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Contact Center Helping Drive Wins for ShoreTel in Enterprise

At last week's ShoreTel Champion Partner Conference, one of several themes was a raised profile for the company's contact center application, Enterprise Contact Center. Whereas last year the mobility application (from the Agito acquisition) was the big news, this year mobility and contact center are both hot, and have been paired and are talked about as the Advanced Applications.

Vice President for North American Sales Tim Gaines said that more than ever before, contact center is helping drive wins for ShoreTel in enterprise accounts. In addition to describing a number of sizable deals (company names NDA), he offered some statistics on the company's contact center business within fiscal year 2012 to reinforce the point:

* Contact center revenue grew by 22%.
* The number of contact center customers grew 19%.
* The number of ShoreTel partners with a contact center practice grew by 142%.

As has been noted by other analysts in blogs and tweets, a lot of the juiciest product information was also delivered under NDA. Suffice it to say that consultants and analysts were given a roadmap presentation by ShoreTel's contact center practice lead, Matt Neimeier and the director of contact center engineering, Olaf Brandt.

Another sign of ShoreTel's commitment to contact center is the 2012 hiring of Steve McElderry as Director Product Management, Contact Center. McElderry came to ShoreTel after a short stint at Avaya and previous to that 13 years at Cisco in its contact center practice. ShoreTel may have a long way to go to compete with Cisco and Avaya in the enterprise space, but hiring this talent is a great place to start.

Given the number of NDA demos in the exhibit hall at the conference, I was pleased to find Brent Barbara, Senior Director, Alliances and Solutions Engineering, showing a solution that has been announced and is due for general availability in December 2012. In the video below, Brent provides a description and progress report on ShoreTel's integration with Salesforce.com.