ShoreTel began in 1996 as Shoreline Communications and kept the name until 2004. The Sunnyvale company sold office phone systems built on internet protocol, so calls ran over the same network as a company's computers. Its customers were mid-sized businesses with offices in more than one place, which could run every site's phones as one system. In July 2007, the old office PBX was dying, and Cisco and Avaya were chasing the same customers.

Edwin Basart's Simpler PBX

Edwin Basart founded the company and was still its chief technology officer at the IPO. John Combs ran it as chairman and CEO. The pitch was ease. A ShoreTel system arrived as hardware and software that a company's own IT staff could install and manage, without a phone specialist. Firms with many branch offices could add a site and have it join the system. The bet was that buyers cared more about simple setup and low running costs than about the biggest brand.

A Small Price, a Long Run

ShoreTel priced at $9.50 a share in July 2007 and listed on Nasdaq as SHOR. It stayed public for ten years, adding cloud phone services as businesses moved their systems online. Competition and slow growth weighed on the stock. In 2017, the Canadian company Mitel bought ShoreTel through a tender offer at $7.50 a share in cash, about $530 million. ShoreTel's shares came off Nasdaq in September 2017.

Cover: Rocky Coast, John Frederick Kensett. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a rocky shoreline (ShoreTel).