Shoretel revenue is up 21 percent year over year, though the U.S. market might have softened 10 percent, says Steve Timmerman, Shoretel vice president. "In light of the softening market, customers are looking more at value proposition."

 

In that area, Timmerman thinks Shoretel has an advantage, in that its architecture requires very few servers and consumes less power as well. No doubt, "the market is tough."

 

Still, perhaps architecture can be a selling point in a softer market, says Jeff Ridley (News - Alert), Shoretel product manager. The appliance-based architecture means there are consistent features across all distributed locations.

 

The peer-to-peer design means each site independent of all others if there is an outage, he says. Plus, the ability to support "N+1" redundancy means one extra switch at any location can back up other sites.

 

The re-engineered desktop suite, featuring visual voicemail, playback through phone or PC, instant messaging support and other "usability" factors get a facelift in the latest version of the software. Other examples are the analog phone support, and a new version of the switch that supports small offices with as many as 10 people,  with fax support and analog phone support, Ridley says.

 

Also, the company's bigger push to support customer relationship management and other business apps such as Salesforce.com, IBM (News - Alert), Microsoft, RightNow and NetSuite will focus on naturalness. "We don't want any 'un-natural' acts so people can use Shoretel with their CRM apps," Ridley says.

 

But background business conditions are a factor at the moment. "We find U.S. business is down, globally maybe business is flat," Ridley notes. "Buyers are deferring decisions, in some cases."

 

Doldrums in financial sector maybe spilling over, he reasons.

 

And Microsoft’s (News - Alert) Response Point system isn’t on the market in full-throttle mode yet.

 

“Response Point acts like a telephone, but has some new cool widgets,” says Erik Lagerway, Lypp (News - Alert) CEO. “ It's as cheap as a phone system can be, and it is extensible.”  

 

“They have done everything right,” says Lagerway.