Transcript for Pej Roshan on ShoreTel's New Products and Customer Options
Blair Pleasant: Hi, this is Blair Pleasant. I am at the ShoreTel Champion Partner Conference, and with me is Pej Roshan, he is VP of product management. Now Pej, yesterday you talked about “Choice is the new brilliantly simple.” Can you talk about that and what it means, and how it impacts ShoreTel?
Pej Roshan: Absolutely. I recently took on this role, just about four months ago. And because “Brilliantly Simple” is so much more than just a tagline for ShoreTel – it’s really woven into everything that we do inside of the company – I wanted to make sure I understood what that meant to us from a product standpoint. And what we realized, was that it has really come to mean how simple and easy it is to roll our solution, that’s really our forte. And as I was kind of conducting some of these ad hoc interviews with the team, with our partners, with our customers, I also started to hear a lot of things about choice. They said that it’s great that we have this choice to go with mobility. We can use these as our primary communication devices. We love now that we have this choice between premises and cloud. I started to realize that they were using it in the same sentence in which they were using “Brilliantly Simple.” So that was a very powerful revelation for me.
So as that relates to what we want to do moving forward, we want to make sure that we’re providing robust choice, we’re not, despite having the cloud division in our sky offering, we're not forcing a choice between one or the other. We are saying you have the option to choose, and with ShoreTel Connect, which we introduced yesterday as well, we give the option to, say, if you would like to stay with an on premises solution, we have a path that allows you to migrate to the cloud. Or take applications and services from the cloud and have them augment your existing on-premise solution. It’s a wonderful opportunity for choice there. Because you are not forced to make that forklift decision as you look at the two different delivery models. And what comes with that is choice in the consumption model as well. You might prefer to buy the CapEx equipment that you want to have on premises, and have some of those services that you roll out for groups or subsets of users on a subscription basis. So you’ve got choice in the consumption model, choice in the delivery model, and certainly a lot of technical options that we talked about in those roadmap sessions which I can’t talk about right now, but I am dying to.
Blair: There was something announced that I am very excited about, but unfortunately we cannot talk about it right now.
Pej: Just a few months away, we’re excited.
Blair: What can we talk about as far as what is coming down the road a little bit?
Pej: Well, with ShoreTel connect, that is, this introduction of taking services and applications that we have in the cloud and making those available for on-premises. So the first applications that we are going to offer, will be mobility, and Blair, you probably remember back in June, we introduced ShoreTel Mobility that ran in the cloud for cloud customers. So, it's ShoreTel Sky Mobility for ShoreTel Sky customers. So now you have the same premise. You have ShoreTel Mobility that’s in the cloud but for premise customers. So now you can have your switches, your call control, everything on-prem, phones obviously, mobile devices... but you can add on this service that brings mobility from the cloud and binds it to your premises equipment, to your premises infrastructure, things like actor, director and so on, are all well integrated. And to my knowledge, this is the first of its kind. Most solutions that talk about something that’s hybrid in nature are usually forcing you to choose between the cloud and the prem. And the two can co-exist but they are kind of separate but equal. This is the first time that you see these things coming together.
We’ve also got some ancillary services that are coming with that that are really neat. We have robust voice mail transcription, which is really slick now. I can just – I tend to be – given my mobile background, pretty mobile centric. I can now see my voice mail appears as text message inside of ShoreTel Mobility. And you will see that start to roll out as part of ShoreTel Connect in the first phase. You will also see email-based fax services as well, called ShoreTel Connect Fax, and that way, just like you would with any electronic fax service, you can email out documents or PDF’s and have them faxed out and receive faxes by email via a dedicated DID that you’ll receive from ShoreTel Sky Service. So that's also going to be available. And that is just the beginning; there is going to be tons of great applications like that, these are just the first three. So I am really excited, and hopefully it gives you a taste of things that we are working on. And I think you got a sense of the other things that are coming around the corner that we will be talking about again in just a few months.
Blair: Well, I am looking forward to it, and we will have to do another podcast when you’re ready to make those announcements.
Pej: Absolutely. Thank you, Blair.