ShoreTel Helps Starts an Apple Watch Conversation
Regardless of how anyone feels about whether there is a valid use case for an Apple Watch, there’s no getting away from the fact that, at the very least, it’s a conversation starter. The challenge facing solution providers is finding a way to turn that conversation into something that creates some potential revenue opportunities for them.
Regardless of how anyone feels about whether there is a valid use case for an Apple Watch, there’s no getting away from the fact that, at the very least, it’s a conversation starter. The challenge facing solution providers is finding a way to turn that conversation into something that creates some potential revenue opportunities for them.
Buried in all the hoopla about the availability of the Apple Watch today is an announcement from ShoreTel that it is making its portfolio of unified communications (UC) applications available for the Apple Watch.
ShoreTel already supports the application programming interfaces (APIs) that Apple exposes on the Apple iPhone, so adding support for the Apple Watch APIs isn’t that much of a technical stretch. In fact, ShoreTel product manager Ed Wright said the bigger challenge was determining what set of functions to expose on an Apple Watch, which has much less screen real estate than an Apple iPhone.
Ultimately, ShoreTel decided to keep it relatively simple. Owners of an Apple Watch that invoke a ShoreTel UC application can access contact lists when initiating a call, redial a call, accept or reject a call, view and respond to instant messages, view and update presence functions, and join a collaboration session.
Of course, initiating any of these actions is only possible when the Apple Watch is in the proximity of the user's iPhone. Given that fact that pricing for the Apple Watch starts at $300, not everybody inside an organization is going to have one. But those who do more likely will be individuals that are either highly enamored with technology or have a lot of disposable income. From solution providers' perspective, those often are the very people they should most want to engage, because they are either predisposed to appreciate the value of technology or exercise enough influence inside their organizations to command a comfortable salary.
Of course, not everyone who goes out and buys an Apple Watch will think to use it to access enterprise applications. But once folks see what can be done it’s probably only a matter of “time” before they start to make the connection.
In the meantime, solution providers might want to buy a few Apple Watches and connect them back to modern UC environments. After all, nothing quite creates the appropriate level of envy in a potential customer than being able to see someone do something really cool that they would love to be able to do if only they knew how it was done themselves.
