ShoreTel’s products and services have evolved to meet the changing communications marketplace.

It offers customers business phone systems and unified communications (UC). The company also features economical and easy to use premise-based IP phone systems with integrated UC, contact center capabilities, and hosted VoIP services.

“We’re seeing the increasing importance of sort of the mobilized workplace,” Kevin Gavin (News - Alert), ShoreTel’s chief marketing officer, told TMC CEO Rich Tehrani, in a recent interview about the sector. “There is a bigger focus on empowering mobile workers and more emphasis on increasing worker productivity. Also, the end user has become increasingly important.”

“In the past the business was mostly about putting phones on desks. And certainly we’ve done that,” Gavin added. “We’ve evolved into much more than that and we made it brilliantly simple.”

For more about trends at ShoreTel and the entire sector, see  the entire interview below.

This year, ShoreTel has made some significant announcements. Last month, the company released ShoreTel 13 software, which features more capability for video communications and instant messaging (IM). For example, ShoreTel Communicator, a call manager application within ShoreTel 13, lets employees take part in room-based video conferences. It features H.264 AVC technology. This means that employees can communicate from either desktops or laptops – wherever they are located.

The company also supports open interfaces for popular third-party information and applications. ShoreTel 13 provides instant messaging access with ShoreTel Communicator with Personal Access. ShoreTel 13 also offers more enterprise contact center agent capabilities.

“Video is becoming mainstream – moving out of the board room and into the everyday workflow. People need the flexibility to connect by video from their desktop not only into the corporate boardroom but also with customers, partners and others with varying system types from Polycom (News - Alert), LifeSize and others,” Gavin said in connection with the release of ShoreTel 13. “By the same token, IM is now conventional for communicating with colleagues regardless of where they’re located. ShoreTel fully embraces the complete circle of unified communications by integrating video, voice, and data across any device to streamline collaboration and enhance productivity with IM, presence, audio and Web.”

In February, ShoreTel acquired M5 Networks, a hosted UC company. With the deal, ShoreTel expanded its solutions into the cloud and lets the company reach customers who want to use IP communications via a hosted model.

M5 provides enterprise-grade communications to over 2,000 companies. In addition, the acquisition comes at a time where there is increased demand for the kind of services M5 Networks provides. For instance, the IP Voice- as- a- Service market is predicted to see a 36 percent compound annual growth rate in North America through 2015 to $2.2 billion, according to recent projections from Gartner (News - Alert).

In showing the company’s leadership, ShoreTel was among the first UC companies to join the Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF), a not-for-profit alliance of technology providers.

Also, ShoreTel remains popular with customers. “For the past few years, ShoreTel has consistently led the industry in UC licenses sold worldwide to the SMB [small and medium business] market, beating out both Avaya (News - Alert) and Cisco,” said Jeremy Duke, founder of Synergy Research Group.

To find out more about ShoreTel visit the company at ITEXPO West 2012. To be held Oct. 2-5 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, TX, ITEXPO (News - Alert) is the world’s premier IP communications event. Pejman Roshan, Vice President, Product Development, will be a speaker at the event. For more information on ITEXPO West 2012, click here.