rpciardiello@gmail.com posted on February 02, 2012 06:05
ShoreTel Inc. said that as part of its strategy to further its cloud presence, the UC provider plans to acquire M5 Networks. As a result of the acquisition, ShoreTel will be positioned to provide customers a choice between on-premise and hosted UC solutions.
The acquisition of privately held M5 enables ShoreTel to expand its solutions into the cloud and reach a large and growing market segment of customers that are looking to deploy IP communications through a hosted model. Industry trends such as cloud computing, virtualization, data center economics and the flexibility of services-based models are driving the Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) market, which provides businesses another way to bring unified communications to their workforce.
“The acquisition of M5 positions ShoreTel as a leader in the fast-growing cloud UC market and delivers a suite of hosted telephony solutions that is unmatched in the marketplace,” Peter Blackmore, CEO of ShoreTel, said in a media statement. “This acquisition is a critical step in our evolution and enables the company to capitalize on trends in cloud computing and advance our enterprise communications strategy.”
M5 is considered the “pioneer of UC” and today provides more than 2,000 companies with enterprise-grade communications on a subscription basis. This acquisition positions ShoreTel to be a leading provider in the emerging UCaaS market, enabling it to extend its technology and industry-leading customer satisfaction that are the hallmarks of its value proposition into the cloud through a hosted offering.
This will be especially beneficial, since, according to a report by Gartner1, the IP Voice as a Service market is expected to show a 36 percent compounded annual growth rate in North America through 2015 to $2.2 billion. With this acquisition, M5 brings the specialized knowledge, infrastructure and skills to give ShoreTel rapid entry into the hosted UC market while maintaining its focus on growing its traditional premise-based UC business.