NSC claims world first with Shoretel on-demand service

Nation-wide communications integrator NSC Group has claimed a world first after signing with Shoretel to sell an on-demand service based on the vendor’s unified communications suite of IP phones and software.

NSC planned to launch the communications-as-a-service solution next month tailored for the mid market, which CEO Craig Neil defined as companies with 50 to 1000 seats. The service relied on a breakthrough commercial model based on a standard hosted delivery platform.

The integrator had spent a year setting up the service, for which NSC rented equipment from ShoreTel directly without the involvement of a third-party financer. NSC had approached several vendors with a similar proposal but had been rebuffed, Neil said.

“We wanted the vendor to own the asset so we are renting the asset from Shoretel. That’s quite unique – for a partner to go out and do that I think that’s a really good sign,” Neil said.

“When we spoke to a lot of the other vendors they couldn’t get their head around it. This is the biggest problem the world faces in getting these technologies into service. When you move to an annuity model your revenue drops but you still have to manufacture products and supply them. But the longer term profitability is better.

“Publicly listed entities are all measured on their revenues so it’s almost an impossible model for these companies to move towards. What I love about ShoreTel is that they did.”

The second requirement was that the vendor’s products had to work well with multiple offices.

“We wanted to target this at the mid market so we wanted a product that was very fast and easy to deploy, with distributed architecture,” Neil said. “A lot of companies that size are multi-site so ShoreTel’s architecture is perfect and that’s one of their selling points. You get a lot of bang for your dollar.”

ShoreTel managing director for ANZ Vasili Triant said the vendor was looking to pioneer new solutions to the market. “It’s taken a considerable amount of time to get up this part of the partnership. It doesn’t happen too often when a big integrator takes on new product,” he said.

“We looked at something that was mutually beneficial and we came up with it relatively quickly. I think NSC were impressed with our ability to be nimble rather than saying get third-party financing,” Triant said.

The integrator joined ShoreTel’s channel as a Gold Partner, the highest partner certification, to sell consumer premise equipment. NSC kicked off its signing with a $200,000 deal for Shoretel on-premise equipment with a 200-seat council and Neil said there was more to come.

“We’ve got a funnel developing quite rapidly. There will be many more deals shortly,” Neil said.

NSC also resells Avaya, Nortel and Genesys.