ShorTel, Foundry Networks Team For IP Telephony Solutions

ShorTel Inc. and Foundry Networks announced yesterday that they had teamed up to offer joint IP telephony solutions to Mortgage Information Services (MIS) and sports equipment manufacturer McKenzie Sports.

Based on Foundry's FastIron switches and ShoreTel's IP public branch exchange (PBX), the solutions are designed to offer great flexibility and high scalability at a competitive cost. Foundry's switches are Power over Ethernet (PoE) compliant, providing for a high level of flexibility and ease of deployment when implementing a voice over IP system.

Foundry product marketing director Gary Hemminger says the joint venture is an excellent match. "Foundry's high-performance, highly-available switching, routing and wireless infrastructure products are complemented by the ShoreTel voice products that are known for their ease of use and management," he said in a statement. "The combination of the two companies' solutions deliver our joint customers a solid end-to-end telephony solution."

The two customers have deployed the solutions quite differently, however. MIS has already been a ShoreTel PBX user and decided to deploy Foundry's FastIron switches as it began to replace traditional telephones with VoIP handsets. McKenzie Sports, on the other hand, implemented both company's solutions simultaneously, installing a FastIron switch at the core and using two of the available eight slots for fiber blades with integrated management.