“For people who place a high value on personal productivity, knowledge workers and companies with most employees having a PC, IP telephony with third party application integration is important. Additionally, companies that are highly customer facing with a large volume of customer interactions as well as remote and mobile workers tend to look for productivity solution rather than a price ticket.”
This suits Shoretel says Gudgion who acknowledges that his IP PBX is not the cheapest on the market. “Our heritage is in the SME and we are working upwards. The sweet spot for our product is around 25 users. As an IP PBX vendor the fact that we have hardware is an important differentiator – we still have dial tone if you turn off the servers. Where we are different with our product is that the core processing is done on flash rather than hard drives. Some applications such as Voicemail and directory services are on HDDs but any one PBX can take over in a network application.”
Shoretel lay a great deal of stock in the reliability of their systems and quote a number of industry analysts that favourable review their products and customer service.
“The reliability of our systems has accelerated our growth. For reseller, our accreditation schemes are, compared to competitors, quick to complete – 10 days for full system engineer accreditation.”
Shoretel’s rout to market is via two distributors; Basingstoke based equIP and Newbury based Sellcomms. They are yet to appoint a UK based traditional voice reseller.