#up-time

Shoretel hosted VoIP. Our organization made the swap to Shoretel in a huge building relocation that took place about a month ago. We had to move to accommodate our growth, and in that, we’d outgrown an old Panasonic hybrid IP PBX system. Enter - VoIP.

I researched a number of different hosted VoIP providers, the option to host VoIP services internally, as well as a myriad of other opportunities. The most cumulatively beneficial decision based on our business needs was to go with a hosted system, and Shoretel’s reputation beat out the competition by a landslide.

The migration was relatively painless, everything swapped on time, and the system voice quality has been great. Support is generally helpful, and our overall experience is 85-90%. Late yesterday afternoon our phones started acting up. Unable to dial internal extensions, unable to access call history/voicemail, etc... I kept my finger on the heartbeat of the issue overnight, and early in the AM I’d noticed that our service hadn’t been restored yet. I have a Shoretel phone at home, so I tested the system first thing when I woke up.

Upon finding this I had to shoot out an all-employee email notifying the organization that our phones would not be operational until further notice. An email from all three of the execs I knew would have issue - CEO/COO/CTO - and I knew my credibility was on the line. This is where my “Trust” in Shoretel becomes thin. 

How do you offer a hosted voice service, with commitment with to a 99.9% up-time target, without having some kind of fail over for catastrophic outage like this? All of your Connect clients were reported to be down by a support rep I spoke with, and our business was without phones from basically 4PM-10AM next day. Internally we’ve taken measures to combat ISP outages, and have provided three connections for our VoIP traffic to run off of.

/endrant