ShoreTel closing in on major NZ customer deal

We may be lacking rain clouds in the sky, but the cloud announcements from vendors just keep on coming.

This time, it's unified communications provider ShoreTel launching a 'partner hosted model' for ANZ.

Essentially a business model and licensing structure allowing ANZ partners to offer hosted or cloud-based services based on ShoreTel technologies, the partner hosted model stops short of offering a fully-hosted service, as ShoreTel has done in the United States.

Jamie Romanin, ShoreTel managing director ANZ, says the company is close to announcing a major New Zealand customer, which has been part of the trial phase.

The vendor, which has 12 resellers servicing New Zealand, has been working with Telesmart here, pre-launch.

Romanin says the addition of the partner hosted programme means ANZ partners can incorporate ShoreTel into their existing cloud offerings and offer a choice of traditional on-premise UC solutions, a consumption-based model or a combination of the two.

“Increasingly, we're seeing interest in the market for a hybrid solutions, such as an on-premise core telephony deployment where advanced applications, such as ShoreTelMobility, are accessed as a service.”

Romanin says while the company is seeing increasing interest from customers for fully hosted offerings, bandwidth remains an issue.

“If everything is in the cloud you are heavily reliant on the link and there are all the costs around redundancy.”

The company has also just launched new offerings to bring new UC and conferencing tools to the iPad.

Mobility 6 delivers a native iPad user interface for enabling multi-modal communications, while Conferencing for iOS adds application collaboration capabilities, allowing users to share presentations controled by their iPad or iPhone with remote participants, or view shared desktops.