ShoreTel, with a new EMEA HQ and new platform product in the next few months plans for growth and is looking froward to a busy 2015. Adrian Hipkiss, EMEA MD talks to IT Europa about what he sees as the biggest and most significant launch in recent years.
Growth will require more from existing channels and he is already working with fast-growing new partners. Unified Communication (UC) has gone through different phases; once a vision, and a journey. It was a good framework, and in the early days getting it to work and interoperability were issues. “We now have a reality and it works, and everyone can do it.”
And now it is all down to ROI. “This is a question I asked at our partner group recently and the return period they reported was 12-18 months – that used to be five years.”
UC had a problem, he acknowledged: “I think there was an acceptance that everyone did the same, and features were added in an iterative way, we have accepted that that is how UC works – as a collection of hard to use tools.”
Compare how UC works to social media software – no-one trains people on how to use a phone. Too many applications have not been user-friendly – conference calls for example with pin codes etc. “This is the reality – it is about the user experience so we decided that with our product launches, we won't tolerate the old user experience.”
“We are doing that work as a design philosophy making it intuitive, and make it forgiving. We looked at our portfolio – applications on mobile phones, tablets, traditional phones and PC systems. We have to be experts on all the interfaces in order to change the user experience. Various acquisitions have given us different approaches, enabling solutions to be built on premise in cloud or hybrid, and with a new user experience. We needed new skills to help build these.
So the company has jumped in size – we are now over 1000 people with many in engineering.”
The challenge he finds is that while there will always be customers for on-premise even though it is in slow decline, particularly PBX. “When we engage with CIOs and all the others round the table – we find that customers are frustrated when attempts are made to force them down one road or another. Some want cloud, some want local systems. And they need flexibility – the ability to scale easily. They want to own at a certain level and deploy other systems as required.
There is a fat middle in the distribution curve between on-premise and cloud, he explains - the market previously forced them into a choice, “We are providing a hybrid model and giving them the choice. The on-premise and cloud solution were written in different ways, so we wanted to bring them together. We looked at what the SaaS industry was doing and decided that what was needed was a hybrid platform – one that sat between on-premise and cloud, and that is exactly what our new platform is. We started with the principle that it should be single button simple.”
That way, as an integrator you can deploy between cloud and on premise. As a user, your user experience should be exactly the same, but you can only do that with a single operating system.
Users coming from the social application world users expect it to work. “But to do it an engineering level we have had to put in 18 months of work, and hire the right skills and capabilities. That is why the 31st March release is ground-breaking in terms of what it does.” One user experience and two ways to paying, and three ways of deployment- cloud, on premise and hybrid.
“The reaction from the marketplace is to ask why we put up with mediocre enterprise software that didn't offer this before.”
It will expand the market and channels and developers will be heavily involved. “We offer different levels of in the innovation network to help developers – entry level is free and you get the sdk and tools you want – to see us as the platform to work with, and many of these firms are start-ups. We have done a lot of work to provide levels of support above this, and we can do other levels of integration. For example, integration is everything in contact centre work - for call recoding, etc and wallboards, and the management data for analytics. Then we can move on to business intelligence and the information coming out on calls routing and the agents etc. All that data is very powerful for marketing companies.”
Things are changing in the channel as well: “They don't call themselves VARs any more - DMRs – service providers, etc. And we have to work with this new way of thinking. We have to support them and it is challenging. The new ones grow faster: when we onboard new partners, they grow very quickly and we invest a lot in that.
“In the European channel this year we will support the partners we have using better remote management as well. We have invested substantially in helping smaller partners, but will continue to grow at all levels, doing larger projects with the large partners. And the partners who are transitioning to cloud will be pleased as we bring our new products to market. I think you will see those partners who are aware of what the market is doing grow very quickly.”
Not that this will be a shot-gun approach: “It is easy for some vendors to assume more channels is better, but we've seen it done this way and badly, and we won't make the mistake.” There will be some expansion, though: “We have 3-4 partners in Paris – is there room for two three others in finance? – probably, but we try to introduce the new partners to the existing channels. And this works well if you are open with them. It is all about trust.”
The ShoreTel Innovation Network has grown and is working with companies such as Salesforce.com as it has matured. “It means we not only have a reactive team but have a proactive alliance develop team looking at verticals.”
It is up against some big competitors, however: Microsoft has been a growing force in UC.
“One of the challenges is that Microsoft is a dominant player in spaces it chooses to play in – as a large organisation, they have the resources. But our growth until the recession was great, and then, after the recession started we did even better – the reasons for this in UC was that the obvious choice started to be more scrutinised and buyers were going out into the marketplace asking for alternatives to Cisco and Microsoft.”
“It was clear that management costs and training people to use these systems was proving very expensive, so we did lot of work in designing the platform to be “brilliantly simple” which means low cost of ownership.” If the platform is intuitive, the training costs are low and it can be done by people with little training.
This is a powerful argument. “In terms of systems management, this is why we have been so successful. We decided to be the best in the 50-5000 user space - the sme marketplace. And we talk then in terms of communications platform not the term UC.”
It is all about connecting people simply however and wherever they choose – not limiting functions to phones or PCs. It has to be a common experience on cloud, premise hybrid and on whatever platform, connected simply, he says. “This has been the challenge for the channel – it has been so busy selling what it has, it has lost sight of how to create really great consumer-like moments of delight – not a consumer product, but a consumer experience.”
The move from traditional PBX has been slow – users have made a major investment and for companies coming up to the refresh point where they need something new, or the business had changed, or need to face new challenges. “When they do change, I think they will look at it with consumer eyes. Upgrades in the legacy world also have become an issue and with support for a couple of years coming in with upgrades costing up to 30% every time, users are wary.”
“We are changing this – we won't be charging for upgrades. There is professional services for channels and the physical work of upgrade, so there is a good healthy business for partners. We enable the channel to add real value and not just sell things to customers. The channel is a tough place and there are real customer with real problems, but salespeople have not got close enough to customers, just trying to sell them things.”