atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Other TDM Phone Systems Shoretel Telephones & Systems Shoretel

I have had rumors of Financial challenges for Shoretel. I really like the product but wonder about their long term viability. Anyone have any insights into the condition of the company? What does the staff look like, are they gaining speed with installs, is Revenue growing, how many employees and how do these items compare with prior years.

Thank you

I think the last I heard they had 145 employees around the world (which is not much). They are a private company though so they do not share finances. When we became a partner we talked to their CFO. They still have a lot of Venture Capital cash left over so they are not hurting for money at the moment, but since it was a company 100% funded by Venture Cap money, they will be wanting their money back in one of two ways (usually) Shoretel will either need to be sold within the next coupld of years or go public. The CFO said they are looking to go public in 2007 and they are taking their time to doing it right. If you have been reading any of the trade journals you will see that Shoretel is the industry darling right now. Now history has shown a lot of companies that have a great product that can't stay in business. But it really does seem like Shoretel is taking their time to do things right! They have a quality product, they stopped selling direct and moved to a partner only service. I talked to about 12 partners or so around the US when I was investigating and all of them love the product. I think Shoretel is working to get the name recognition now. It really is an awesome product, so I hope it really takes off. As I said in my post above it really is better than Avaia and Cisco. It is much different, but it really is a quality product that is well thought out. My only complaint is that compared to Cisco, Shoretel's phones are really ugly!

Thanks. I think the product is a terrific option. I have looked at AltiGen, Cisco, Sphere and ShoreTel. All of them have something to offer, but I think the ShoreTel is the most complete. I don't paticularly care for their phones either but they have excellant sound quality. I have seen a number of very positive articles regarding Shoretel and they don't appear to be advertising pieces which is useful. Cisco has a great product as well and they are very aggresive in offering discounts and incentives but I think this is indicative of an attempt to get to Smaller, not GM or Boeing, type companies. I think this also indicates that in the long run Cisco will be a more expensive solution to maintain, ( either in technical skill requirements or in future upgrade of the system ). But Cisco is putting a huge amount into R&D and ShoreTel, the smaller company, can't compete at this level. AS they are not Public at some point one has to wonder what will become of ShoreTel. As you indicated it is either an IPO or Sale and this could be good or bad. I have heard that there have been a number of management changes and if you look on their web site there are not many Exec's that have been there too long. As they are not Public there is not much financial info either like Sales, Revenue growth or profitability.

That was our biggest fear at becoming a partner, but after talking to other partners on how easy the system is to sell, I think that sold me. I did not let Shoretel give me references either, I just did a google search for Shoretel partner and started calling.

Cisco is a great product, but a full callmanager install is very expensive, and callmanager express is a terrible product. Cisco is a little harder to manage in that it is two apps, callmanager and unity. So you have to set a new user up in different places. Shoretel sets up fast and is easy to add a new users. From a network infrastructure point of view though your understanding of QOS in switches and routers would have to be the same. Shoretel will try and tell you, you really don't need to do QOS, but I think it is something that always should be done on the converged network. To keep our partnership with Cisco strong here we always sell Cisco switches and routers with the Shoretel system.

As you pointed out Cisco is not going anywhere, what is holding Cisco back a bit at this point is they consider a small business to be under 1000 employees. Also Cisco makes it imposible for the smaller phone provider to sell full Call Manager, they will also not hesitate to pull a customer out of a small company and bring it to a big one. This is why Shoretel partnership is really growing. I think at this rate the only Cisco vendors you are going to find are the really big vendors, which I think is very sad. Another thing that Cisco is doing that is really messing with the smaller vendors is the new Linsys One system, it looks like they are really pushing that to be a replacement to call manager express, but they are only selling the product through service providers. Bottom line is Cisco needs to fix they way they treat their vendors very soon much as Microsoft did several years ago, or people are not going to want to sell the product.

Excellent points! The Shoretel guys were planning on selling me a netgear POE switch, I have an HP and was planning on that or Dell. The Cisco's seem to expensive. My comment about "Technical expertise" were garnered from the cost of the install, ( cisco was 2-3 times the cost of install as any of the others ) and because of the huge initial discounts when I add stations or options it will cost considerably more than the others.

Yeah I would never use the netgear, I would like to get a Dell though at play with it, for the price and features it looks like it has promise. I have used the non PoE verion of the Dell switches and never had problems. You should also look that the HP procurves. They are Cisco switches but are half the price. 3com has some really good POE swithces too. Also cisco has the new 500 series of switch that has a decent price point.

Sacramento with 150+ ShoreTel 530, 210, and 100 IP phones. Currently evaluation whether or not to add ACD package. End users love the system! Basic admin stuff are a breeze eventhough I still have never attended any ShoreTel admin classes...yet. About to upgrade to ShoreTel6 on Feb 15.
Lots of excessive packets loss and dont know what's the best way to solve this issue without costing the company too much $$. Suggestions??

Is you packet loss over a local LAN or do you have users connecting over a WAN connection that are experiencing the problem? IF a WAN, how many users over what type of connection? I probably won't be able to solve your problem, but I am reviewing the product and am curious about your packet loss.

PB, can you give us a little more info. What are you using for switches? As a10ecun pointed out are you experiencing excessive packet loss over the wan or lan. Also (not sure if I can post this here, if I can't i am sorry) have you tryed bringing your question to the Shoretel user group at https://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/shoretel/

Also have you tryed calling Shoretel on it? I am sure they will hvae you adjust your jitter buffer size. Give us the details of your infrastructure and I will see what I can do to help.

have found that the event 119 "excessive packet loss" is most often a bogus report. if you can't hear it in the phone call, I wouldn't believe it. if you CAN hear it, then yeah, it's real, spend time on it. for us, those very few instances of real packet loss have been found to be duplex mismatches that don't happen very often.

just installed site #14. we're at 300+ IP phones. users love ShoreTel's Personal Call Manager. no major glitches yet.