Shoretel, a leading manufacturer of SMB IP PBXs debued strongly yesterday on the NASDAQ finishing up 28% from its opening (book) price of $9.50. This shows either (1) there is a lot of interest in the very competitive IP PBX platform market or (2) Lehman Brothers and J.P. Morgan are very good at what they do. After all they are bulge bracket brokers.
ShoreTel, a provider of enterprise IP telephony solutions, completed the initial public offering of 7,900,000 shares of its common stock at a price to the public of $9.50 per share. In its first day of trading (July 3), the shares rose $2.65 to close at $12.15, up 28%.
You can find a good (financial geek) analysis here. I do think it is a good buyout candidate and Mitel may make sense but they have a lot of overlap of products. What I would worry about is that Nortel, the king of the SMB CPE market is coming out with some very good SIP products that will be very aggressively priced, along with good 3COM products in this sector.
