Plessie to take all-round benefits of IP communications to 1200-strong customer base
KZN telecommunications company Plessie has announced that it has partnered with ShoreTel and ShoreTel’s South African distributor Tellumat Communication Solutions, to provide Unified Communications (UC)and Enterprise Contact Centre (ECC)solutions to its extensive customer base in KZN. With the announcement, Plessie is ShoreTel’s first partner based in the province.
After assessing a number of different vendors of IP-based communications systems, Plessie chose ShoreTel based on the scalability of the technology, the ease of configuration and installation, and the opportunity the solutions provided for Plessie to build a managed services business to support its business communications deployments.
“We see ShoreTel and Tellumat taking our business to the next level,” said Rowan Purll, CEO of Plessie, “There is a huge opportunity in the market with many government and business organisations currently looking to upgrade their telephony environment to IP and take advantage of the benefits of UC.”
Leon Rusch, channel manager at Tellumat, says the company has had a relationship with the top-ranked Pinetown-based firm for more than 10 years.
“Plessie has built up a distinguished record selling telephony and contact centre systems over the years we have been doing business with the company. Plessie has an impressive portfolio of customers across KZN, covering multiple industries and segments, serving the entire spectrum of small one-site businesses through to big multi-site deployments, including government departments and large corporates.”
ShoreTel, a US-based technology vendor, was established in 1996 and has developed its telephony and unified communications solutions on a pure IP-based platform. The result is a suite of brilliantly simple unified communications platforms, applications and mobile UC solutions. With costly complexity eliminated by design from ShoreTel’s award-winning, all-in-one IP phone system, UC and contact centre solution, workers enjoy a freedom and self-reliance that other providers can’t match. Users have full control to engage and collaborate, no matter the time, place or device, for the lowest cost and demand on IT resources in the industry.
ShoreTel further offers its channels (distributor and resellers) excellent sales and knowledge resources to serve the market and support customers, and consistently ranks highest among its peers in customer satisfaction results.
“ShoreTel is developing some real traction in the South African market, and we are really thrilled to have a company like Plessie as our first partner in KZN,” said Bruce Downing, Managing Director, Asia and South Africa, ShoreTel.
“What’s really pleasing is that a company with such a strong track record and technical capability in telecommunications has done its homework on IP-based UC vendors and clearly picked ShoreTel as the best solution for the South African market.”
Purll says the partnership offers exciting possibilities for Plessie as customers increasingly embrace the rich communications potential of unified communications (single-interface telephony, video, collaboration, instant messaging, email, conferencing, etc).
The company will offer onsite as well as hosted, managed service delivery, allowing small companies to obtain high-end UC functionality without undergoing a big upfront capital outlay.
Bennie Langenhoven, managing executive at Tellumat Communications Solutions, says Tellumat has been a distributor of ShoreTel’s solutions since 2009, but of late demand has increased markedly.
“Tellumat now has ShoreTel resellers based in three provinces – Gauteng, KZN and Western Cape – and we will continue to assess new partnership opportunities from established regional and national resellers with a solid skills complement and implementation record.”
Tellumat provides lead generation, pre-sales, sales and after-sales support to its technology partners, and offers training and joint marketing programs and initiatives.
Tellumat Communication Solutions, the converged communications specialist in the Tellumat Group, is the local distributor of ShoreTel’s brilliantly simple Unified Communications solutions, based on its award-winning IP business phone system. ShoreTel offers organisations of all sizes integrated, voice, video, data, and mobile communication on an open, distributed IP architecture that helps significantly reduce the complexity and costs typically associated with other solutions. The feature-rich ShoreTel UC system offers the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) and the highest customer satisfaction in the industry, in part because it is easy to deploy, manage, scale and use. Increasingly, companies around the world are finding a competitive edge by replacing business-as-usual with new thinking, and choosing ShoreTel to handle their integrated business communication.
About ShoreTel
ShoreTel is the provider of brilliantly simple Unified Communication (UC) solutions based on its award-winning IP business phone system. We offer organizations of all sizes integrated, voice,
video, data, and mobile communications on an open, distributed IP architecture that helps significantly reduce the complexity and costs typically associated with other solutions. The
feature-rich ShoreTel UC system offers the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) and the highest customer satisfaction in the industry, in part because it is easy to deploy, manage, scale and
use. Increasingly, companies around the world are finding a competitive edge by replacing business-as-usual with new thinking, and choosing ShoreTel to handle their integrated business
communication. ShoreTel is based in Sunnyvale, California, and has regional offices and partners worldwide. For more information, visit shoretel.com.
Tellumat Communications
Bennie Langenhoven
Tel: +27 (0)21 710 2911
Cell: +27 (0)82 469 0354
Email: blangenhoven@tellumat.com
