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ShoreTel Hosted Voice achieves rapid partner uptake and strong customer demand

SYDNEY, Australia – July 28, 2016 – ShoreTel® (NASDAQ: SHOR), the leading provider of brilliantly simple unified communications (UC) solutions and phone systems, today announced that approximately 50 percent of its current Australian channel partners have formally signed up to sell the company’s new cloud service, ShoreTel Hosted Voice (SHV), and ShoreTel has had interest from more than 60 new channel partners looking to sell SHV.

ShoreTel Hosted Voice was launched in April 2016, offering Australian organisations a fully managed IP telephony hosted solution including voicemail, unified messaging, click to dial, mobility and conferencing services, with optional services available such as contact centre, call recording and toll-free numbers.

There are three ways for partners to sell ShoreTel Hosted Voice in Australia - as an Approved Partner, an Enabled Partner, or a sub-agent of a ShoreTel Cloud Services Distributor – Dicker Data.

“We have received intense interest in ShoreTel Hosted Voice from our Australian partners since we launched the new service just over two months ago. Our partners are experiencing increased customer demand for cloud-based unified communications – or ‘UCaaS’– solutions. Several partners have now closed their first SHV deals, these contracts were all signed and delivered within 2 weeks of quoting,” said Frederic Gillant, vice president of Asia Pacific at ShoreTel.

“Given this is a completely new service, new contracts have been executed and our channel partners have completed a one-day intensive SHV training course, so it’s fantastic to see the level of responsiveness from our partner community.”

One of the first partners to sign up for ShoreTel Hosted Voice was Simply Ask Simon, an Adelaide-based IT consulting business. The company is a recent ShoreTel partner, joining the program to sell ShoreTel’s onsite solutions in November 2015. Simply Ask Simon has already closed three new SHV customers, and is on the cusp of attaining Silver Partner status within the Champion Partner Program, within the first month of selling.

“ShoreTel Hosted Voice is one of the only cloud-based services in Australia that gives customers the full feature set of unified communications in one package,” said Simon Buckingham, managing director, Simply Ask Simon. “An increasing number of our customers are adopting flexible working practices, and the ShoreTel Hosted Voice solution supports that environment by extending the full UC feature set to remote, mobile and home-based workers. It also has the built-in redundancy and business continuity capabilities that were previously only available from higher-end UCaaS solutions.”

He added, “Just like our customers who are looking for predictability around their operating costs, as a business we operate primarily on a monthly recurring revenue model so the ShoreTel Hosted Voice pricing structure suits us perfectly.”

Simply Ask Simon has already signed up a number of new customers for ShoreTel Hosted Voice. One of those customers, McArdle Freight, is scheduled to have its new unified communications (UC) system installed and fully operational in July.