Military strength

An apprenticeship with the Australian Army was the career starting point for Tony Warhurst, now managing director, South East Asia for ShoreTel, a recently publicly listed IP telephony solutions provider.

Aged just 16, the boy from Ballarat, Victoria wasn’t sure what to do with his life but electronics held a certain appeal.

“I spent a total of nine years with the Army’s defence force, developing service to air missile systems and calibration techniques so I suppose I always had a real interest in ‘tecchy’ things and the way that machinery works.”

Armed with an Associate’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the Army School, Warhurst, now 41, made the decision to re-join civilian life in 1991 and get into a more sales-focused career.

“Testing and measurement equipment had been my most recent area of interest but I was getting sick of the bench and really needed a career change where I could expand my burgeoning interest in the world of business.”

Taking on the sales world

Selling communication and ISDN equipment for technology firm Tekelec Australia was the first company on Warhurst’s corporate career ladder, where he stayed for nine years, gradually getting promoted through the sales ranks to national sales manager.

The next step was Zultys, an American telecom equipment vendor, which Warhurst launched as a start-up in Australia back in 2002. Completely looking after the Oceania side of the business, he started the division from scratch, doing everything from registering it as an entity, finding office space and doing the accounts, to recruiting a distribution and reseller channel for the business.

Eventually growing the company to a pre-eminent position as a tier one VoIP company and winning business against much larger competitors such as Avaya, Samsung and Cisco, he expanded from a one-person operation to a business with offices in Sydney and Melbourne with clients covering local government, industry and the professions and a reputation as the most profitable office in the group.

“It was a real pleasure to grow that sort of a business from scratch, and I learnt a lot from doing it, especially about how crucial it is to provide exceptional customer satisfaction – something we are extremely focused on now at ShoreTel.”

New beginnings

Unfortunately for Warhurst, in mid-2006, US-based Zultys suffered a major shock when the company – amid a lack of funding and with more than $US45 million of liabilities on its balance sheet – was forced to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

“It really was both a shock and a major let-down for the whole of the company, as well as its channel,” he said.

However, they say that one door closes and another opens. Late last year, Zultys’ demise led to a new beginning with ShoreTel when one of the latter’s senior employees headhunted Warhurst for a new challenge directing the business down under. ShoreTel said that its managing director brings a ‘high level of skills in account management, applications engineering, technical support, sales forecasting, and budgeting’ to the company, with his key achievements in Australia and New Zealand being the development of a new distribution model and the management of a 28-strong reseller channel. It also highlights the leading of a strong sales drive, with deployments in place across Australia and New Zealand.

Pride in Australia

“I certainly don’t have any plans to move abroad,” he said determinedly. “This is a great country with a great economy and the business I am in is reflective of that. I think Australians are a good bunch of people to sell to, having high standards that they don’t let you forget! You really have to deliver what you promise you will and I certainly would agree that Aussies being a laid-back lot is often a misconception – certainly in business anyway!

“Also I think Australians are very embracing of new technology (and the rate at which it develops) and adopt it at a faster rate than in many other countries.”

He points to VoIP as a technology which has really started to gain momentum now in this country. “It’s great that people are now really experiencing the many advantages of the technology and also that VoIP has become much more mainstream.

“At ShoreTel, we’re finding that we’re getting in front of a lot more customers, especially within organisations where you think people may not be especially interested, such as engineering and particularly mining.”

New market sectors

Mining may be a very old and consequently traditional industry, said Warhurst, but these guys have heard about the benefits of the technology to their businesses and are keen to hear more. “Likewise, there’s many smaller, often very low technology, businesses that are important suppliers to the mining industry and we’re finding that they too, have a curious interest in what we do.”

Attention to customer satisfaction is at the heart of what prompted him to take on the managing director role at ShoreTel a year ago.

Attention to detail

For the past four years, IT executives surveyed by independent research firm Nemertes Research have rated ShoreTel highest in customer satisfaction among leading enterprise telecommunications systems providers.

“We aim to reward staff based on the results of our regular customer satisfaction survey.
“ShoreTel voice systems are designed to make business smarter, setting new standards for usability and manageability, while reducing telecommunications costs. High reliability, scalability and availability are all taken into detailed consideration. It would be no good having a technologically perfect system that simply could not grow with the client.

“I think that is why we have been so successful in winning business with companies that are in expansion mode.”

He said companies in the financial market fall into this category, “especially with their acute understanding of the benefits of pure IP”.

ShoreTel, a 2007 winner of the US VoiceCon award, also has a strong focus on maintaining its client relationships for the long term, he said. “We generally aim for around 10-15 years, so superior service has to be constant.”

So what of the challenges ahead?

Having gone public in July this year, Warhurst said the company is aiming to grow internationally and is already on the path to achieving this with Hong Kong and Singapore currently witnessing the launch of ShoreTel’s 7.5 software releases.

“They have well developed infrastructure in these two regions with superior broadband capability, so we see a great deal of growth business here. They are also hubs for countries less developed in their telecommunications including Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines and China so we are keen to see how opportunities develop for us there, too.
“Overall though, we realise there needs to be a very valid proposition for VoIP telephony if it is a technology that can be successfully launched in that country. It’s no good trying to introduce it where they do not have the facilities to support it.”

Development ahead

Warhurst believes Australia still has a ‘long way to go’ with its broadband capabilities. “I would love to see the big firms such as Telstra really deliver on their broadband promises in the rural communities of Australia.

“It’s all very well having companies with their corporate head office in Sydney, for example, but if their satellite offices are spread over wide rural regions with no connectivity, then they are really losing the ability to have communications systems over multiple sites and they risk losing the visibility of their branch offices.

“Prices still also need to be driven down to achieve a level playing field for everyone.”
Warhurst admitted he is a bit of a risk taker. “I must be. I have started two US companies in the Australian market!

“The first one was a bit of a stumble, but certainly a great learning curve. The second I am rather more confident on from both a product and financial perspective. Coming to ShoreTel has been safe for me from the start as I knew it already had a very strong track record and cash flow in the US. And when I look at it, it really has got a very positive background and with it now growing at a great rate with a great market share, things cannot be bad.

“I would probably like to increase the partner channel, maybe to about 40 or 45 resellers but I certainly would not want to flood the market. It’s much more about quality than quantity. What distinguishes those good resellers from the rest is those that you can tell really buy into the value of our product and maybe even promote it as their flagship.

Life on an ocean wave

Warhurst is a happy man, as well as a keen golfer (his handicap is 15). Along with his wife, Christine, an accountant, and their dog Obi, he whiles away many a weekend on their sports cruiser, moored near their home on Sydney’s Northern Beaches.

“Nothing is ever as relaxing as when we are sailing along the ocean in our boat,” he smiles.