Departing just as his company reaches a new plateau, exiting ShoreTel CEO John Combs said today on an earnings call with analysts that the IP telephony system provider is “really hitting on all cylinders."
ShoreTel reported quarterly revenues of $42.2 million, up 30 percent than the same period in 2009, and a net loss of $3.7 million. For the 2009-2010 fiscal year the company lost $12.8 million, slightly more than the previous year, on record revenues of $148.5 million. Combs, who will step down as CEO in September, said on the conference call with analysts that the company expects to return to profitability before the end of the 2010-11 fiscal year.
Profiting from market share losses by rival Mitel, the Sunnyvale, Calif. supplier of IP phones and software said it has moved into the No. 3 position in the market for IP telephony, behind Cisco and Avaya. No successor to Combs has been named yet.
“We are making our mark in the industry as a prime challenger in the status quo of overly complex and expensive systems," said Combs, who instituted the motto “Brilliant simplicity" to describe the company’s focus on ease of use and low cost of ownership of its unified communications platform. Last month the company released the new version of its contact center platform, which is designed to better integrate contact-center functions with a company’s existing main business processes, using real-time APIs and event feeds that better track, respond and prioritize the entire lifecycle of the customer call. ShoreTel’s Contact Center 6 is targeted at those companies that don’t want – or aren’t equipped – to deal with the kind of product complexity that some of their bigger competitors entail.
ShoreTel executives expect first-quarter revenue of between $41 million and $45 million, beyond consensus Wall Street estimates of $41.3 million. ShoreTel’s share price was up 5 percent in midday trading on the Nasdaq.
