There is no question that email marketing is on a growth trajectory. The current total spend of over $1 billion dollars is projected to double in the next few years alone. This includes emails of all major categories – advertisements, solicitations, as well informational emails. Email marketing is attractive because it can be deployed quickly [...]

With the advent of the cloud, social media, the term “big data” seems to be the current buzzword in the information technology sphere these days. Broadly speaking, it is used to refer to data sets that are just too huge for traditional systems (like relational databases) to house and/or analyze. Most organizations’ preoccupation with data [...]

Companies undergo mergers and acquisitions (M&As) for different reasons, but using it as a Launchpad toward future growth is one primary reason. Large corporations sometimes go one step further by acquiring companies that are a threat, dissolve them, and thus neutralizing that threat. But for more modest-sized companies, it is mainly about the pursuit of [...]

Conducting a pilot implementation with certain prospects is an effective way of getting your foot in the door and making a future full-fledged sale. The goal of conducting pilots is to give the potential customer the full experience of our offering – albeit in a smaller, localized environment. It’s essentially the first stage of a [...]

Around 50 percent of our existing customers first found out about ShoreTel from our dealer network (source: Customer Satisfaction surveys). A sizeable chunk (approximately 25 percent) first found out about us from a friend/colleague or their IT department contact person. This is interesting for a variety of reasons.

As ShoreTel continues to grow, we have larger customers. Larger businesses are often multi-national, and are more likely to have multi-sites even if they are 100 percent domestic. Having these larger businesses as our customers is a positive affirmation that our marketing and branding efforts are paying off. In fact, over 10 percent of our [...]

Although the current economy has resulted in zero growth of corporate IT budget spending since 2010, there is still plenty of opportunity out there. Remember that, in most organizations, a lot of IT spending is done outside of the corporate IT budget. As a technology vendor, it’s important to bear in mind that with the [...]

Those of us who went to business school (or did a business subject study in academia at some point) are aware of a business intelligence methodology called the SWOT analysis. SWOT = Strengths. Weaknesses. Opportunities. Threats. As the name implies, it’s essentially a structured method for assessing and evaluating both the positive and negative factors [...]

As we look forward to introducing more new customers to ShoreTel, it is interesting to know there are over 18 million businesses in the U.S. When you look at the biggest businesses out there – there are over 4,500 companies that have over 5,000 employees. Needless to say, the Fortune 1000 companies are in this [...]

There is no denying the current trend in bringing your own devices (BYOD). The rapid proliferation of smartphones and tablets is the driving factor behind the BYOD movement of late. It’s not a new concept. Notebook computers, PDAs and more recently Netbooks have been propagating this trend for years. However, one can argue that it [...]