Bruce Downing is Managing Director, Asia and South Africa, and his current focus is to establish and build new partnerships, create market demand in ShoreTel’s new markets of operation across Asia, as well as continue to grow ShoreTel’s business in its more established Asia markets – including Singapore, Hong Kong and the Philippines.
ASIA TODAY editor sat down with Bruce to hear about the latest developments and the roadmap for 2013.
Q: What is the roadmap for 2013 and beyond for ShoreTel Asia?
In our Unified Communications suite of solutions, our IP Telephony and Contact Centre solutions seem to be well placed and priced for the Asian market – proven through the rapid adoption of our technology, especially in the SMB and mid-market sectors across almost all verticals. We will be announcing shortly further expansions and offerings to our solutions portfolio for the Asian market, which will increase further our regional market share in 2013.
Based on the requests we are getting from our local customers, the practice of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) is starting to gain momentum, moving from hype status to reality. ShoreTel’s brilliantly simple solutions are perfectly placed to address this customer requirement and we are experiencing very positive growth as BYOD adoption increases. We will continue to invest and drive this in 2013 and beyond.
ShoreTel operates a 100 per cent indirect sales channel in Asia, with all our sales generated through our certified partners in each of the countries across the region. We are and have been experiencing very strong growth across Asia, exceeding the region’s market growth by a very large factor. We work closely with our fantastic partners that have helped our growth. There is a lot more that we can do to support and develop our partners’ sales, marketing and technical capabilities – we have planned and are executing currently a variety of programmes.
In terms of partner development, our focus this year is on sales and technical training. We are concentrating on solutions selling and what we at ShoreTel call our ‘advanced applications’ – for example, contact centre and mobility – which are integrated with ShoreTel’s core Unified Communications solution. ShoreTel’s solutions selling programme is a new training initiative that has been very successful with our US partners and is now being offered to our Asian partners’ sales teams.
ShoreTel is currently established in ten countries across Asia, and we have identified a number of strategic markets. India, Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia are the four key markets that we believe will drive our business growth in 2013 and beyond. We are investing heavily in headcount in Singapore and across the region to support our objectives; our team is focused on building market awareness for ShoreTel, generating customer demand, and supporting our partners with sales and engineering resources.
Also in line with our Asian investment, we moved our Asia headquarters in December 2012 to new premises in Singapore’s Suntec Tower Three – giving us additional facilities, training competencies and space to accommodate our planned headcount and growth in local-language technical support.
Q: What are ShoreTel Asia’s main strengths and what is its vision?
ShoreTel has a great network of distribution and reseller partners across Asia; a really strong internal sales and technical team; growth rates well above the market; and a solid technology platform. Our vision is to accelerate our market growth and establish ourselves in the top three IP telephony vendors in Asia. That is more than achievable, as ShoreTel is established already as one of the top three vendors in the US, our largest market.
Our strengths are our people, our partners, and the brilliantly simple solutions we provide; this combination is driving our growth.
Even though ShoreTel in Asia is still a relatively unknown brand, compared to the USA where we originated and have an incredibly strong presence and market awareness, we are finding customers are very receptive to a new alternative voice and unified communications vendor. The feedback we get from our customers is that the solutions and licensing from the more established players in this market are much more complex and costly – which is even more obvious over the longer term as total cost of ownership is considered.
Q: What is the most popular product or service in your portfolio?
ShoreTel’s most popular product in Asia is our core Unified Communications solution. Most of our customers today are transitioning for the first time from legacy systems to IP telephony, and achieving tremendous business benefits from the switch. These benefits extend from pure telephony cost savings, increased user adoption, very simple system management, and an architecture that is very efficient from a networking and hardware perspective. Our single-image architecture greatly reduces cost of ownership and brings simplicity to any organisation’s voice and unified communications strategy.
We are also starting to see organisations increasingly interested in adopting more of the unified communications features, especially integration with email and instant messaging. Our Contact Centre solutions sales are also gaining significant momentum in the Asian market.
Q: Could you give an outline of the competitive environment for business communications providers driving workforce engagement and collaboration in Asia?
Even given the above, it is still very challenging to sell the benefits of unified communications to organisations in Asia. One of the main reasons is that customers are still ‘sweating their assets’ given the current economic climate in which we all live and work. The primary business driver for most of the organisations in Asia where we operate is still cost reduction. The concepts of workforce engagement and collaboration tend to be based on the more positive benefits of improving productivity and business agility. The good news is that we can demonstrate both sets of benefits to our customers. Our up-front hardware and licensing costs are very competitive and unique, and many of our customers are now taking into account total cost of ownership – which is a calculation of the costs over the lifetime of the system. At the same time, we can demonstrate how our three key solutions (Unified Communications, Contact Centre and Mobility) can generate positive benefits to the organisation.
Q: Who are your main competitors in the region?
ShoreTel’s challenge is that the competitive landscape varies country to country across Asia, with different competitors being stronger in different markets. Generally, we find ourselves competing against Avaya, Cisco, Mitel and NEC.
Q: Have you encountered challenges following your expansion into Asia with a new branch office in Singapore?
ShoreTel first opened an office in Singapore in 2011, before moving into a larger space in December last year due to the growth of our team. We have always focused on hiring staff with extensive experience in the region, which has largely ensured that we have not had any major challenges establishing the business in Asia. My own appointment to the Asia Managing Director role in August 2012 is likely a case in point, since I had already worked and lived across Asia for more than 13 years.
Q: What are the barriers to cope with in terms of Asia’s language and culture diversity?
To ensure you can tackle cultural and language barriers, it is critical that you hire local resources in each country. More than that, ShoreTel’s hiring strategy has focused on bringing on board staff members that have an established track record in that country’s IT industry. That has given us a ‘headstart’ when establishing operations in a new territory because we not only traverse language and cultural barriers, but also business norms.
We take our customer and partner relationships incredibly seriously and are here to work with them for the long term; which is very important, especially in the Asian cultures.
Q: Do you have any plan for expansion into other part of Asia? If yes, what would likely be the next country?
While ShoreTel is focusing on growth in existing markets and being successful in those, we are excited by the potential of emerging markets including Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam. ShoreTel already has an R&D presence in Vietnam, where we have over 50 staff members and are looking to open a sales presence there in the near future.
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Bruce Downing
Managing Director, Asia and South Africa
ShoreTel, Inc.
Bruce Downing is Managing Director, Asia and South Africa, and his current focus is to establish and build new partnerships, create market demand in ShoreTel’s new markets of operation across Asia, as well as continue to grow ShoreTel’s business in its more established Asia markets – including Singapore, Hong Kong and the Philippines.
Based in ShoreTel’s regional head office in Singapore, Bruce is responsible for managing ShoreTel’s business operations, sales, channels and go-to-market strategy across the Asian and South African regions.
Bruce is an industry veteran with more than 20 years’ experience in IT and telecommunications. Originally from South Africa, he also has extensive experience in IT engineering, sales and management roles in the Asia Pacific region – specifically in Singapore, Japan, China and Australia.
Bruce joined ShoreTel in February 2012 as Country Manager for South Africa and was promoted to his current role in July 2012. Prior to joining ShoreTel, Downing spent 12 years with Cisco, most recently in various operations director roles including mobile business, enterprise and service provider in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). He began his career as a network administrator at Nelson Mandela University and has held various positions with IBM, Cabletron Systems/Enterasys, AT&T and Singapore Technologies.