ShoreTel also is ranked sixth in market share for UC desktop units in large enterprises worldwide, according to the Synergy report, 'Q4 2008 Collaborative Applications Market Shares,' providing clear confirmation of ShoreTel's rapid growth in the UC market, and the increasing popularity of its easy-to-use and manage UC system.
In the SMB segment, ShoreTel beat the next closest competitor, Cisco, by almost 35 percent in sales of its ShoreWare Call Manager application suite which is included with every user license.
"We have always believed that an easy-to-use yet powerful desktop application is the cornerstone of unified communications leadership, and ensuring that every ShoreTel user has access to this compelling tool is a key element of our commitment to delivering world-class customer satisfaction," said John W. Combs, chairman and CEO of ShoreTel. "This latest data confirms everything we've been hearing from our growing fan base-ShoreTel's ease of use, highly available distributed architecture and low total cost of ownership are just some of the reasons why ShoreTel is becoming the platform of choice for organisations of all sizes."
The report by Synergy Research Group is the first in the industry to effectively quantify the number of desktop applications shipped by leading vendors from 2006 to 2008.
"Architecturally, ShoreTel built its PBX from the ground up as a Unified Communications platform, providing Collaborative Applications as a standard feature set," said Jeremy Duke, CEO, Synergy Research Group.
"We believe this forward-thinking design has positioned ShoreTel as a market leader and has been fundamental to their market share gains in the face of much larger, capitalised competitors. While ShoreTel's initial success has been rooted in SMB, we believe ShoreTel has the product and the management team to aggressively target the enterprise UC market, which will lead to further market share gains."