Shoretel Promotes GreenShoretel Promotes Green

I got hit with the "Green IT" message in the convergence area for the first time, when getting a briefing from Steve Timmerman, Shoretel's VP of marketing, about Shoretel's newest product release . One of the big product improvements is the downsizing of Shoretel's ShoreGear voice switch, from 1U to just half a rack unit, while at the same time the switch can serve double the capacity of the previous 1U version. The smaller unit uses 20 percent less power, so on a per-user basis, it cuts your power usage by 60 percent.

I got hit with the "Green IT" message in the convergence area for the first time, when getting a briefing from Steve Timmerman, Shoretel's VP of marketing, about Shoretel's newest product release . One of the big product improvements is the downsizing of Shoretel's ShoreGear voice switch, from 1U to just half a rack unit, while at the same time the switch can serve double the capacity of the previous 1U version. The smaller unit uses 20 percent less power, so on a per-user basis, it cuts your power usage by 60 percent.That's good and green and all, but what I was curious about was why Shoretel didn't stick with a 1U switch and quadruple the previous capacity, instead of half-U and double capacity (the biggest ShoreGear switches support 220 IP phones, and you can aggregate 500 switches into a single system). I wondered if Shoretel might be able to bulk up into bigger-size enterprises if it did that.

Timmerman's response was that Shoretel's users are more concerned with resiliency than with such a large jump in capacity. "Customers say, 'I don't want one big switch at my site, I want two medium-sized switches,'" he said.

I have to wonder, though, if Shoretel can continue its success at going up-market without a heftier switch. On the other hand, that would involve a fundamental shift in the distributed-architecture view that has differentiated Shoretel thus far.