Ever since Sunnyvale, California-based Unified Communication (UC) solutions provider ShoreTel (News - Alert), Inc. began supporting virtualization over a year and a half ago, it has observed that increasing number of enterprises have started deploying its solutions in a virtualized environment – for significant cost savings, easier administration, and increased system availability.

Consequently, ShoreTel recently achieved VMware certification for its Enterprise Contact Center (ECC) solution. According to a source, ShoreTel’s ECC achieved VMware Ready status, a designation indicating that the company’s ECC has passed a detailed evaluation and testing process managed by VMware. ShoreTel’s ECC is now listed in the VMware Partner Product Catalog.

ShoreTel’s Enterprise Contact Center (ECC) software provides advanced multimedia call center solutions for all organizations. It features sophisticated real-time management and reporting tools. It also provides tailor-made functionalities that can meet specific requirements with advanced routing, multiple service options, and tools that help deliver calls to the right agents and services at the right time.

To attain the VMware Ready certification, ShoreTel had to pass extensive VMware-specified tests that help ensure ECC make best use of VMware technology and is ready for deployment in customer environments.

According to ShoreTel, more than 1,000 customers in 26 countries have deployed the company’s software in a virtual environment. The capability to virtualize key applications complements ShoreTel’s distributed architecture and also allows customers to take advantage of virtualization benefits, such as better server utilization, centralized deployment for more efficient applications management, and improved business continuity.

The VMware Ready status for ShoreTel’s ECC signifies that resellers and customers can be confident that the mission critical Contact Center has been fully tested to run on VMware, thereby assuring stability and reliability.

Sheila McGee-Smith, president and principal analyst of McGee-Smith Analytics, said in a statement, “Virtualization is important to contact center management as corporate IT departments increasingly embrace data center deployments and virtualization of both infrastructure and applications. Few, if any, competitors can match the simplicity of ShoreTel’s single image contact center virtualization; most involve complex management of multiple virtualized images.”

Sheryl Sage, director of Alliance Programs at VMware, also said in a press release, “We are pleased that ShoreTel’s Enterprise Contact Center qualifies for the VMware Ready logo, signifying to customers that it has passed specific VMware testing and interoperability criteria and is ready to run in production environments.”

Kevin Gavin (News - Alert), chief marketing officer at ShoreTel, said in a statement, “ShoreTel support for VMware extends beyond the core IP PBX (News - Alert) UC and now includes the Contact Center as well so customers can leverage their VMware environment even more broadly. The inherent brilliant simplicity within the ShoreTel solution is further enhanced by the additional reliability and scalability benefits of a VMware platform.”