{"id":9120,"date":"2011-01-20T08:11:19","date_gmt":"2011-01-20T08:11:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/e-commerce\/shoretel_filling_the_nortel_void.html"},"modified":"2011-01-20T08:11:19","modified_gmt":"2011-01-20T08:11:19","slug":"shoretel-filling-the-nortel-void","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/technology\/shoretel-filling-the-nortel-void.html","title":{"rendered":"ShoreTel Filling the Nortel Void?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jeff Wiener at The Telecom Blog predicts<\/a> 2011 will be a huge year for ShoreTel and as supporting evidence he cites distribution deals with Catalyst\/Scansource and Westcon – traditional Avaya partners. He quotes ShoreTel’s Kevin Gavin who says the company is looking to fill the void left at the table in the wake of Avaya’s Nortel acquisition.<\/p>\n

Indeed, ShoreTel has been seeing positive momentum in terms of perception – there is no question about that and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them gaining market-share in the future.<\/p>\n

Mitel could have certainly been the company to step up to the plate – they have always had great technology and the Inter-Tel acquisition of a few years back really broadened their product line and distribution. The challenge is the company’s outward communications have been spotty – they promote themselves and then go dark. Mostly they’re dark. <\/p>\n

Moreover, Inter-Tel had a very strong US brand and Mitel allowed it to completely die without replacing it with their own brand. Most if not all of the $723M spend<\/a> on the purchase is now down the drain.<\/p>\n

In reality, Mitel’s brand wasn’t strong enough to support the success of its own product line, let alone the products of another company.<\/p>\n

And when you have a company like ShoreTel leveraging its momentum and putting out consistent messaging, you start to lose sales. Obviously Cisco too is a strong branding company – and 9 times out of 10 the company with the best communications and branding is the winner.<\/p>\n

This is a fact engineers who typically run tech companies fail to take into account.<\/p>\n

ShoreTel One-Year Chart<\/strong>
\"shoretel-one-year-chart.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It should subsequently come as no surprise that although ShoreTel and Mitel are both trading below their IPO levels, Shoretel’s market cap is $392M while Mitel is worth only $275M. Moreover, the Mitel one-year chart is very similar to ski slope, down<\/a> 57% while Shortel is up<\/a> 44%.

Mitel One-Year Chart<\/strong>
\"mitel-one-year-chart.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Mitel is addressing its challenges with a new CEO, Richard McBee<\/a>. I’ve reached out for an interview but the company didn’t make him available at this time. <\/p>\n

If I were McBee the first thing I would do is focus on a five-year branding strategy with integrated PR and make it a capital offense to cut these budgets. Moreover, I would leverage Sir Terry Mathews<\/a> to the hilt. He is Warren Buffet and John Chambers rolled up into one and yet his tremendous influence isn’t leveraged in end-user sales. Dan York says Mathews has passionate power<\/a> and he is right. <\/p>\n

But a bigger challenge for the CPE market as a whole will be cloud-based solutions. Traditional telecom companies really need to be entrenched as cloud-enablers to be sure they can grow regardless of of how companies want to deploy their communications systems.<\/p>\n

As always, I’ll be sure to keep you posted on the latest happenings at Mitel, ShoreTel and the rest of the tech and communications markets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jeff Wiener at The Telecom Blog predicts 2011 will be a huge year for ShoreTel and as supporting evidence he cites distribution deals with Catalyst\/Scansource and Westcon – traditional Avaya partners. He quotes ShoreTel’s Kevin Gavin who says the company is looking to fill the void left at the table in the wake of Avaya’s<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166,158,168,170,179,181,182,160,162,199,197,1677,189,206,118,177,175],"tags":[507,360,1721,1722,719,436,1723,1724,657,1725],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9120"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}