Applaud says it selected ShoreTel following an extensive 18 month review of potential partners and based its decision on the vendor’s extensive and highly regarded product suite. “ShoreTel’s IP communications products have been designed from the ground up rather than developed through legacy or acquired technologies,” saidRicci Danieletto, Managing Director, Applaud Services.
“In recent years, our Applaud solution consulting expertise has matured and VoIP is playing an ever increasingly important part in our clients’ integrated cloud strategy aimed at improving overall business efficiency. At the same time, our managed services delivery model is also inheriting an increasing amount of VoIP responsibility from clients who either want to refresh and upgrade existing infrastructure or forge new applications through an integrated unified communications platform.”
ShoreTel is a unified communications (UC) vendor with range of VoIP telephony, instant messaging, conferencing, mobility, presence, and collaboration capabilities. “Our strategy is to work with partners who have trusted and established relationships with their client base, and who want to expand their services and solutions to encompass telephony and unified communications solutions. Applaud is ideally placed to complement our product strategy with its track record in offering high value skills, services and support in the Australian market,” said Jamie Romanin, ANZ managing director for ShoreTel.
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Applaud provides managed services in the form of traditional and cloud services, coupled with a professional services consultancy arm. It specialises in designing, procuring and deploying private clouds. It has a suite of services which can be selected individually or collectively to simplify IT service and support management requirements.
ShoreTel will now provide Applaud with the ability to offer its public and private sector customers with flexible Unified Communications solutions which can scale from 20 to 20,000 users on a single platform. At the same time, Applaud’s customers will now be able to manage and monitor their ShoreTel infrastructure remotely via Applaud’s cloud offering.
Applaud has also announced that it will deploy the ShoreTel system internally for its own telephony and contact centre requirements. By signing on as a ShoreTel partner, Applaud joins the ShoreTel Champion Partner Program which provides access to training and certification, sales incentive programs and marketing support.
“ShoreTel is an entrepreneurial, highly respected company experiencing robust market momentum. As a result, we felt there was a natural affinity with our own business and we look forward to working closely to build mutual success,” said Danieletto.
As part of the two companies’ overall marketing plans for the year ahead, Applaud and ShoreTel have announced they will stage an “Enabling Unified Communications and Mobility in the Enterprise” roadshow for end users in Sydney and Melbourne in January 2013.
