UNITED STATES SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION
Washington, D.C. 20549

Form 10-K

☒   ANNUAL REPORT PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934

For the year ended June 30, 2016

or

o   TRANSITION REPORT PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934

Commission file number: 001-33506

SHORETEL, INC.

(Exact name of Registrant as specified in its charter)

960 Stewart Drive
Sunnyvale, CA 94085-3913
(408) 331-3300
(Address, including zip code, and telephone number, including area code, of Registrant’s principal executive offices)

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act:

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(g) of the Act:
None

Indicate by check mark if the registrant is a well-known seasoned issuer, as defined in Rule 405 of the Securities Act. Yes o No ☑

Indicate by check mark if the registrant is not required to file reports pursuant to Section 13 or Section 15(d) of the Act. Yes o No ☑

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant: (1) has filed all reports required to be filed by Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to file such reports), and (2) has been subject to such filing requirements for the past 90 days. Yes ☑ No o

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has submitted electronically and posted on its corporate website, if any, every Interactive Data File required to be submitted and posted pursuant to Rule 405 of Regulation S-T during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to submit and post such files). Yes ☑ No o

Indicate by check mark if disclosure of delinquent filers pursuant to Item 405 of Regulation S-K is not contained herein, and will not be contained, to the best of registrant’s knowledge, in definitive proxy or information statements incorporated by reference in Part III of this Form 10-K or any amendment to this Form 10-K. o

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-accelerated filer, or a smaller reporting company. See the definitions of “large accelerated filer,” “accelerated filer,” and “smaller reporting company” in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act (Check one):

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a shell company (as defined in Rule 12b-2 of the Act). Yes o No ☑

The aggregate market value of the voting stock held by non-affiliates of the registrant as of December 31, 2015 was approximately $583.8 million (based on the last reported sale price of $8.85 on December 31, 2015 on The NASDAQ Global Select Market). This calculation does not reflect a determination that persons are affiliates for any other purposes. Shares of stock held by ten percent stockholders have been excluded from this calculation as they may be deemed affiliates.

The number of shares outstanding of the registrant’s common stock as of August 26, 2016 was 67,625,724.

DOCUMENTS INCORPORATED BY REFERENCE

Part III incorporates by reference certain information from the Registrant’s definitive proxy statement (the “2016 Proxy Statement”) for the 2016 Annual Meeting of Stockholders.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

TRADEMARKS

The ShoreTel logo, ShoreTel and Brilliantly Simple are trademarks or registered trademarks of ShoreTel, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks, trade names and service marks herein are the property of their respective owners.

AVAILABLE INFORMATION

Our Internet address is www.shoretel.com. On our Internet website, we make publicly available free of charge our annual report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, current reports on Form 8-K, and amendments to those reports filed or furnished pursuant to Section 13(a) or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file such material with, or furnish it to, the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”). The information that is contained on or that can be accessed through our Internet website is not part of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

In addition, the public may read and copy any materials we file with the SEC at the SEC’s Public Reference Room at 100 F Street, N.E., Washington, D.C. 20549. You may obtain information on the operation of the Public Reference Room by calling the SEC at 1-800-SEC-0330. The SEC maintains a website that contains reports, proxy and information statements, and other information regarding issuers that file electronically with the SEC at http://www.sec.gov.

The charters of our Audit Committee, our Compensation Committee and our Corporate Governance and Nominating Committee, as well as our Code of Business Conduct and Ethics, are available on the Investor Relations section of our website under “Investor Relations – Corporate Governance/Leadership.” This information is also available by writing to us at the address on the cover of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

This report contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Forward-looking statements relate to expectations concerning matters that are not historical facts. Words such as “projects,” “believes,” “anticipates,” “plans,” “expects,” “intends” and similar words and expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. While we believe that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, we cannot assure you that those expectations will prove to be correct. Important factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those expectations are disclosed in this report, including, without limitation, in the “Risk Factors” described in Part I, Item 1A. All forward-looking statements are expressly qualified in their entirety by these factors and all related cautionary statements. We do not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements.

PART I

Overview

ShoreTel is a leading provider of brilliantly simple business communication solutions. We focus on the small and medium sized businesses seeking a Unified Communications (“UC”) solution allowing them to communicate anytime, anyplace and through any device that they chose.

