ShoreTel’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales David Petts will be coming to Asia to discuss the biggest trends within the UC market: mobility and IM/presence. Asia Today editor had the opportunity to meet with Mr. Petts to ask him about his trip and the technological trend.
Questions:
1. Frost & Sullivan’s Unified Communications and Collaborations report published in 2013 stated that the key unified communications (UC) applications in Singapore for CY 2012 were mobility and IM/presence. Can you elaborate further about this trend?
The future of mobile and tablet communications is going to be less about a focus on incremental cost savings and more about the delivery of a collaborative experience to the mobile user. Saving costs through toll avoidance is an attractive concept to early adopters of the technology. However, the true benefits of mobility and IM/presence will be from the enhanced productivity that mobile workers experience, through having all the functionality of their desktop on their chosen mobile device that they know and love.
2. How does the growth of mobility and IM/presence compare to the other technology segments within the UC market?
The Singapore market’s adoption of enterprise mobility and the delivery of IM/presence to the mobile device are more significant than in other countries in Asia. Users’ iPhones or Androids have become an extension of their personalities in a way that none of their other work tools have, and the expectation is that the device that they love should deliver relevant and productive enterprise integrations. So, smart enterprises are capitalising on this and realising that they can control and manage those interactions, whilst delivering enterprise capabilities to the devices employees want to use.
Frost & Sullivan is predicting that we will continue to see a strong rate of adoption in Singapore over the next five years, and ShoreTel’s objective is to grow faster than the market in this space.
3. How has UC technology changed the way we work and communicate and how does it benefit BYOD users?
A decade ago, workers may have been given a Motorola flip phone – which was a very basic tool to make outbound and receive inbound calls – to use at work. It had simple functionality that was used in the course of the workday, and if one was particularly dexterous, he/she may have been able to text, in addition to making calls.
Smartphones have changed the way users perceive what a phone should be able to do. Users are finding their own applications to perform their jobs, and often more efficiently and faster than traditional IT departments.
This is where BYOD and UC collide, and employers who want to attract and retain great staff are finding that they need to provide enterprise applications for the device that employees want to use. There is a lot of valid discussion around the “consumerisation of IT”, which naturally leads to a discussion around the “consumerisation of UC”, where users have come to expect simple, intuitive delivery of UC capabilities. If an iPhone can deliver a one-click simple video application like FaceTime, then an enterprise mobile video deployment must be just as easy for users to be happy.
If employees were asked if they wanted a particular capability delivered to their desktop or personal device, most people would want it delivered to their iPhone or Android. Since employees want to use their own devices, they are also more inclined to self-serve and manage their own technology. This revolution in who manages the application was only a dream 10 years ago, but today’s IT departments are saving costs by assigning the responsibility for managing and owning the device back onto users.
4. Which applications are key to BYOD users and why?
BYOD users should expect enterprise-grade UC capabilities as fundamental to their experience. What happens next will be integrating UC into line-of-business applications. For example, the most important application for someone in a sales organisation might be SalesForce.com, whilst the most important application for a recruiting organisation might be Bullhorn. The applications that will be key to a particular user will depend on his/her role within the organisation – the job of mobile UC will be to integrate in a meaningful way to a broad range of applications, in the same way that a “wire-tethered” phone system does today.
5. Which markets in Asia are leading BYOD adoption and why?
We are seeing strong adoption of the BYOD concept in the more mature and established markets, like Singapore, Malaysia, Korea, Japan and Hong Kong. These countries have the robust infrastructure necessary to support BYOD requirements, as well as stable political and social environments that make such transformative work practices beneficial to the organisation.
These countries also have strong service economies, which lend themselves to mobile workers, further encouraging the adoption of BYOD technologies, compared to the less mature markets.
6. According to more than 1,600 IT and security professionals Dimension Data surveyed recently, mobility is a top priority for most IT departments. Unfortunately, there’s a critical gap between the vision these IT leaders have for enterprise mobility and the real-world implementations. Please explain how ShoreTel fills that critical gap.
One observation about this statistic is that it focuses on the IT department, and not line-of-business leaders or the end user. More and more, we are seeing end-user demand replicate the simple experience they have in their consumer lives into their business lives. Or, we see business leaders looking for ways to improve the efficiency of their teams through access to business applications from devices they always have with them.
