When ShoreTel bought Agito last year, the acquisition instantly made gave ShoreTel a mobility strategy and another weapon with which to continue their attack on ever-larger accounts. But it turns out that the situation isn't as straightforward as that.
I had a chance to chat with Pej Roshan at the ShoreTel booth on the Enterprise Connect show floor this week. Pej was with Agito and came on board with the title of Senior Director of Product Management at ShoreTel; he told me that ShoreTel continues to sell the WiFi gear into accounts other than ShoreTel's.
"We thought we'd get chopped off [after the acquisition], but Avaya and Cisco are still letting us stay in their programs," Pej said. And his sales teams are "actively pursuing" non-ShoreTel accounts. I doubt any one at Cisco or Avaya is losing much sleep about Agito gear being the means by which ShoreTel sneaks in and steals their accounts; but if Pej and his ShoreTel Mobility team can generate additional revenues out of these customers, they can keep alive the potential for fixed-mobile convergence (FMC).
And Pej has definitely not given up on FMC. He told me that he believes that as 802.11n rollouts become ubiquitous, the resulting higher bandwidths will make WiFi an appealing mobility feature in the enterprise, especially as mobile video becomes more widely accepted and expected.
He also noted that the hottest mobile devices out there--tablets--are well suited to office/campus mobility that could be supported by WiFi. This may be not so much in the road warrior scenario, but with tablets used in factory floor/hospital-type deployments.
Finally, Pej insisted that even though FMC isn't in wide use among enterprises, it is a box that customers, in his experience, insist be checked off.
"It's a bullet point now, but we couldn't win a deal without it," Pej said.