We provide this to the market via two solutions: ShoreTel Connect, our UC solution, and Contact Center offering and ShoreTel Summit, our platform for developers and integrators. ShoreTel Connect delivers a fully featured UC solution and applications such as mobility, collaboration, and workgroups. ShoreTel Connect is unique in that it offers three different delivery models including cloud, onsite and hybrid. Connect Cloud provides a hosted voice solution to our customers. Connect OnSite provides our customers the ability to independently own and operate their equipment. Connect Hybrid enables our customers to use both our cloud and onsite offerings while still delivering the same user experience and providing our customers increased choice and flexibility. Summit, our Communications Platform as a Service (“CPaaS”) offering, delivers the option to either deeply integrate communications into any application or workflow or to create a standalone business communications application.

We believe our solutions address changes in the UC market being driven by both technological advances and new workplace trends. We believe some of the current factors affecting the UC market include: the shift to consuming communications from the cloud, addressing an increasingly mobile workforce, the ongoing need for collaboration, a desire for multiple forms of communication and a need to integrate communications into workflows and applications. Our solutions are sold through our extensive network of over 1,200 authorized resellers and value-added distributors throughout the world served either by national distributors or by ShoreTel directly.

We were originally incorporated in California in September 1996 and reincorporated in Delaware in 2007. ShoreTel is based in Sunnyvale, California, and has regional offices in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.

Evolution of Business Communications

We believe ShoreTel is at the forefront of the UC industry that is in transition. We believe customers seek flexibility and choice when making a purchase decision relating to Business Communications. We provide simple to deploy options, via the cloud and the option to purchase the product or a combination of both. We also deliver the ability to deeply integrate into an existing workflow or application, providing a customer the capability to consume or develop, affords us a unique differentiator in the UC market.

We will continue to make investments in order to capture a greater percentage of the market share in the cloud-based solutions market which we believe is continuing to grow as well as to maintain our competitive position in the premise market.

We will continue to make investments to grow our CPaaS capabilities and capture a greater percentage of the developer market seeking to create or integrate communications into workflows or applications.

Our customers enjoy a broad approach to their UC requirements. Whether they are looking to acquire a cloud, premise, hybrid UC solution or to further integrate that into their workflows and applications or whether

they want to develop a specific communications application, we provide a solution to fit. Coupled with ready-made applications and supporting services such as ShoreTel Contact Center, ShoreTel Mobility, and professional services including ShoreTel Global Services and application and development professional services.

Hosted Architecture and Services for Hosted Customers

Our hosted services offer a secure and reliable business communications solution to organizations with minimal capital investment. The heart of the hosted service is our Call Conductor core technology, a ShoreTel designed and developed modular software architecture operating on an industry standard platform, which makes it easy to add capabilities in response to customers’ evolving needs and integrate readily with leading business applications. This technology was specifically designed to meet the unique requirements of the hosted communications market, offering a full portfolio of services to customers, including soft-switch services for ShoreTel IP Telephony, as well as integrated software modules for ShoreTel Unified Communications, ShoreTel Contact Center, ShoreTel Mobility, Business Intelligence Analytics and Reporting. By incorporating a multi-tenant software foundation, multiple customers can be served simultaneously by servers located in data center co-location facilities. Hosted technologies are complemented by a series of service modules that enable billing, diagnostics, system monitoring, Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (“CALEA”) regulatory compliance, emergency call routing and other related operational services. A variety of customer selectable network services are also available, including local and long distance network services, toll-free numbers, number porting, circuits from carriers and other value-added network services.

Hosted Operations

We have a centrally managed platform consisting of data management, monitoring and security, control and billing systems that support our hosted services. This platform consists of a customer quotation portal, customer provisioning, customer access, fraud control, network security, call routing, call monitoring, media processing and normalization, call reliability, call record storage and billing. Our platform monitors our process of digitizing and compressing voice and video into packets and transmitting these packets over data networks around the world. We maintain a call switching platform that manages call control and routes calls.

Customer and Technical Support

We maintain a contact center that provides customer service and technical support to our customers. Customers can access our services directly through our website or receive customer service and technical support through telephone communication, e-mail support and online chat services. Our website also maintains a knowledge base repository that our customers and partners use for education and issue resolution.

Hosted Data Centers

ShoreTel utilizes data centers located in the United States, Europe and Asia which are co-located in service facilities operated by third parties. These data centers include sufficient physical building security, network operations and resiliency services and backup power generation. These operation centers house the application servers and proprietary technologies used to provide services to customers.

