“ShoreTel investing for growth” says UK boss

By Will Garside, Channel Pro

New pan-European distie on the cards for ShoreTel with plans to double channel

Although ranked sixth in the overall enterprise voice market share, UC vendor ShoreTel(NASDAQ:SHOR) claims it is profitable, agile and ready to offer VARs a viable competitor to entrenched market leaders Cisco(NASDAQ:CSCO) and Avaya.

According to ShoreTel's UK MD, Adrian Hipkiss (pictured), the UK arm is making money and ploughing it straight back into the channel and is keen to invest in joint activities. The firm hopes to double the size of its channel over the next year. “We are not going to do anything that will cause a red flag for our channel or [potential] customers,” explains Hipkiss.

The firm currently has around a 100 active partners in a three tier channel served by distributors ScanSource, Avnet and Cohort. Hipkiss confirms it is also looking for a pan-European distributor to complement the existing set-up, but stated there are no plans to drop any existing distie.

ShoreTel offers IP phone systems with integrated unified communications. The distributed architecture offers self contained appliances that can scale as a cluster to provide more capacity and to add redundancy. Although primary an on-site sale, several UK partners are offering the systems as a hosted service.

Hipkiss’ comments dovetail a new survey from analyst Aberdeen Group, which claims the firm’s technology is the easiest to set-up with customers experiencing a 67 percent savings in internal implementation cost per phone when compared to Avaya Aura Communication Manager. The survey of 236 different businesses also found that in terms of system administration, ShoreTe’s system cost 77 percent less to manage than Cisco's Unified Communications Manager.

Hipkiss joined ShoreTel in October 2011 following long stints at Vodafone, Cable & Wireless and as an account director at Avaya. In his view, 2012 is likely to be a tough year for enterprise communication vendors who have that failed to innovate in line with the expectation of a more knowledgeable partner and customer community.

In the frame are firms like Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU), which saw most of its divisions drop revenue during the third quarter of 2011 with its wireline and network application divisions seeing sales decrease by more than 20 percent.

Customers are prepared to look for something new, claims Hipkiss: “[The channel] needs to really understand what is in for the end customer,” he says, pointing out cases where customers upgrading from rival products two versions back can find that an entire ShoreTel equivalent is often less than the incumbent’s upgraded license costs.