M&A Bombshell: Mitel Buying ShoreTel in $430 Million Deal

**Editor’s Note: Please click here for a recap of the biggest channel-impacting merger and acquisition news from May and June.**

Seemingly out of nowhere comes the biggest channel M&A news in weeks: Mitel is acquiring ShoreTel for $430 million.

Mitel said the combined company will be the No. 2 player in UCaaS, and it more than doubles its UCaaS revenue to $263 million. The transaction is expected to go final in the third quarter, subject to ShoreTel stockholder approval, regulatory approval and customary conditions.

Mitel’s Rich McBee

The companies’ combined annual sales total $1.3 billion. Mitel tried to buy ShoreTel nearly three years ago.

The combined company will operate as Mitel. Rich McBee, Mitel’s CEO, will lead the combined organization. Steve Spooner, Mitel’s chief financial officer, will continue in that role.

“This is a very natural combination that enables us to continue to consolidate the industry and take advantage of cost synergy opportunities while adding new technologies and significant cloud growth to our business,” McBee said. “Together, Mitel and ShoreTel will be able to take customers to the cloud faster with full-featured, cloud-based communications and applications.”

The combined company will have about 3,200 channel partners, and a portfolio of communications and collaboration offerings. It will have a global workforce of about 4,200 employees.

The companies said they are “committed to providing continued support and an attractive path forward for all customers and partners.”

“With the announcement today, this concludes our comprehensive review of strategic alternatives by delivering a significant cash premium for our shareholders,” said Don Joos, ShoreTel’s CEO. “Customers are clearly moving to the cloud at a rapid pace. The combination of Mitel and ShoreTel creates a new UCaaS market leader with a differentiated strategy and solution, and a clear migration path so that no customer is left behind or will have to abandon what they already have to cloud-enable their organization.”

Lauren Shapiro, president of PlanetOne Communications, said the acquisition is an “all around good move.”

“It’s great to see channel-friendly leaders including Mitel take the lead in these acquisitions,” she said. “Mitel has a strong agent and growing MSP channel that aligns nicely with ShoreTel’s portfolio. As one of our preferred providers, Mitel’s reach and relevance in the MSP community is growing. Mitel’s proven success within our agent and MSP communities will go a long way for channel partners who want to incorporate ShoreTel’s technology into the mix.”

At last winter’s ShoreTelOne Global Partner Conference, Joos told partners his company has come a long way from being “just a phone company,” with its delivery model evolving from onsite to cloud, and from ownership to subscription.

For enterprise customers, ShoreTel’s offerings will strengthen Mitel’s ability to cloud-enable customers with existing premises or mixed-estate deployments, creating the technical foundation needed for delivery of next-generation cloud applications, the companies said.

Earlier this month, Mitel bought Toshiba’s Telecommunication Systems Division (TSD), which was set to shut down.

Last summer, Polycom snubbed Mitel’s $1.96 billion acquisition offer.