The key elements of our hosted applications and services include:

ShoreTel Business Communications for Premise Deployment

We provide a unique modern hardware and software architecture for premise customers, which offers the high availability and reliability needed for mission critical communications. Our premise business communication solutions are comprised of hardware and software components including ShoreTel Voice Switches, ShoreTel Service Appliances, ShoreTel Client and Server Software Applications, such as ShoreTel Director, Small Business Edition 100, and ShoreTel IP Phones. All ShoreTel software applications may also be virtualized, operating on customer-provided general purpose servers.

ShoreTel Business Communications for Hybrid Premise Environments with Integrated Cloud Services Deployment

ShoreTel customers can extend their investments in their business communications solution by incorporating both cloud and premise based approaches via ShoreTel Connect. ShoreTel Connect enables customers to add new sites and add new applications, such as Contact Center, Mobility, Instant Messaging, Presence, Fax and Scribe and will also enable customers to easily add new services that we introduce in the future.

Business Communication Products and Services

ShoreTel provides a diverse set of applications and services for both premise and hosted customers, consisting of ShoreTel IP Telephony, ShoreTel Mobility, ShoreTel Unified Communications, ShoreTel Contact Center, and professional services, including ShoreTel Global Services and application development services.

Enterprise Mobility

ShoreTel Mobility extends the capabilities of a desk phone and Unified Communications capabilities to leading smartphones and tablets, allowing the user to communicate from any location, including office, home or through Wi-Fi hotspots. ShoreTel Mobility enables access to any cellular or Wi-Fi network, simply and cost effectively. ShoreTel Mobility solutions for smartphone users consist of a ShoreTel appliance coupled with system management and end-user software. ShoreTel Mobility is available as part of our premise solution and also offered as a hosted service.

Unified Communications

ShoreTel Unified Communications enable the integration of IP telephony solutions with instant messaging, mobility, presence, desktop collaboration and video.

Contact Center

Contact Center enables organizations to route incoming contacts to the most appropriate agent in a multisite contact center, regardless of location. ShoreTel Connect Contact Center includes a range of options including agent phones, switching infrastructure, end-user interfaces, and platform software for both premise-based and cloud-based customers. The solution features capabilities including call handling, self-service, multi-media, and reporting. Contact Center applications provide a range of features to satisfy the needs of all-sized organizations, from basic call center capabilities to sophisticated, distributed multimedia contact centers.

ShoreTel Global Services

We complement our cloud, onsite and hybrid solution with a broad range of support services to help us maintain and expand our relationships with our enterprise customers and channel partners. Our product support contracts provide us with recurring revenue. Typically, our resellers provide many of these services, with ShoreTel providing manufacturer and escalation support as needed or, if requested by the enterprise customer or reseller, we can provide these services directly.

ShoreTel Global Services provides professional services, system design and installation, training and technical support including:

Application Development Services

ShoreTel offers custom application development and integration services for businesses with unique communication requirements. We offer businesses the option to enhance their communications solution by enabling the integration of business applications including customer relationship management (“CRM”) solutions such as Salesforce.com, Zendesk, Desk.com, NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics, as well routing, interactive voice response and reporting solutions that automate business workflows and enhance operational oversight.

Customers and partners can create integrated applications using the open application interface of the system available for developers through the ShoreTel TechConnect.

Customers

As of June 30, 2016, our solutions have been installed by approximately 40,000 organizations in over 50 countries. We serve a wide range of vertical markets, including professional services, financial services, government, education, health care, sports and entertainment, manufacturing, non-profit organizations and technology industries.

Focus on Customer Satisfaction

We believe that maintaining the highest possible levels of customer satisfaction is critical to our ability to retain existing and gain new customers. We believe that satisfied customers will purchase more of our products and serve as advocates for our solutions, and we work closely with them and our channel partners as customers deploy and use our solutions. We conduct formal customer reviews that involve our internal staff and third-party technical personnel to ensure smooth implementations and to resolve any issues that may arise. We follow up with ongoing check-ins to ensure customers are satisfied with their solution, surveying them regarding various aspects of the experience with ShoreTel. We use industry-recognized Net Promoter Score^SM customer loyalty metrics to help ensure that we are meeting our customers’ expectations. Through this process, we gain valuable insights into the existing and future requirements of our customers’ activities and this helps us develop product enhancements that address the evolving requirements of customers.

Additionally, to promote high-quality support throughout our services organization, we measure performance indicators of our services organization, including call answer times, call abandon rates, customer satisfaction with technical support, time to issue resolution, first contact resolution, call interaction quality, as well as customer satisfaction with system implementation, training services and technical support, and use the results to direct the management of our services organization.

