ShoreTel Named Ingram Micro's UCC Vendor of the Year

By Christopher Mohr
Contributing Writer

ShoreTel recently announced that Ingram Micro (News - Alert) named it UCC Vendor of the Year. It marks the first time that Ingram has recognized a company in this manner and comes on the strength of its cloud and hybrid solutions.

Sunnyvale, California-based ShoreTel develops on-premises, hybrid and cloud-based unified communications (UC) solutions. This is not the first time ShoreTel has received recognition. Earlier this year, the company was recognized by Gartner (News - Alert) Research for being a Leader in its Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications for Midsize Enterprises, North America. Nemertes rated ShoreTel (News - Alert) as the vendor with the lowest first-year and five-year costs for IP telephony and UC.

Ingram Micro is an Irvine, California-based wholesale distributor that works extensively with resellers to provide electronics and software products. It has established relationships with major vendors like Apple, HP, Lenovo, and Cisco (News - Alert) and has previously offered ShoreTel on-premises solutions.

Back in April, ShoreTel, Ingram, and HP collaborated on an effort to provide UC software and hardware to the SMB market. The decision to work together came after HP and ShoreTel received numerous requests from customers and resellers seeking cloud-based UC solutions. The two companies felt that Ingram was the best company for distribution. The new solution was named HP Networking for ShoreTel Solutions and combined UC service from ShoreTel with networking hardware, such as switches and routers, from HP.

For all the talk about entirely cloud-based solutions, the SMB market seems to gravitate towards hybrid UC installations. According to NoJitter writer Dave Stein, this is because many companies do not fit neatly in the pure on-premises or cloud communications scenarios.

In spite of the demand for UC in the cloud that led to partnering with HP and Ingram, ShoreTel acknowledged that hybrid deployments are where the SMB market is headed:

"We believe hybrid deployments will become more prevalent as a way for businesses to add cloud services," ShoreTel CEO Sam Koury told eWeek. "We don't think customers with on-premises UC are going to make a flash cut to cloud. Instead, many will put apps in the cloud, for instance. Or a company will deploy premises at headquarters and cloud at branch locations."

Awards and recognition are always nice to receive, but perhaps more significant is the reason behind them. ShoreTel is a respected vendor in the SMB market, and the success of its solutions and business relationships suggests that it will remain one for the foreseeable future.