Most every company has a market of choice, one that provides ongoing results that help keep the business afloat. For the corner ice cream shop, it's the youth market. For the sports car maker, it's young single professionals. For ShoreTel (News - Alert)—a provider of phone systems and unified communications (UC) solutions—the market of choice seems to be government agencies, because the company has found quite a bit of success offering up its product line to groups backed by taxpayer dollars.

For those taxpayers out there, meanwhile, this is actually great news. ShoreTel's ongoing success in the public sector can be attributed to several factors, including the ease of use involved with ShoreTel products, but also its high amount of expertise in the field and its comparatively low total cost of ownership. Taxpayers have been working to keep government spending reined in with varying degrees of success. But that in turn means that government agencies have been facing reduced budgets as well as a rapidly-changing environment for communications technology, giving ShoreTel a great opportunity to step in.

ShoreTel offers up a complete line of integrated services, offering voice, video and data communications, as well as mobile solutions to meet the needs of the increasingly mobile workforce. Better yet, ShoreTel can offer this array of services on a plug-and-play basis, making it easier to install and put to use, meaning less time is spent in maintenance and training, reducing the overall costs. This combination has made it a powerful name in the public sector, and now, ShoreTel counts over 2,000 state and local government agencies to its credit with an average of 500 seats per organization.

More specific examples of ShoreTel's overwhelming productivity abound. The Alabama Department of Transportation was looking to replace a

Nortel (News - Alert) system, and thus turned to ShoreTel for its ability to provide faster response times at lower costs while still improving employee productivity for an environment of over 5,000 users. The Little Falls Police Department in Little Falls, New Jersey stepped in as well, calling on ShoreTel to replace an AT&T (News - Alert) Centrex system as part of the city's 911 call center. With ShoreTel in place, Little Falls could use an automated routing system in 911 calling, which allowed operators to focus on radio dispatch. The City of Beaumont, Texas, meanwhile, demonstrated ShoreTel's effective reach, as the city had 999 users across 22 separate sites, with more slated to follow.

The examples tell the story well here; three separate public agencies with a wide variety of different use cases were all able to turn to ShoreTel to accomplish the desired tasks. Some needed a large number of users in a small area, others needed wider dispersal, but regardless of what was needed, ShoreTel could provide. When an organization can supply the needs of several different situations at once, it's easy to see why such a system would be in demand, and ShoreTel is clearly in demand.

Budgets are tight all over, and even government agencies are feeling the pinch. Out to save a few bucks while not sacrificing quality, it's easy to see why ShoreTel comes up so often as a means to provide the best in communications solutions while still keeping costs down.