We also monitor our customers’ satisfaction with our channel partners by surveying our customers after the system is installed. We actively encourage our channel partners to maintain and improve our customers’ levels of satisfaction. We also monitor our channel partners’ satisfaction with ShoreTel, as their satisfaction with and advocacy of ShoreTel is also very important to our success.

ShoreTel delivers the lowest cost of operations for IP Telephony and Unified Communications and Collaboration for premises and cloud according to Nemertes’ 2016 research. ShoreTel has the greatest costs savings and lowest overall cost over a five-year period, when compared to the industry average and various providers for both premises and cloud. Providers included 8x8, Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft, Mitel, NEC and Vonage¹.

Sales and Marketing

We sell our premise products, support and services primarily through an extensive network of channel partners that include value-added resellers, service providers, direct market resellers and value-added distributors. Our hosted services are sold through channel partners and our direct sales force. As of June 30, 2016, we had over 1,200 channel partners in our network. These channel partners range in size from single-site, regional firms with specialized products and services to multi-national firms that provide a full range of IT products and services. They also include top U.S. telecommunication carriers: AT&T and CenturyLink. Our channel partners market and sell our products into both the small-to-medium and mid-enterprise markets. Our channel partners in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia may offer both premise and cloud solutions to their customers.

We maintain a sales organization that manages the business relationship between ShoreTel and our partner network, recruiting, training and enabling the partners to market, sell and support ShoreTel solutions. In addition, we also have a ‘Client Sales’ team of sales personnel to assist our channel partners in selling to and providing support for customer accounts.

We believe our channel partner network allows us to effectively sell our solutions without having to dedicate the resources required to build large in-house sales and service capabilities. We continue to work with existing channel partners to broaden their sales of our solutions as well as to recruit new channel partners with a focus on increasing market coverage.

Our internal marketing team focuses on increasing our “Brilliantly Simple” brand awareness, communicating product advantages and generating qualified leads for our sales force and channel partners. In addition to providing marketing materials, we communicate product and service offerings through e-mail and online and direct mail campaigns, print and web-based advertising, a customer reference program, press releases, social media, video and web-based demonstrations.

Research and Development

We believe that our ability to enhance our current products and services, develop and introduce new products and services on a timely basis, maintain technological competitiveness and meet customer requirements is essential to our success. To this end, we have assembled a team of engineers with expertise in collaboration and UC technology, such as voice, messaging, conferencing, video, mobility, file sharing, contact center and workspaces. We have invested significant time and financial resources into the development of our architecture, including ShoreTel Connect, ShoreTel Summit, ShoreTel Connect Contact Center and ShoreTel Connect appliances which are available for both hosted and onsite customers. We intend to continue to expand our service and product offerings, improve the features available on our services and products and integrate our solutions with third-party enterprise applications. Research and development expenses were $60.5 million, $53.4 million and $49.8 million in fiscal years 2016, 2015 and 2014, respectively.

Manufacturing and Suppliers

We outsource the manufacturing of our hardware products. This outsourcing allows us to:

Currently, we have arrangements for the production of our switches and mobility routers with contract manufacturers in the United States and for the production of our phones with a contract manufacturer with multiple locations including the United States and China. We also rely on a sole or limited number of suppliers for several key components utilized in the assembly of our products.

We regularly provide forecasts for orders, and we order products from our contract manufacturers based on our projected sales levels, which is in advance of receiving customer orders. However, customers may generally cancel or reschedule orders without penalty, and delivery schedules requested by customers for these orders frequently vary based upon each customer’s particular needs.

For more information on risks related to products and components, see “Risks Related to Our Business and Industry - Our business may be harmed if our contract manufacturers are not able to provide us with adequate supplies” and “Risks Related to Our Business and Industry - Our products incorporate some sole sourced components and the inability of these sole source suppliers to provide adequate supplies of these components may prevent us from selling our products for a significant period of time or limit our ability to deliver sufficient amounts of our products.”

We typically fulfill product orders out of our California, New York, United Kingdom, Australia or Singapore warehouses.

Financial Information about Geographic Areas

For financial information about geographic areas, refer to Note 14 to the Consolidated Financial Statements in Item 8 of this report.

Competition

The market for business communication solutions is quickly evolving, highly competitive and subject to rapid technological change. As a result of the convergence of voice, video, messaging, mobility and data

networking technologies that characterize IP enterprise Unified Communications solutions, we compete against vendors of hosted solutions and premise-based solutions, some of which have solutions in both markets and CPaaS providers.

