Converged Technology Professionals One of First VARs to Offer ShoreTel Sky

Earlier this month ShoreTel (News - Alert) unveiled its new program that lets its value-added resellers offer the ShoreTel Sky suite of cloud-based VoIP services, and one of the first resellers to take advantage of the program is Converged Technology Professionals.

This comes as little surprise given that Converged Technology Professionals is one of ShoreTel’s most mercurial resellers. The company, which is based in the Midwest and serves clients on six continents, had sales growth of more than 200 percent last year, and has really figured out the right equation in taking ShoreTel’s already stellar offerings and adding additional value to them. It comes as no surprise, then, that Converged Technology Professionals would jump on the new ShoreTel Sky program, and do it at the highest level.

For Converged Technology Professionals, the approach is to take the dead-simple ShoreTel unified communications and mobility solutions and both package it for particular industries and add its own stellar client support.

In particular, Converged Technology Professionals focuses on healthcare, financial services, manufacturing and the public sector, according to the company. It also helps give smaller companies the same enterprise telephony services as a premise-based solution.

The new ShoreTel program unveiled earlier this month enables partners to offer clients its ShoreTel Sky suite of cloud-based VoIP services. Depending on the cloud experience of the reseller, these services can be offered at one of three levels.

The most basic level is the Referral level, and it is intended for ShoreTel partners who are new to cloud sales. At this level, partners hand leads over to ShoreTel, which then handles the deal directly. ShoreTel gives partners a one-time payout for each lead, in what amounts to a typical referral system.

The next tier is the Approved level, which is where ShoreTel works with the partner on the sale. Approved partners not only identify leads, but they also qualify those opportunities and work side-by-side with ShoreTel on closing the deal. The final proposal and actual implementations are handled by ShoreTel, however.

The highest level, and the one that Converged Technology Professionals has joined at, is the Enabled level. These partners handle the sale end-to-end, and get a one-time payout plus a larger percentage of the monthly recurring revenue than Approved partners. To qualify as an Enabled partner, however, the organization must have a dedicated ShoreTel cloud sales resource on staff—something that Converged Technology Professionals, due to its size, now offers.

"As a ShoreTel Sky Enabled Partner, CT-Pros can leverage our extensive experience and expertise in the installation and training of new ShoreTel Sky accounts,” noted Eric Peterson, president of operations at Converged Technology Professionals. “Controlling the entire deployment lifecycle ensures that our customers' transition to ShoreTel Sky is smooth and productive from day one."

It comes as little surprise to ShoreTel that Converged Technology Professionals would be one of the first resellers to use the new program.