Last week ShoreTel held its first industry analyst conference, in San Francisco. This was a good thing, as the subject of my blog, brand recognition, involves the analyst community too. I’m assuming the majority of my colleagues know who ShoreTel is – a purveyor of VoIP switches, contact center, and unified communications software – but I bet that not many of them previously knew ShoreTel to the depths we went last week. Even I didn’t, although I have to admit I should have as I’m married to a ShoreTel reseller, hear about them all the time, and use their products every day.
Biggest downside, even though they have been around 10 years or so, is not enough people know about them yet. In fact, this was one of the few complaints we heard from the panel of partners we got to quiz as to what difficulties they had as ShoreTel partners, and truthfully we had to push them to find some. Their customer panel was the same way. They had a lot of stories about which incumbent vendors they threw out and why they brought ShoreTel in when they were invited to the party, but getting to the party was the difficulty. True, every vendor can pony up some happy customers and distributors, but pretty unprompted they were all saying the same things – total cost of ownership is lower than the industry, implementation is a breeze, and no need to add a bunch of redundant servers at each site for back up and additional applications.
Biggest upside - one of the themes of the conference that stood out was the advantage of purpose built, switch-based, pure IP, unified communications, making it easier to install, scale, and manage, all for less money than traditional PBX/application implementations. All the base functionality is there, and ShoreTel has integrated more functionality into their base servers, such as voice messaging and basic contact center, so there isn’t a need to bolt on another server when you want to add another application. And yes, they have way more than base functionality to boot.
There are other vendors in the market with software-based products, and the entire industry is moving in that direction anyway. Yesterday’s announcement of Siemens’ OpenScape Unified Communications Server is an example of this, but the reality is that the more established vendors in the telephony space, such as Siemens and others, still have decades of myriad products, and large installed bases to support, sometimes further complicated though acquisitions of other companies and products too. In many cases this has caused these vendors to have different sized product lines that overlap, and products that require the classic forklift upgrade. Starting from inception with a software-based approach has been very advantageous for ShoreTel, in that they have one product and one architecture for all line sizes, and no incompatible legacy products to support.
One thing about not carrying the TDM legacy around is that everything is integrated so well. To tell a story, one of my husband’s customers previously had a PBX “integrated” with the same vendor’s voicemail system. This was a switch and voicemail system from a big name PBX player. However, the integration with voicemail was so bad that there was no DTMF type ahead and users had to wait until the prompts stopped before they could enter digits. After three years of pain, the customer threw out the system and brought in ShoreTel.
To follow up on this, I recently got it in my head to use ShoreTel’s voicemail in a way that I’m sure it was never intended to be used. I had my husband configure a record button on my ShoreTel 530 phone (very cool phone, but not as cool as the color one), so that I could use it as a podcast recorder. I have a handheld recorder, but I figured that I could do podcasts over the phone instead of only in person. Cool yes? Well, it was cool after the first time I tried it and we realized that there was a default 8 minute limit on voicemails, but I digress (mine is now an hour, but please don’t leave me a message that long). To create a podcast, I hit record, do my spiel, and then hit the record button again to stop the recording. Instantly, I get the beep that indicates I have a new voicemail in my UM mailbox, and there is the .wav file sitting there. It wasn’t until I actually recorded a message and heard that instantaneous beep that I realized just how truly integrated the switch and voicemail are. Normally when you let a call go to voicemail, you get the beep that someone has recorded a message, but you really don’t know when they hung up or how long before you got the message that they left it. Now I know. One second. That is integration. Had I tried this on our old voicemail system, which my husband could have made happen, the system would have taken my digital voice, converted it to analog and handed it off to a Dialogic card….. and the quality would have suffered. With ShoreTel it is digital end-to-end with no quality degradation.
At this point in time I can’t say that ShoreTel has every bell and whistle that a traditional PBX has, though I personally haven’t counted. I can’t say that they are dead even with the heavy hitters in unified communications either, and as far as speech technologies go, they need to do more than speech enable a basic auto-attendant.
I can say that some of the larger and more established vendors ought to be scared though. When you look at ShoreTel’s price performance compared to others, tremendous ease of installation, and total cost of ownership, if ShoreTel had the brand recognition that some of the bigger guys enjoy they would be eating their lunch. Further, if I were ShoreTel I would be quite happy (at least for the time being) to be trading lack of brand awareness for not having to deal with the complexity and overhead required to support parallel product lines for different line ranges. As for those individual features, I’m not too worried. They’ll catch up.