Conceptus

Conceptus is a leading Silicon Valley medical device company that designs, develops, and distributes innovative medical products for women. The company was established in Northern California in 1992 and has offices in London and just outside Paris. Growing its employee base by about 10 percent each year and its revenues by nearly 30 percent annually, Conceptus needed a highly reliable, versatile and easy-to-manage communications solution to support business expansion.

"Our vision for an effective unified communications solution is to provide whatever I needed so staff can communicate at any time, from any place and on any device they choose.  It became imperative that we create a new legacy—a tradition of seamless communication—starting with a replacement solution that helps us achieve our vision."
— Jeff Letasse, Vice president of IT, Conceptus.

Conceptus had been relying on an AltiGen legacy telephone system for almost a decade, until the system could no longer keep up with demand and started failing. With business expanding and the Versailles office opening up, the medical device company wanted to ensure seamless and reliable business communications among staff and with customers.

One of the major issues the company faced was that field sales staff was experiencing increasing difficulty in accessing corporate staff. ShoreTel offered the best solution for meeting both telephony and integration requirements.

"ShoreTel offered the deepest integration with the Microsoft Office Communicator Server, the best price by 20 percent, and the feature set to champion our goals. Beyond the functionality and longevity of a unified communications system, we had to have a cooperative spirit and execution abilities between the vendor, Microsoft and the implementation team. With ShoreTel, Microsoft and 3GC Group, we felt like we had the right mix."
— Jeff Letasse, vice president of IT, Conceptus.

The ShoreTel system was seamlessly integrated with Microsoft products wherever possible, including Microsoft Office Communicator Server and interface, Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange. Conceptus used ZAG Technical Services to provide installation services for the Microsoft Office Communicator server. Benefits include:

• Deep integration between the ShoreTel system and Microsoft OCS provides greater communication choices to field and office staff, resulting in accessibility and productivity gains.
• Conceptus has reduced conferencing costs by 50 percent or $30,000 annually due to ShoreTel’s efficiency and ease of operation, and due to options such as webinars, screen shares, virtual roundtables and voice sessions.
• High system availability, with no communications downtime to date.

"With ShoreTel and Microsoft we have enabled Unified Communications and conferencing. This powerful combination allowed us to complete an ERP software implementation in our sales office in France with minimal travel expense. We saved $20,000 in the first three months".
— Eric Simmons, Director of IT Operations and ERP Systems, Conceptus.