A Giant ShoreTel Fan
A Giant ShoreTel Fan by Blair Pleasant
Bill Schlough, CIO, San Francisco Giants, isn't just a baseball fan, he's a technology fan. And he's a huge fan of ShoreTel, which is used to help keep communications flowing at AT&T Park. At a Giants vs. Dodgers game at AT&T Park, Schlough gave some press and analysts a tour of the ballpark's social media hub, as well as its telecom facilities. He noted that the ShoreTel system saved the Giants $400,000, or the equivalent of a major league minimum salary.
Transcript for A Giant ShoreTel Fan
Bill Schlough: Well this is our fifth season with ShoreTel, and each year we have saved essentially the Major League minimum compared to what we had before. Really, kind of the drivers for this other than this memo from my owner to my CEO and to me, my CEO said, "We may be cutting our telephone expenses from year to year, but we're still at the top of MLB. How do we reduce further?"
So we reduced further by bringing in ShoreTel. In our RFP process we looked at all the major players, but the real differentiators for ShoreTel, for us, was number one, simplicity. You can look at it right here.
Like I said, I don't have ShoreTel techs down here, this is my ShoreTel system, it supports like 800 phones. You always see this many boxes because we have a whole bunch of analog phones here, we have the fibrillators which are still on analog lines. So that's why we have a lot of these boxes. And John can talk to you again, technically if you want to hear it, but this is how simple it is. Very robust, and so simplicity was number one.
Number two was really kind of the reliability of this system. It is simple, it is simple to administer, but it is also highly reliability. We, like I said, we don't have a lot of single points of failure any more. Over on that wall (pointing to legacy system), we had a lot of points of failure, over here we have very few.
And last but not least, it was really the service that we get from ShoreTel. And that was a real differentiator. They made us feel, from the start, like we were their only customer. We now know that we are not, they have another customer down south in L.A., so we know that they have at least two customers. We feel like it is just us and the Dodgers, and we actually know of some other sports teams that have come online as well since then. It has really, really kind of felt like the perfect fit for a sports team, so it was about simplicity, it was about reliability, cost savings, and it was about service.
The only other thing I can tell you, it wasn't just cost savings for us. One thing about ShoreTel Systems, it allows us to take control of our phone system here at this ballpark. We have a lot of tenants here; we have a medical center, Dignity Health; we have caterer, Bon Appetite; we have a restaurant, Mijita and Public House; we have all these different tenants here. Now we are able to charge them for their phone service and they leverage us. So we make over $50,000 a year through charging for these services. In fact, I was just going back and forth....the playoffs are coming this year. It is not something I am that focused on, but I know Ralph (Dodgers CIO) is, and a few other teams. And several of the teams were asking, okay, do you charge for folks who come in and need phone services during the post season? And we are like, "heck yeah we charge!" I mean, it's not free to us, so we provide that facility and broadcasters that come in are happy to for it. So that's the story with ShoreTel.