Features

As IT departments across the country gear up for new budgets and new opportunities for network upgrades, voice-over-IP (VoIP) solutions are expected to be near the top of the list. Surprisingly, however, the big names may not be the ones many IT buyers select for their convergence projects. According to one national survey, IP telephony products from ShoreTel are ranked higher than products from industry behemoths Cisco, Avaya and Nortel.

“Convergence & Next-Generation WAN Technologies,” conducted independently by Nemertes Research (www.nemertes.com), is a comprehensive study based on interviews with enterprise IT professionals. The study reportedly was not commissioned or sponsored by ShoreTel in any way.

So what is ShoreTel doing that the other IP telephony vendors are not? Lots of things, according to study participants. They were asked to score their VoIP vendors on a scale of 1 to 5 in nine specific areas: value, technology, VAR expertise, management tools, customer service, solution experience, product features, ease of installation/troubleshooting and performance.

ShoreTel won every category, with a near-perfect score of 4.83 for both installation/troubleshooting and overall performance. Only one of the other vendors cracked the “excellent” rating in any category. As a result, ShoreTel’s average score of 4.52 was almost a full point higher than theirs. Nemertes says, however, that the size of VoIP installations can influence survey results, with Cisco and Avaya generally involved with larger projects and ShoreTel concentrating on smaller implementations.

Across the whole study, participants had the most gripes about the installation and troubleshooting category. ShoreTel ranked highest within the category, more than a full point ahead of second-place Avaya. One IT director says he was just about to roll out Cisco company-wide when he was introduced to ShoreTel and saw its easy implementation, disaster recovery and redundancy, and intuitive user interface. “That turned everything upside down.”

Asked to rank selection criteria for VoIP solutions, study participants put products and capabilities first, followed by customer service. ShoreTel placed first in those categories, as well.

For the technology rating, participants were asked to look beyond just the features to the macro-design of the solution’s underlying platform. Respondents gave ShoreTel high marks for its technology, which is fronted by an intuitive user interface and backed up with built-in redundancy and disaster recovery, and can co-exist with legacy technology and multivendor environments.

“We wanted the ability to do things like record calls and add voice mail, and with competitors, every time you wanted to add a feature, it was another $50,000,” says one customer. ShoreTel includes such capabilities in the basic product.

Another study participant replaced Avaya’s contact center with ShoreTel’s, saying, “It has all the workgroup functionality we needed and more.”

Not surprisingly, IT professionals consider reducing costs as “very important” for VoIP implementations. Participants collectively spent the most operational startup time on Cisco implementations, followed by Nortel, Avaya and ShoreTel. For implementations of up to 1,000 units, ShoreTel costs the least per user at $105; for installations of 1,000 units or more, ShoreTel also comes out on top at $31 per user, followed by Avaya at $50. Cisco is the most costly at $165 per user, followed by Nortel at $132 per user. The figures include how much time organizations spend on planning, installation and troubleshooting. When assessing all capital costs associated with a VoIP deployment, Avaya posted the lowest cost per user at $308. 

IT workers on the move

Chances are, your technology workers are restless with their current job situation and are searching for new opportunities. In fact, 58% of nearly 1,000 IT workers recently surveyed by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) say they are actively looking for a new job, primarily in search of higher pay.

A bigger paycheck is the number one reason why tech workers are scouring career Web sites and help-wanted ads. The desire for more money was cited by 73% of individuals seeking new positions as their reason for doing so.

The survey also indicates that IT professionals are interested in more than just their paychecks. Nearly two-thirds of tech workers say there is no opportunity for advancement in their current job; while 58% say they are looking for a new challenge. The survey also found that nearly 60% of the IT professionals looking for new jobs have been with their current employers for three or more years; and 52% have been in their current job role for at least three years.

“Tech workers who stayed put in their jobs over several years of uncertainty in our industry are clearly looking to move on now that we’re in a period of growth,” says Neill Hopkins, vice president, skills development, CompTIA.

The restless tech workforce is not limited to the IT industry. Among the workers surveyed, one-quarter work with companies that are primarily in IT, but 16% work in education, 15% in government, 8% in healthcare and 7% in manufacturing.

“The survey findings are a mixed blessing for employers,” Hopkins says. “Some organizations will lose the IT workers who’ve been responsible for building and maintaining their technology infrastructure. But employers looking to build internal IT expertise should be able to draw from a large pool of technology professionals eager for new challenges.”

Security is weak link

Security concerns are the biggest obstacle to the widespread adoption of wireless and remote computing in businesses worldwide today, according to a global survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by Symantec Corp. More than 60% of companies are holding back on deployment, citing security concerns. Close to 47% of respondents cite cost and complexity as a major obstacle to deployment. In addition, almost one in five businesses has already experienced financial loss due to attacks via mobile data platforms.

The research highlights serious weaknesses in firms’ present security arrangements for mobile devices. While 82% of businesses worldwide indicate that they see the damage from virus attacks as the same or greater on a mobile network than on a fixed network, only 26% have assessed security risks of smart phones, compared with 81% of enterprises conducting security assessments for laptops. More than 240 global company executives were surveyed, and a number of in-depth interviews were conducted.

Despite the proliferation of mobile device use in the enterprise, only 9% of companies have incorporated a comprehensive security architecture designed to include mobile device access. Of the rest, 10% of companies have no measures for addressing mobile security, 39% are granting mobile devices access to corporate networks on an ad hoc basis and another 39% are integrating mobile devices into their existing fixed network security architecture.

Wireless, cabling unite

Everyone knows that a wireless network actually requires plenty of wiring. Access points, for example, need to be connected to the wired network and to power sources. Cabling vendors started coming to this realization about two years ago, and now several traditional cabling providers sell wireless products, including Ortronics, ADC and Panduit. Now, another company has joined the growing list.

Belden, a provider of wired signal transmission products for the enterprise and industrial markets, and Extricom, the New York-based designer of an interference-free wireless LAN system, have joined in a multiyear, multimillion-dollar global agreement that will focus on developing enterprise Wi-Fi solutions, enabled by Extricom’s core technology.

“Our entry into wireless technology presents another avenue for the fulfillment of our customers’ needs, with unified wired-wireless solutions they can depend on,” says Peter Sheehan, president of Belden Americas, headquartered in Richmond, Ind. “Extricom provides a highly differentiated technology that will be the basis for Belden’s future wireless products.”

Extricom’s interference-free WLAN system represents a fundamental shift in architecture from “cell planning” to a “channel blanket” topology, Sheehan says. The technology eliminates the co-channel interference inherent in traditional WLAN systems, to deliver zero-latency mobility, robust, wire-like client connections, and the ability to design for a guaranteed and predictable level of service for all users. The result, he adds, is a high- performance solution for powering the enterprise triple play of data, voice (VoWLAN) and video.