TMCnet News
ShoreTel Revels in Its IPO, Annual Partner Summit Executive Editor, IP Communications Group ShoreTel is a perfect example of an up and coming purveyor of Enterprise IP
 Communications solutions. Founded in 1996, ShoreTel’s (News - Alert) advanced distributed software architecture and switch-based hardware platform can bring sophisticated voice services to employees wherever they may go. In the wake of ShoreTel’s IPO back in July, vice president of marketing Steve Timmerman remarks, “It was a big effort for us. The key piece for us was not the actual financing event, per se. We have a positive cash flow and didn’t need the liquidity. The real benefit for us is the brand awareness and also just giving prospective customers more comfort in knowing that we are a stable, transparent company that will be here in the long term to support their unified communications needs. At the moment we’re one of the lesser known brands, at least relative to companies such as Avaya (News - Alert), Cisco, and Nortel, so our challenge is making sure we’re on the ‘short list’ of companies when they’re about to purchase IP communications technology. And we find that we have a great winning percentage in that area. Combine that with the fact that we have transparent financials and support all of the rigor that goes into being a public company, and you can see why we have a lot going for us and how we can ‘get past the front door’ and we continue to enjoy significant growth in the industry going forward, much faster than the market as a whole.”
“We’re also proud that we picked up CDW (News - Alert) and Black Box in our reseller channel,” says Timmerman. “In fact, Black Box announced that they were dropping Avaya as a vendor. So we’re very pleased to have Black Box (News - Alert) switch to us as their vendor of choice for IP telephony.”
“We recently held our annual Channel Partner Summit,” says Timmerman. “We’re 100 percent into the channel, having announced in June our ShoreTel Technology Partner Program, offering an ecosystem of technology partners whose products extend the capabilities available to customers of ShoreTel’s IP telephony system. We have over 400 channel partners worldwide. We held the Summit in Orlando, Florida. It attracted more than 550 channel partners from over 200 separate partner companies. It was our biggest Channel Partner Summit yet. We had a great turnout. We’re fanatics about customer satisfaction and, not surprisingly, when our post-summit survey was crunched here recently, we again got great reviews in terms of the content and delivery. There’s always a great networking opportunity there for partners, and everybody can learn about best practices, and I love the competitive selling and training modules that we offer as part of attending as well. So, the summit was a great way to kick off our new fiscal year.”
Indeed, inhouseIT, an IT services company and Premier ShoreTel Partner in Southern California and Colorado, received three awards at the 2007 ShoreTel Summit/Partner Conference. Among these were awards for highest volume and customer satisfaction. inhouseIT ended ShoreTel’s fiscal year with a 96.3 percent overall customer satisfaction rating. inhouseIT’s performance in these two categories ranked the company second nationally in ShoreTel’s Circle of Excellence, an award ShoreTel presents to its top 10 partners.
ShoreTel 7 is ShoreTel’s most recent major release. Appearing in April 2007, it includes some important enhancements to the desktop client, the Personal Call Manager, as well as enhancements to its Director system management tool. It also includes a family of new high-density switches with a small footprint that are complementary to ShoreTel’s current line of switches.
All in all, ShoreTel is a company to watch.
Richard Grigonis is an internationally known technology editor and writer. Prior to joining TMC as Executive Editor of its IP Communications Group, he was the Editor-in-Chief of VON Magazine from its founding in 2003 to August 2006. He also served as the Chief Technical Editor of CMP Media’s Computer Telephony magazine, later called Communications Convergence (News - Alert), from its first year of operation in 1994 until 2003. In addition, he has written five books on computers and telecom (including the Computer Telephony Encyclopedia and Dictionary of IP Communications). To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
What’s the best resource to learn about latest trends in the IP communications industry? Why, INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO, of course. ITEXPO West 2007 is just around the corner—this year it’s being held at the Los Angeles Convention Center in California, Sept. 10-12. Register here. Preview sessions, speakers and exhibitors. And don’t forget to check out the brand new Green Technology World Conference. |