Shoreline Targets SMBs With IP-PBX Solution

Shoreline's new Single-Site Enterprise Solution, an IP-PBX targeted at businesses with 100 or fewer telephone users in one location, is built on the same Shoreline3 hardware as its Multi-Site Enterprise Solution for larger clients, said Jennifer Stagnaro, chief marketing officer at Shoreline, Sunnyvale. The SMB product excludes some of the high-end software functionality that smaller customers do not require, she said.

Previously, Shoreline did not have an entry-level offering appropriately priced for smaller businesses, said Wesley Clark, partner at Computer Network Power, a network integrator based in Charlotte, N.C.

"Our business is a mix of single-site and multisite clients, so we felt like [a single-site offering was a missing piece to get started," Clark said.

With the new solution, Shoreline has a lower-priced offering that can be expanded as customers grow and need new feature sets, Clark said.

Shoreline developed the new solution after some of its channel partners alerted the company to sales opportunities it was missing, Stagnaro said.

"Our resellers came to us with the idea, and we worked with them to bring about what we're announcing today," Stagnaro said.

The vendor launched Team Shoreline, its first channel partner program, in April.

The Single-Site Enterprise Solution includes one or more ShoreGear voice switches for dedicated call-processing and the ShoreWare application suite, which includes the Shoreline Call Director Web-based management tool, voice mail, automatic call distribution, and automated after-hours call answering and routing.

The application suite also includes ShoreWare Personal Call Manager, an end-user interface that provides caller information, point-and-click features such as call transfer and conferencing, as well as integration with Microsoft Outlook for automatic contact lookup and dialing.

A typical 38-user system would be priced at $22,240, while a typical 96-user system would be priced at $52,175.

When single-site users expand and are ready to migrate to a multisite solution, they can purchase additional hardware and a license-key upgrade that activates more advanced application features, such as least-cost call routing, call queuing, integration with third-party interactive voice response systems, and more sophisticated call and system management features.

A license-key upgrade to add mult-site capabilities costs $7,500.