This is being supported by ShoreTel in a number of ways. Firstly, through the development of connectors to applications, such as SalesForce.com, and the mobile integration of these connectors. Secondly, by providing APIs and SDKs to our ‘Innovation Network’ to stimulate further the 3rd-party development of such business-application integration. And lastly, by harnessing the development taking place in the iOS and Android ecosystems that brings forward more breadth of choices.
This is an area that will continue to grow and develop into a broader focus for developers of business applications, as they see the benefits of the additional mobile use case. As additional choices become available to users, business leaders and, of course, IT, we will see real-world implementation.
To illustrate this, I can share a parallel from a recent adoption inside ShoreTel. In simple terms, the team that supports our expenses tool and process was approached by a vendor showcasing an integrated mobile extension that allows users to simply snap a picture of a business-expense receipt with their mobile device and have the application upload that to the expense system and categorise the claim in the correct way. This was shared with me as a business leader; I could see the business value; and it has been adopted. In this case, IT was not the driver of the new technology adoption – it was us as the end users leading the process.
True mobility-enabled UC will allow workers to extend the desktop to the mobile device, allowing employees to perform their roles and deliver value to the organisation wherever they are, without the limitations of suboptimal communications tools. Being able to take a phone call from a client whilst on the road, reviewing a presentation or some other document remotely, making changes or sharing a mobile desktop with the person on the other end of the phone, pulling into the conversation a subject-matter expert who is in yet another remote location, and then closing a deal and submitting an invoice – these are all possible today.
7. Can you describe the other upcoming UC trends in Singapore?
The biggest shift we are seeing around UC is that it is no longer a decision that is exclusively controlled and managed by the IT department. The sales organisation, operations, services and finance are all involved in driving technology requirements for the organisation. The consumerisation of enterprise technology is creating demand from other parts of the business to seek their own technology solutions to deliver value to the business.
We are also heading towards an inflection point in the demographics of the workforce in Singapore. In 10 years’ time, there will be more workers from the millennial generation than all other generations combined working in Singapore. This is the most technologically savvy group of digital natives that history has ever encountered. Organisations that want to attract and retain this highly educated and motivated workforce will need to offer UC tools and applications in the enterprise that this group uses in their personal lives.
8. How is ShoreTel making sure it keeps a competitive edge in this crowded marketplace? What are the strategies to meet Singapore’s market demands?
ShoreTel maintains an edge over its competitors in this crowded marketplace by offering mobility solutions that users know and love, with practical devices like the ShoreTel Dock, which merges all the benefits of a desk phone (audio quality, always-on power and ergonomic comfort) with the features and functions of ShoreTel Mobility.
Today’s end users are bombarded with increasingly complex technologies in the workplace. When it comes to personal productivity, they want simplicity and elegance, not greater degrees of difficulty. ShoreTel’s philosophy of “Brilliantly Simple” solutions brings the best elements of design and functionality to the user, supported by a robust platform. It is the simple elements of ShoreTel Mobility that enhance user productivity. One feature, the conference-call ‘join’ button – which enables a user to access a scheduled conference call with the touch of a single button, without needing to remember long strings of phone numbers and access codes – is an example of ShoreTel’s commitment to stripping away complexity. Visual voice mail in the mobile client with media streaming through the device is another – if users can watch YouTube videos streaming to their device, should their voice mail not stream just as easily? All these are delivered through a stylish and inviting user interface that is in keeping with our “Brilliantly Simple” philosophy.
David Petts
Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales
David Petts joined ShoreTel in 2012 as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales. Petts’ expertise strengthens the ShoreTel sales organisation and reinforces the drive for growth.
Petts comes to ShoreTel from Nokia, where he spent seven years in sales leadership roles. There, leading global sales, marketing and services of security and mobility solutions for business customers, as well as the global relationship with AT&T, Petts was responsible for driving long-term strategy as well as implementation and execution. Prior to Nokia, Petts held a number of executive management roles with Hewlett Packard (HP) and Compaq in both the U.S. and U.K.
Petts holds a bachelor's degree in economics and quantitative studies from Queen Mary College, London University. He is based in the New York office, co-located with the ShoreTel Cloud Division.