In The News

Earlier this month, ShoreTel announced its intention to acquire M5 Networks. The highlights of the deal include an M5 valuation of $160M (estimated to be about four times revenue), of which about half will be paid in cash. ShoreTel intends to operate M5 as a subsidiary, with key M5 management remaining. This was, in my opinion, a fairly significant announcement for ten reasons.

Remember Sylantro? GoBeam? There’s DNA from these long-gone companies at ShoreTel, but I think it had a lot to do with their recent move to acquire M5 Networks. First and foremost, kudos to ShoreTel for thinking big and thinking out of the box. I’m pretty sure they realized that organic growth and incremental moves won’t cut it to stay competitive. They need a to make a bigger move – and a bolder move.

UCStrategies’ Blair Pleasant moderates this Industry Buzz podcast. The topic is hosted unified communications, which has received recent attention afterShoreTel announced plans to acquire hosted provider M5 Networks.

M5 Networks delivers solutions that arm its customers with insight into their customer data and interactions. Not only does Live Answer Service Metric provide customers with various data on incoming calls and call treatment, but it also ranks such data and offers it in a format through which customers can compare their performance on these fronts with other businesses in their vertical.

Theoretically, team-building activities help employees work more effectively in teams, which should lead to better performance. Heather Bennett, vice president of Marketing for M5 Networks, a VoIP provider of business phone systems and applications, reports that her company made “tremendous gains in customer satisfaction (as measured by our Net Promoter Score)” and grew sales without expanding the sales force.

The desk phone fell to the fifth position among corporate communication devices in 2012 previews, behind the smartphone, laptop, computer and tablet, and down from the third spot in 2011, a survey by Infonetics Research Inc. found. However, the president of Colorado’s Fountainhead Networks Inc., Stephen Crockett, said in an e-mail that “desk phones won’t be going away any time soon.”

ShoreTel Inc. (SHOR) agreed to acquire cloud-computing company M5 Networks for up to $162.4 million in cash and stock, adding to the online telephone provider’s software portfolio.

ShoreTel makes voice-over-Internet-protocol products, which use computer networks to make telephone services more flexible and less expensive. M5′s technology provides its communication services through the cloud, a term used to describe networks that can host customers’ software and data off-site.

M5 is a telecom company based in New York City that offers Internet phone services. But it offers something else for its employees: At the Rochester, N.Y., office of M5, workers are gearing up for a companywide battle of the bands against other branches.

Live Answer Service Metric is a KPI (Key Performance indicator), allowing M5 customers to measure how often their staff are picking up their phones as opposed to letting calls going to voicemail. This metric was once only available to advanced contact centers is now available to the entire enterprise.

M5 Networks – a provider of cloud-based telephone services for businesses – is teaming up with the Hochstein School of Music for a program called M5 Rocks. M5 Rocks is about much more than just finding time to jam: There’s no better way to build a team than to start a band.