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Applications Featured Articles
Enterprise IP
 telephony provider ShoreTel (News - Alert) Inc. has priced its initial public offering of 7,900,000 shares of its common stock at $9.50 per share. In addition, ShoreTel has granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 1,185,000 shares of common stock. ShoreTel will trade on the Nasdaq Global Market.
Lehman Brothers Inc. and J.P. Morgan Securities Inc. are acting as joint book-running managers for the offering, and Piper Jaffray & Co., JMP Securities LLC, and Wedbush Morgan Securities Inc. are acting as co-managers.
ShoreTel was originally slated to price its IPO at $10.50 per share last week, but the IPO was upstaged by the announcement the company was on the receiving end of a patent suit by its competitor Mitel (News - Alert).
In the suit, Mitel claims ShoreTel infringed upon four its patents, covering algorithms used for an automatic patent generator, portable telephone profiles, automatic telephone feature selector, and local area communications server.
ShoreTel’s IPO is sign that IP telephony providers are aggressively seeking to raise cash to fund growth initiatives that will give them a leg up in an increasingly fierce SMB market. Not only must ShoreTel square off against traditional competitors such as Mitel and Inter-Tel (News - Alert) – both of whom had agreed to merge back in April—it must also compete against corporate behemoths Microsoft (News - Alert) and Cisco, which are trying to muscle in on SMB territory.
Spencer Chin is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
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