In addition, because the market for our products is subject to rapid technological change as the market evolves, we may face competition in the future from companies that do not currently compete in the enterprise unified communications market, including companies that currently compete in other sectors of the information technology, communications and software industries or communications companies that serve consumer rather than enterprise customers.

We may also face increased competition from Internet portal-focused providers who extend their portfolio to include business communications solutions, such as Amazon, Skype/Microsoft, Google and Yahoo.

In particular, as more enterprises converge their voice and data networks, the business information technology and communication applications deployed on converged networks become more integrated. We may face increased competition from current leaders in information technology infrastructure, information technology, personal and business applications and the software that connects the network infrastructure to those applications.

We could also face competition from new market entrants, whether from new ventures or from established companies moving into the market. Competition from these other potential market entrants may take many forms, including offering products and applications similar to those we offer as part of a larger, bundled offering or as a cloud-based or hosted services offering. In addition, technological developments and consolidation within the communications industry result in frequent changes to our group of competitors.

Many of our current and potential competitors are substantially larger than we are and have higher brand familiarity with buyers, and significantly greater financial, sales, marketing, distribution, technical, manufacturing and other resources. We believe that we currently compete favorably with regard to the principal competitive factors applicable to our products and services, which include price, portfolio, feature set, reliability, scalability, usability, simplicity, total cost of ownership, customer satisfaction and service.

For more information concerning competition, please see “Risk Factors - Risks Related To Our Business and Industry – “The market in which we operate is intensely competitive, and many of our competitors are larger, more established and better capitalized than we are” and – “As voice, video, messaging and data networks converge, we are likely to face increased competition from companies in the information technology, personal and business applications and software industries.”

Regulatory

Voice over IP (“VoIP”) communication services, like ours, have been subject to less regulation at the state and federal levels than traditional telecommunications services. Providers of traditional telecommunications services are subject to the highest degree of regulation, while providers of information services are largely exempt from most federal and state regulations governing traditional common carriers. The Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) has subjected VoIP service providers to a smaller subset of regulations that apply to traditional telecommunications service providers and have not yet classified VoIP services as either telecommunications or information. However, the FCC reviews the status of VoIP service providers and the services they provide and may increase regulations that apply to hosted services.

The effect of any future laws, regulations and orders on the hosted offering is unknown at this time. But as a general matter, increased regulation and the imposition of additional funding obligations increases service costs that may or may not be recoverable from our customers. This increased regulation could result in making our services less competitive with traditional telecommunications services if we increase our retail prices or decreasing our profit margins if we attempt to absorb such costs.

Intellectual Property

A factor of our success as a company is our ability to protect our core technology and intellectual property. To accomplish this, we rely on a combination of intellectual property rights, including patents, trade secrets, copyrights and trademarks, as well as customary contractual protections.

As of June 30, 2016, we had 136 patents issued in the United States, and had 41 patent applications in the United States. Our patents have been both internally developed and externally acquired. Our patents have a range of expiration dates. The earliest patent to expire will do so in 2016, and the last to expire will do so in 2035.

The steps we have taken to protect our intellectual property rights may not be adequate. Third parties may infringe or misappropriate our intellectual property rights and may challenge our issued patents. In addition, other parties may independently develop similar or competing technologies designed around any patents that are or may be issued to us. We intend to enforce our intellectual property rights vigorously, and from time to time, we may initiate claims against third parties that we believe are infringing on our intellectual property rights if we are unable to resolve matters satisfactorily through negotiation. If we fail to protect our proprietary rights adequately, our competitors could offer similar products, potentially significantly harming our competitive position and decreasing our revenue.

Employees

As of June 30, 2016, we had 1,194 employees in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia, of which 395 were in sales and marketing, 391 were in research and development, 264 were in global support and services, and 144 were in general and administrative functions. None of our employees are represented by labor unions and we consider current employee relations to be good.

Executive Officers

The following table sets forth information about our executive officers as of September 1, 2016:

Don Joos has served as our President and Chief Executive Officer and a Director since August 2013. Mr. Joos served as our Senior Vice President of Business Operations from July 2012 to August 2013. Mr. Joos joined ShoreTel in April 2011 as our Vice President of Global Services. Prior to joining ShoreTel, from December 2001 to April 2011, Mr. Joos served in various senior management roles, including Vice President Channel Transformation, at Avaya, Inc., a provider of business communications and collaboration systems. Prior to this, Mr. Joos also held service and operational roles at SiteStuff, Inc., Williams Communication Solutions, LLC, Nortel Communication Solutions and Marshalls Inc. Mr. Joos holds a B.S. in Sports Management from Springfield College in Massachusetts.

