Unified communications and contact centre specialist, ShoreTel, has been on a five-year journey to transform its global UC&C (unified communications & contact centre) portfolio and how it is deployed, with rapid acceleration beyond North America, including the most recent acquisition of contact centre provider Corvisa, which has implications for the European market.
Mark Roberts, CMO at ShoreTel tells IT Europa: “I see a modification in the way we are thinking about channels and how they make their money from the interaction and services, it is the same with unified communications. Our last quarter results showed this as we did well on revenue and beat the earnings forecasts.”
“It is a cloudy world; if you are not moving your customer base, someone will do it for you. We spend a lot of time with partners and the programme is now structured to be neutral between cloud, hybrid and on premise. We have seen a lot of take-up there under the new points scheme because it is seen as balanced – it has normalised the behaviour in channel.”
Cloud is in a strong growth phase – analysts talk of mid-20% . Driving that in EMEA is something recent for ShoreTel – in the last six months or so. “The North America cloud is growing great for us, and more than anything it is a question of keeping up with the market. Making sure the right bets are placed – which in a high growth era is not that easy.”
All the case studies and collateral is geared to cloud as that is where the growth is, he adds.
“We are increasing the focus on the European market – the latest acquisition, Corvisa, is aimed at the European market. We find that there is a lot of expertise in EMEA around contact centres, which perhaps does not seem to be there in the rest of the world. Corvisa gives us a standalone contact centre which doesn't need to run on ShoreTel switches – it can run on anybody's . That allow us to massively expand the opportunities, and allows us to get a footprint in those larger deals that were previously denied because it would have meant a full ShoreTel solution package. The Corvisa systems is highly customisable, with a SDK and APIs so that you can do authorisations etc. We also got SIP trunking.”
Being the communication supplier of choice in the SMB sector is ShoreTel's aim and that focus is repaying dividends, he says– as is the hybrid story . “We just need access to enough of the market, and find growth inorganically. While we tend to think about the larger customers, most people work for companies with under 300 people.”
“We need to get the right partners to the right part of the marketer. If we were a new company just setting up, we'd probably go cloud; if we were a rich established business, we might invest in on-premise. We need channel partners who can get into the middle of that conversation.”
Not all channel partners are moving to cloud, it is suggested. But customers are going cloud, if the channel is not seeing it, then they may a have a surprise coming, he says. In some ways, customers are ahead of channels in making the move, he suggests. “I've not seen a difference here between Europe and the US. I have seen conversation where the customer indicated they want to go cloud and the partner is still offering an on-premise solution: 'If you don't sell me a solution, I'll go elsewhere,' says the customer. There will be integration and customers asking 'can you help me?'. We are seeing some of that.”
The two primary requirements for unified comms are compatibility with existing apps and integration – it is not all total cost of ownership or ROI or price. “I think the channel partner that can have that conversation will do well in the long run. It means we can add a number of new partners who get cloud. Customers are buying it from somewhere and if they are not getting it from traditional channel because they are doing so well, there will come a point in future when it rebalances."
The experience in the US is that this will happen very quickly – over the period of a year they realised that they were losing their existing customers, he says. "There are no new 500 /person companies out there – all wins at this level come from another supplier. Time and again we see erosion of a customer base because customers want to make a change. Nature abhors a vacuum."