ShoreTel Purchase Of Corvisa Opens 'Significant Window To Innovation,' Partners Say

Partners say ShoreTel's acquisition of cloud-based communications specialist Corvisa for $8.5 million will drive innovation, international expansion and increase revenue opportunities for the channel.

"Knowing the cloud revenue [Corvisa] has, the call center feature set they have and the ability they have for application development on top of the call center opens a significant window to innovation to the ShoreTel product line now – it's huge," said Joe Rittenhouse, president of business development and managing partner at Crystal Lake, Ill.-based Converged Technology Professionals, a longtime ShoreTel partner. "There's a lot of innovation they've acquired for a really good price."

Milwaukee, Wis.-based Corvisa is a provider of cloud-based contact center and business phone system software, along with SIP trunking services. ShoreTel says the acquisition will accelerate its hosted revenue growth in fiscal 2017 by 30 percent.

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The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based VoIP and unified communications specialist ShoreTel will leverage Corvisa's open standards-based application programming interfaces (APIs) and software development kits (SDKs) to increase third-party application integration within the ShoreTel ecosystem. Corvisa's standalone cloud contact center also expands the vendor's presence in the contact center market and allows for integration with non-ShoreTel solutions.

Channel partners will also be able to unlock new revenue streams through Corvisa's SIP trunking portfolio.

"Corvisa has portals and stuff that will integrate with the partner channel and a lot of strategic applications that will be able to evolve around the partner community, like SIP trucking," said Rittenhouse. "It's a very key, strategic move for ShoreTel."

ShoreTel will also acquire Corvisa's Amsterdam and U.K. data centers, which expands its cloud services offerings in Europe.

"[Corvisa] has international presence where ShoreTel is trying to scale, and being able to acquire that and taking over that will also increase ShoreTel's footprint internationally, significantly and quickly," said Rittenhouse.

Don Joos, president and CEO of ShoreTel said in a release that the acquisition aligns tightly to ShoreTel's strategic plan of accelerating technology time to market, growing hosted services revenue and expanding cloud offerings globally.

The purchase will bring nearly 100 Corvisa employees to ShoreTel, most of which are technical engineers. The deal is expected to close during its March quarter.