Asian eMarketing recently met David Petts, ShoreTel’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales, for an interview to find out more about the company’s updated unified communications (UC) solution and the launch of ShoreTel 14.2, besides getting deeper insights into the expert’s channels strategy.

ShoreTel primarily sells and markets their product through channel partners, including Tier 1 carriers such as AT&T, Verizon, or Telstra - and David Petts is in charge of handling them all. For a company like ShoreTel, focused on growth, one of the biggest opportunities is making sales more productive and that’s exactly were a company’s sales channel comes to the fore.

Petts’ forte is in optimizing ShoreTel’s go-to-market strategy and to no surprise he has recently been nominated as one of CRN’s 2014 Channel Chiefs, besides receiving a 5-Star rating in the CRN 2014 Partner Program for ShoreTel’s Champion Partner Program. He joined the provider of “brilliantly simple” unified business communications solutions two years ago, after seven years in sales leadership roles at Nokia and numerous executive management roles at Hewlett Packard (HP) and Compaq.

Around a year ago, the company launched ShoreTel Dock, the industry’s first business-grade docking station that transforms iPhones and iPads into desk phones when paired with ShoreTel Mobility, and just in January the new ShoreTel 14.2 has been presented. ShoreTel 14.2 delivers greater flexibility for customers, with the ability to mix and match hardware-based and virtual appliances in a single network, all managed using a single web-based management interface.

Employees can now simply slide their ShoreTel Mobility enabled iPhone or iPad into the ShoreTel Dock and get instant access to the comfort, battery life and call quality of a business desk phone. And when combined with ShoreTel Mobility and conferencing applications, users get a remarkable UC experience, utilizing voice, instant messaging (IM), presence and conferencing on a device that they already know and love. Besides, since ShoreTel Mobility works over both Wi-Fi and cellular, the ShoreTel Dock can be deployed anywhere, which has the advantage that users can be reached on their same extension whether they are working at their office or at home. Businesses can easily deploy the ShoreTel Dock to office and remote workers, giving them the tools they need to freely work at their own rhythm.

“The Dock station is very unique, providing mobility that is intuitive and easy-to-use 24/7, emulating a desk phone solution,” Petts commented, emphasizing that the ShoreTel Dock is the desk phone for the mobile generation.

In fact, ShoreTel 14.2 now allows customers to select the UC deployment model that best suits their business and infrastructure needs – virtual, physical or any combination of both – which brings all the immediate benefits mentioned, such as reduced hardware and operational complexity, higher application availability, increased scalability and reliability.

While traditional time-division multiplexing (TDM) systems or competitor VoIP solutions require full redundancy, ShoreTel accomplishes redundancy by balancing the load on Unix-based voice appliances. Their appliances use embedded flash memory and do not have any spinning media or hard drives. System administration is performed within ShoreTel Director, a web based application for managing and configuring users, devices and applications across the entire enterprise. User applications for desktop users are available as ShoreTel Communicator, an application for PC and Mac users for IP telephony, conferencing, instant messaging, softphone and other services, and applications for mobile users include ShoreTel RoamAnywhere, a client and server application for popular IP PBXs that provides IP telephony as well as UC services over Wi-Fi and PSTN cellular networks - just to explain quickly what makes ShoreTel 14.2 so outstanding.

Considering ShoreTel’s technical innovations that combine mobile devices conveniently with the power of a business communications system, this certainly explains why the company has received a lot of attention recently and won three Gold medals in this year’s Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards competition with ShoreTel Docks.

Watch out for ShoreTel next week, when we take a closer look at the company’s success stories as well as the recent restructuring of ShoreTel’s Champion Partner Programme and its tangible improvements.

By MediaBUZZ