Why Virtualize Your UC
Why Virtualize Your UC
Virtualization has taken firm root from data centers to desktops at businesses of all sizes. In fact, 72 percent of small- and mid-sized businesses use server virtualization, according to Spiceworks’ most recent State of SMB IT survey, and all signs points to continued growth. Many businesses have reaped the benefits of running email, customer relationship management, financials, and other business software in a virtual environment. And increasingly, they are virtualizing their IP phone systems and contact centers — and wondering why they waited so long to improve the efficiency and availability of their business communications.
The benefits of virtualization for unified communications and other applications are well documented:
Increase IT efficiency. By running your applications in a virtual environment, you can consolidate the number of physical servers you need. Many organizations were hesitant to virtualize real-time applications, such as unified communications, but there’s no doubt that today’s powerful servers can handle the demands. Virtualizing more applications means running fewer physical servers, which reduces space requirements as well as power and cooling needs in your data center or server room. And that adds up to costs savings and a greener environment.
Improve application availability. Virtualization puts high availability within the reach of small and mid-sized businesses. You can more easily and efficiently leverage the business continuity features offered by the virtual server vendors for all of your applications. For example, if the primary virtual machine fails, a backup virtual server can take over automatically so that your email, unified communications, and other virtualized applications won’t skip a beat.
The first step to the cloud. Virtualization is a strategic move, too, as it is the first step toward taking advantage of the cloud. Virtualizing your applications gets you comfortable with a model where you can’t hug your servers and it readies you to take the next step to the cloud.
Virtualize Your Business Communications with ShoreTel
Like a growing number of companies, J-W Energy Company runs a 100-percent virtual environment. Virtualization has enabled the Texas-based natural gas company to centrally manage massive amounts of data and back-end services for greater cost efficiencies and better access to information. Having a phone system that can be virtualized extends this flexibility to employees’ communications.
“ShoreTel runs great in a virtualized environment,” says Joel Wolfe, director of IS at J-W Energy. “It was very important for us to have a single integrated system. With ShoreTel we found a solid, comprehensive, yet entirely flexible communications solution.”
ShoreTel offers customers a choice of implementation models that fit your needs, whether you prefer virtual or physical servers. Many organizations run ShoreTel’s core unified communications system and Enterprise Contact Center on VMware. The ShoreTel core platform and Enterprise Contact Center also can run on the same physical server.
Virtualization complements ShoreTel’s highly reliable architecture and that protects your business phone system and contact center. If an outage does occur, the ShoreTel workload can be moved automatically to a different virtual machine without a disruption to the workflow. For example, if a customer is using the automated attendant when the system goes down, the call will be automatically moved without dropping.
Virtualization also simplifies IT management. Your IT administrator can manage the ShoreTel system from your headquarters to your remote offices from a single console.
In addition, ShoreTel Communicator, the single interface used to manage communications on a ShoreTel desk phone, computer, mobile device, or home phone, can run in virtualized or thin-client environments such as Citrix XenApp. Using desktop virtualization brings many benefits, including the ability to quickly onboard employees or contractors, and reduces the hassle of installing and maintaining client-specific software. Desktop virtualization is often used in security-conscious environments, such as finance or healthcare, and where there is high demand for mobile devices, such as in schools.
