You've been CEO for almost two years now and the largest development in that period was the acquisition of hosted VoIP supplier M5. Why did you acquire them and what have you achieved since?

Last year in June we discussed with our board the changes in the market and the growth of voice-over-IP in the cloud, and we agreed that ShoreTel, notwithstanding the continued strong growth in the premise, would need a .

The issue was, do we buy or do we build? We knew we could build a cloud platform, but the time it takes to build it, scale it, get the data centers running, get new accounting systems that do very different sorts of billing than we do, it's a three-plus year exercise. So we decided to buy.

BACKGROUND:

The reason we decided to buy is when the market starts accelerating to the extent cloud is, there's a window of opportunity where you can find good targets and you can also afford the target. So we think we got the timing just about right.