ShoreTel was at Call Center Week in Las Vegas talking about how hybrid cloud communications are really coming together, how the company is now offering consulting services as a presale function, its new platform play, and why the company is referring to itself as the new ShoreTel.
I spoke with Brandon Knight, ShoreTel’s director of consulting services, at the event last week to learn more.
Knight noted that ShoreTel now offers its business communications services via the on-premises and cloud based models. A lot of organizations now want to move to the cloud, but are uncertain about how to do that, he said, so ShoreTel is educating them about how they can leverage a hybrid model as a stepping stone to get them there. It’s not necessary for organizations to move to the cloud all at once, he emphasized.
Regarding the presale consulting services, Knight said that only about 10 percent of contact centers have moved to the cloud, and that’s due largely to a lack of education on the benefits of doing so. More specifically, he said, the cloud marketplace is too confusing for many folks to navigate, as there is such a wide array of solutions from which to choose. To help organizations identify the solutions that best meet their requirements, and assist with related things like best practices and NPS, ShoreTel now offers presale consulting.
Another topic Knight discussed with us was ShoreTel’s recent acquisition of Corvisa LLC, which provides the company with third-party development tools. In the near future, he said, ShoreTel will be talking more about its true platform experience. That means its customers will have a single platform on which to run IVR and other ShoreTel applications, and on which to develop their own custom solutions.
"The addition of Corvisa's standards-based APIs, SIP trunking, and standalone contact center expands our cloud-based offering while providing new sources of hosted revenue," said Don Joos, president and CEO of ShoreTel, at the close of the deal earlier this year. "We are excited to have Corvisa's leadership team and approximately 95 technically skilled and customer-facing employees join ShoreTel to further enhance our development roadmap and go-to-market actions."
ShoreTel is also changing its tagline from Brilliantly Simple to We Make Interactions Simple, said Knight. This new wording, he said, reflects the move beyond business phone service to all communications, and the migration from on-site solutions to ShoreTel becoming a flow-blown cloud player.
Edited by
Alicia Young
