Communication systems requirements vary widely from company to company, and the availability of virtualization technology is changing how unified communications is deployed in small- and medium-sized companies as well as large enterprises. Virtualization technology can deliver a number of benefits to customers, depending on customer uses and needs.

"The time is now to take advantage of virtualization for unified communications - the infrastructure is in place, the market is ready, the channel is knowledgeable, and customers are clamoring to virtualize their PBX and entire communications platform," said Pej Roshan, vice president of product management at ShoreTel. "Virtualization complements our distributed architecture and allows customers to benefit from virtualization features and ShoreTel's inherent N+1 redundancy to deliver high availability at the lowest cost. In addition,virtualization sets the foundation for customers to consume VoIP services via on-premises, hybrid, and cloud deployment models."

ShoreTel enables customers to choose the unique deployment model that best suits their needs. This allows customers to leverage virtual servers they already own and operate.

"My customers are ready to deploy virtualization technologies, and with ShoreTel 14.2, they have the ability to mix and match hardware-based and virtual appliances on a single network," said Jeremy Vignaux, vice president of technology at Harbor Networks. "This brings greater flexibility along with reduced hardware and operational costs because virtual appliances support higher phone and SIP trunk capacities.And terminating SIP trunks on virtual appliances is a lot simpler while also increasing the capacity of the virtual machines."

ShoreTel 14.2 enables all ShoreTel UC components, including call control, SIP trunks, and collaboration applications, to be virtualized and implemented on industry standard servers. In addition, virtualization allows customers to take advantage of features such as VMware High Availability and VMotion to improve applications availability and enable disaster recovery practices companies already have in place.