Sizing up

Tom Perry

ShoreTel’s newly appointed Director of EMEA Channel Marketing Tom Perry talks about his new role and his plans for the future.

“The role at Shoretel attracted me for many reasons, but principally the position of the company in the market, especially how well it has done in the US. Being number two to Cisco proves the strength of the proposition; the task of bringing that success to Europe is an exciting prospect.

“It was clear to me that Shoretel products have a great reputation in the marketplace – people that are involved in our channel and have taken the plunge actually rave about the products. Part of my marketing role is to take that message out to a wider audience across EMEA and it is a challenge I found exciting.

“With regards to product positioning, Shoretel is going down a unified communications route and integrating that in to a number of other applications. What I have seen here however is because the Shoretel product is a pure IP system – we had the luxury of starting with a blank piece of paper – our integration is very simple and far superior to anything I have seen before. Legacy systems have become massively overengineered and are only becoming more complex; so it is very refreshing to have a product that does what it says on the tin and does not require legions of expensive implementation staff to get it up and running.

“My experience as a channel reseller taught me that we don’t need more complexity in the products we sell. A lot of companies are putting old

technology into servers and calling it IP – the right approach is to have a product designed for IP communications from the outset.”

Immediate Tasks

“Over the next six months my role will be to assist in selectively recruiting new European partners. Having a great partner community is the number one priority so that we can duplicate the growth we have already achieved in the States. We have a great story but need to develop our tools for local markets.

“Once we have the infrastructure and the partners we want to work with, the role will transition to developing business at the partner level. Not all partners are sized or resourced equally. A lot do not have marketing resource, so manufacturers such as ourselves need to provide the marketing infrastructure for them to scale. For some resellers it will be an education process, and if we sign a reseller of a smaller size then I am well placed to extol the virtues of effective marketing within a reseller operation.

“There are a number of resellers and distributors out there that are already looking at their legacy products and asking of their manufacturers, ‘This is getting pretty turgid, and I am not getting the deal that I was promised at the outset’. I think some of our competitors have been very aggressive at recruiting partners and getting signatures on agreements but then not been great at developing them.

“Another point to consider is that should a reseller enter an agreement with some of our competitors then they will be entering an overcrowded arena. Unless the reseller can deliver volume very quickly they will not get a realistic slice of the vendor resource to support them. The type of resellers I am looking for are those that have recognised they are not getting that support from the top vendors and want another product that is simple, different and with a strong message.

“The marketing programmes I am developing fit in to the three categories I will be focusing on; one at the top that addresses vertical markets with established resellers that have their own marketing function, the mid range that have a sales and marketing function where we will help with marketing, and thirdly a large number of resellers that do not have a marketing team nor understand the impact it can have on their business, where we will assist with the full implementation of various marketing programmes.”

Product Developments

“Shoretel is making the kind of investments to become a global player and has recently released version 8.1 of our product with London being the centre for a global launch. This brings in high quality video to the desktop as well as enhanced SIP interfaces and a new version of our desk-top call manager. The video is our own application managed through our call manager software which is very simple to set up and use.

“Our goal is to size up quickly in EMEA and become a true global player – an aggressive target and we are therefore looking to scale the business quickly and with the right partners - it is great to be part of a talented team with the right products to make this happen.”

Ed Says

If you consider we’ve covered a lot of ground here without including any of the ‘Top 10’ vendors then you can understand just how crowded and competitive this market really is for everybody. Likewise, distributors find the 50-100 user market equally demanding yet it is here that they probably have the best opportunity to develop new and additional income streams.