How significant are ShoreTel’s claims about the ‘hard’ benefits of its UC s

One of the biggest criticisms leveled at UC provider sales pitches is their focus on ‘soft’ benefits, such as time saved for the average office worker and increased productivity. Of course, what most organisations need in order justify a UC purchase decision is reliable evidence of ‘hard’ benefits such as cost reduction and accelerated time to market. ShoreTel’s promotion of the energy efficiency of its solution provides an interesting example of a UC provider trying to address that need.

ShoreTel’s claims are based on a report it commissioned from the Tolly group to investigate the power consumption of its IP switches and IP phones relative to those from other suppliers. These tests were then used as the basis for projections of the typical energy consumption of ShoreTel’s UC solution in various deployment scenarios. These projections estimate that a ShoreTel UC system on a network made up of 350 users at a main site and 19 branch offices would use 45% less power than Cisco’s UC offering. At a single site with 65 users, the saving would be 44%, and that deployment at a main site with 1500 users plus one regional and one branch office site would produce savings of 37%.

On the one hand, it’s shame that the figures that ShoreTel is quoting here are only projections - many customers will only be convinced if they see numbers that originate from real world deployment. On the other, ShoreTel should be commended for having enough faith in its own technology to risk a severe loss of credibility if customers make a purchase on the strength of these energy saving projections, and then fail to achieve a comparable result in the field.