ShoreTel's IBM IntegrationShoreTel's IBM Integration

Running communications software on a broader server platform is a different take on the virtualization trend.

In Orlando, I had a chance to sit down with Kevin Gavin, who's VP of Marketing for ShoreTel, and we discussed ShoreTel's recent announcement of an integration with IBM Lotus Foundations.ShoreTel made the initial announcement at Lotusphere in January, and at VoiceCon they announced GA for the integration. Putting ShoreTel communications software on the Foundations platform lets SMBs (up to 500 users) run communications alongside Lotus Sametime, Web and business apps.

That plays well into the story ShoreTel has been telling almost from its inception, which is summed up in the word: Simplicity. Independent lab tests and analyst evaluations consistently ranks ShoreTel at or near the top of the pack in terms of ease of use, both at the administrative back-end and the user interface.

The Foundations integration continues this by allowing the ShoreTel communications to be provisioned at the same time that a user is added to the other applications that the user is configured for, with no separate provisioning. And at the user end, ShoreTel's Call Manager user interface can be integrated into the Sametime interface for a single user view.

Running communications software on a broader server platform is a different take on the virtualization trend, one suited for the SME market where ShoreTel has traditionally been strong. The Foundation integrations--IBM also announced one, similar to ShoreTel's, with NEC--echo an earlier generation in which 3Com and Nortel each made deals to integration their call control onto IBM midrange servers (AS400 and its successors).

Those earlier integrations faltered in part because of larger business factors--neither 3Com nor Nortel survived as independent companies, getting acquired by HP and Avaya respectively--but one reason that ShoreTel is optimistic about the Foundations play is that the addressable market is actually pretty strong. When I talked with Kevin Gavin, he tossed out a statistic I hadn't heard before--that each year, 300,000 businesses in the U.S. buy their first servers ever*. Given the opportunity, will these businesses piggyback communications onto the new platform? The promise of more enterprise-grade communications functionality without a separate, dedicated telecom rollout and staff would seem appealing.

* This originally read "3 million"--my mistake.

For more on the announcement, here's my interview with Bernard Gutnick of ShoreTel from the VoiceCon Orlando show floor: