Over the past couple of years, there has certainly been no hotter driver of IT spend than prepping the enterprise for BYOD. We've seen the explosion of the mobile device management market; the continued strength of WiFi vendors and cloud services has been on the rise as a way of delivering apps to consumer devices.
The UC market, though, hasn't really managed to take advantage of this trend other than augmenting their solutions with "soft" clients that run on consumer devices, which hasn't been a great driver of UC spend.
On Monday, the first day of this year's Interop show (and nurse appreciation day--shout out to my wife, Christine), ShoreTel announced a product that should have great appeal to iOS-heavy companies. The company is releasing the "ShoreTel Dock", a docking station that allows iPhones and iPads to be used as a business desk phone--and I think the company will have success with the product.
The ShoreTel Dock lets workers use an iOS device combined with the ShoreTel mobility client as a true replacement for an IP phone. I know there has always been the option to use a PC-based phone, but whether the UC industry likes it or not, ergonomics have a great deal to do with the limited adoption of traditional PC and laptop-based soft clients. Many workers still prefer a handset to hold and buttons to push. Dialing and talking on a traditional desktop or laptop is, at best awkward. Perhaps when touch screens are a bit more common, this barrier may fall, but those devices are still in the minority.
The Dock also addresses a couple of other barriers to making a mobile device the primary communications device, and that's battery life and cell coverage. The Docking station charges the device while it's plugged in, so workers can use it all day long without battery life being diminished.
The ShoreTel mobility client uses corporate WiFi, meaning no more holes in coverage, assuming there's adequate WiFi coverage in the worker's office.
Call quality should greatly be improved too, allowing workers to have longer calls that are better quality. Mobile phones are great for a 10-minute call but they're not great for hour-long calls. The Dock bridges that gap and lets workers use their mobile devices for long calls, speakerphone calls, or any other type of call they may want to make.
ShoreTel built a device that comes as close to replicating a desk phone as I've seen. In addition to having a handset and buttons to push, when the user picks up the handset, they get dial tone. Try doing that on a traditional soft phone. Users of the Dock can forward voice mails, do three-way calls and everything else they could do on their desk phone. The only difference is that they're using the device they use the most for everything else.
The Dock currently works with older versions of iOS devices, but the company told me they have a lightning-pin adapter version coming by the end of the year. Also, I understand there's an Android version coming, I'm just not sure when, but it certainly is a logical next step--although the wide variety of Android phones can make this very challenging.
Skeptics may remember the Mitel IP phone where one could dock a Compaq iPaq. True, this was the same idea--but no one used the iPaq as a voice device, the iPaq had a fraction of the computing power, and the market adoption of that PDA was nowhere near what iPhones and iPads are today. I applaud Mitel for the effort, but that idea was way ahead of its time. The mobile devices just were not ready to take on that role at that time.
The Dock is a gutsy move for a company like ShoreTel that makes a significant amount of revenue from IP phones, like all of the UC vendors. The Dock clearly cannibalizes the market for IP phones, but I think it should be clear to everyone that workers want to use their mobile devices more, and ShoreTel is choosing to be an enabler of that instead of ignoring the demand that's there.
The Dock provides a very natural way for workers to leverage iPhones and iPads, and enables ShoreTel to ride the BYOD wave. Don't get me wrong, I don't see the Dock replacing IP phones in mass, but I do think it makes a great augmentation to a ShoreTel customer's UC strategy.
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