ShoreTel goes big in hosted VoIP: A Q&A with CEO Blackmore

02.10.2012

Your annual report says your profit margin is lower on the hosted side than on the customer premise side, which seems counterintuitive, no?

Hosted customers have a choice of either a pure Web connection or a T1 connection to improve voice quality. The vast majority ask us to provision T1 and therefore it reduces our overall margin. Over time, I think that will go away because the quality of the Web telco will steadily improve.

Speaking of time, although the hosted business is a fraction of your customer premise business today, looking out five, 10 years, does that flip-flop?

IDC says that by 2015 the voice market for premise and the voice market for cloud will be equal at $15 billion. And then on top of that you've got to add the UC market, which will be split between the two, and that would be an additional $12 billion. So you've got 15 and 15 plus 12. That's the size of the market, and it is split 50-50. So it doesn't flip but that's cloud catching up fairly fast with premise.

Is M5 fully integrated at this point or is there still work to do?