option of having TAC call you back instead of waiting in queue – without losing your place in queue. This can be done at the time of SR creation via the portal or when placing subsequent follow-up calls for support. (This feature is currently available to our North America Partners. By July 1, we plan to make it available to everyone.)

Users have also been asking us for the ability to troubleshoot common issues without having to call into TAC.

We are thrilled to announce that the first round of TAC Troubleshooting Reference Guides (TRG) are now available! You can find them at: http://support.shoretel.com/kb/view.do?kcId=KB16648 (customer/partner login required).

Our objective is to share the most common issues we get calls for, and the techniques used to troubleshoot them. These first round of TRGs pertain to Contact Center, Communicator, SIP Trunks, and Server. These guides also include what info TAC will need when you call, so we can more quickly address your issue.

We take your feedback seriously and are committed to taking action to make ongoing service improvements. If you have any suggestions or comments, please send them to me at: bharath-feedback@shoretel.com.

Thanks!

Avaya Financial Update

Everyone is talking about the Facebook IPO. No doubt investor demand is high as Facebook is profitable and has been growing revenue. Some speculate that the company could be valued at over $100 billion.

Another company that has announced its intention to go public is Avaya. Avaya recently filed its calendar Q1 2012 quarterly financial report with the SEC and the results paint a vastly different picture than Facebook.

In its most recent quarter, Avaya had a sequential revenue decline of 9.4% and a year-over-year revenue decline of 9.6%. Furthermore, its net loss was $162 million compared to a loss of $26 million in the previous quarter and a loss of $432 million in the year ago quarter. Not exactly what investors are looking for.

In fact, Avaya was named to Fortune Magazine’s “20 Companies That Lost the Most” list in 2012 and “20 Biggest Money Losers” list in 2011.

With Avaya’s over $6 billion (yes, billion with a “B”) in debt, it’s no wonder that they’ve had to continually restructure their operations. In fact, Avaya has had a restructuring program in fiscal 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012 (source: Avaya 10-Q pages 11-13).

We know all too well the risks to Avaya customers of having too much debt as evidenced by what happened to Nortel and Nortel customers. Avaya even highlights this risk in their annual 10K filing (Avaya 10K, December 2011, page 30):

“Our degree of leverage could adversely affect our ability to raise additional capital to fund our operations, limit our ability to react to changes in the economy or our industry, expose us to interest rate risk to the extent of our variable rate debt and prevent us from meeting obligations on our indebtedness.”

Perhaps a telling sign is that Avaya’s debt is rated “B3” (junk, non-investment grade) by Moody’s and “B-“ (junk, non-investment grade) by Standard & Poor’s (source: Avaya 10-Q page 60). These debt ratings are actually lower than what Nortel debt was rated 4 months before Nortel declared bankruptcy.

Whether or not Avaya will be able to go public depends on investor appetite. Those investors who do their homework may come to realize that they are not that hungry.

Avaya’s latest SEC filing can be found at: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1116521/000119312512232956/d338618d10q.htm

Understanding ShoreTel’s Failover Options

ShoreTel’s Unified Communication solution provides powerful and cost effective options to maximize the availability of dial tone for users. IP Phones (also known as VoIP phones) are controlled by modular voice switch appliances that are inherently super reliable.

This reliability can be augmented by provisioning two methods of backup voice switches:

Inter-Site

This solution is ideally suited for distributed systems comprised of a larger HQ location and any a number of branch locations. Dedicated spare IP phone resources can be provisioned at the HQ location to serve the entire system i.e. any voice switch failure at a branch location will result the branch IP phones switching over and receiving service from the HQ voice switches.

This is extremely cost effective and leverages the statistical likelihood that only one branch will have a local voice switch outage at a given time.

Intra-Site (aka: N+1)

IP failover within a site is a second option of course. This might be considered for the HQ location itself or for larger semi-autonomous branch locations. This option requires spare voice switch at the location itself. What distinguishes the ShoreTel solution again is the efficiency with which the spare capacity can be provisioned.

Let’s take an example of 180 IP phones at such a location. A nominal implementation might be to deploy two voice switches capable of supporting 90 phones each. However by deploying 3 voice switches with spare capacity a more optimal backup scenario can be created: the three voice switches each nominally serve 60 phones (i.e. they each have spare capacity of 30 phones).

A failure in any of one of the three voice switches will result in the affected phones seamlessly moving over to the spare capacity on the other two voice switches. So the cost of providing backup services is 50% or less over the nominal cost of the required resources compared to 100% for more conventional redundant solutions from other vendors.

It is even possible to combine these two options and this allows ShoreTel to deliver an extremely robust UC platform.

 

Empowering Partners Through Marketing Funding, Education And Incentives

Channel partners are an extension of the ShoreTel organisation. That is why we have always strived to invest in their businesses and incentivise their successes. Eighteen months ago, we decided to take this further and set the beginning of the Accelerate Marketing Knowledge master classes.

We had the vision of inspiring our partners to create and execute joint marketing activities with ShoreTel, and this is exactly what we designed these classes to do.

At ShoreTel, we have always held the opinion that customer retention, growth and satisfaction stem from a thriving and successful partner ecosystem. To achieve this, we decided to initiate a series of events, which would educate channel marketing professionals with the very latest industry ideas, concepts and practises. As a first step, we hired marketing specialists Bowan Arrow to design one day sessions which would provoke discussions, debates and actions. We wanted these sessions to originate individual marketing plans, into which fulfilment ShoreTel would invest.

Each one of our channel partners brings specific expertise, whether it is vertical understanding, or horizontal technical expertise, to the customers that they serve. What we wanted to do with the Accelerate programme, was to grow their businesses by providing the tools and education needed for them differentiate and make themselves heard in the competitive, noisy market of unified communication solutions.

As of today, we have over 30 joint marketing campaigns agreed and underway in the UK channel as a direct result of the Accelerate Marketing Knowledge series; some backed with 100% funding from ShoreTel.

The next Accelerate Marketing event will be held in the autumn, when attending partners will report on their successful campaigns and share best practice with the community.  We also plan to reward the most proactive partner marketer with personal incentives, as well as recognise the businesses that have been commercial successful through joint initiatives with ShoreTel.

From the outset we viewed the Accelerate marketing Knowledge project as a long term investment that encouraged personal development, as well as commercial success. The feedback we gather from the sessions is overwhelmingly positive and the attendance numbers reflect how much value our partners get from this training.

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