Michael E. Healy has served as our Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer since May 2007. From February 2004 to May 2007, he served as Chief Financial Officer and Senior Vice President of Finance of Genesis Microchip Inc., a supplier of display image processors. From November 2002 to February 2004, Mr. Healy served as Chief Financial Officer of Jamcracker, Inc., a software and application service provider. From September 1997 to June 2002, Mr. Healy held various senior level finance positions at Exodus Communications, Inc., an Internet infrastructure outsourcing services provider, including as Senior Vice President

of Finance prior to February 2002, and as its Chief Financial Officer and Corporate Treasurer from February 2002 to June 2002. From 1987 to 1997, Mr. Healy held various financial management positions at Apple Computer, Inc., and was an auditor at Deloitte & Touche LLP from 1983 to 1987. Mr. Healy holds a B.S. in Accounting from Santa Clara University and is a Certified Public Accountant (Inactive). Mr. Healy is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and the California Society of Certified Public Accountant.

Eugenia Corrales has served as our Senior Vice President of Product since July 2015. From July 2013 to July 2015, Ms. Corrales served as Vice President and General Manager of the Computing Systems Group at Cisco Systems, Inc., a provider of Internet protocol based networking and other products related to the communications and information technology. From September 2012 to July 2013, Ms. Corrales was an independent consultant working with multiple networking and renewable energy startup companies. From June 2010 to September 2012, Ms. Corrales served as Chief Executive Officer and Executive Vice President of Engineering and Operations at Nanosolar, a developer of solar power technology. From June 2006 to June 2010, Ms. Corrales served as Chief Executive Officer at Sunmodular, a startup focusing on providing efficiencies to solar panel technology. Ms. Corrales holds a B.A. in Physics from Grinnell College and a M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University.

David Petts has served as our Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Customer Success since July 2012. From June 2005 to July 2012, Mr. Petts served in several sales leadership roles at Nokia Corporation, a mobile communications company. Prior to then, Mr. Petts held a number of executive management roles, both in the United States and the United Kingdom, with Hewlett Packard Company and Compaq Computer Corporation, providers of products, technologies, software, services and solutions. Mr. Petts holds a B.S. in Economics and Quantitative Studies from Queen Mary College, London University.

Bharath Oruganti has served as our Senior Vice President of Worldwide Business Operations since February 2014. Mr. Oruganti also served as our Vice President of Global Services from September 2012 to January 2014. Mr. Oruganti joined ShoreTel in October 2011 serving in the position of Senior Director of Technical Services. From February 2011 to October 2011, Mr. Oruganti served as President and Chief Operating Officer at Encore Media Metrics, LLC, a digital media startup focused on advanced insights and analytics. From September 2006 to February 2011, Mr. Oruganti served as Senior Manager in the Strategy and Operations practice at Deloitte Consulting LLP. Prior to then, Mr. Oruganti served in various positions, including Senior Manager of Global Customer Support, at Cadence Design Systems, Inc., a provider of semiconductor design software. Mr. Oruganti holds a B. Tech in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Andhra University, a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from University of Kentucky and an M.B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin.

Allen Seto has served as our Vice President and General Counsel since March 2013. Mr. Seto joined ShoreTel in June 2012 serving as Associate General Counsel. From January 2011 to May 2012, Mr. Seto served as Associate General Counsel at Taleo Corporation., a global provider of on-demand talent management software solutions. From February 2008 to January 2011, Mr. Seto served as Senior Corporate Counsel in the Corporate, Securities & Acquisitions group at Oracle Corporation. From July 2005 to January 2008, Mr. Seto served as Corporate Counsel at SYNNEX Corporation, a business process services company servicing resellers, retailers and original equipment manufacturers. Prior to then, Mr. Seto was in private practice at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP. Mr. Seto holds a J.D. from University of California, Los Angeles School of Law and a B.A. in Economics and a B.A. in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley.

Risks Related to Our Business and Industry

We may not be able to achieve our strategic initiatives and grow our business as anticipated.

We cannot assure you that we will be successful over the long term in transitioning internal and external views of our Company to a service delivery model and growing our business as anticipated. Our strategic initiatives have required us to devote significant financial and operational assets to these activities. However, at the same time, a growing focus on hosted revenues involves different types of revenue recognition and has different cost structures than our traditional product revenues. Our success depends on our ability to appropriately manage our expenses as we invest in these initiatives, enter into beneficial channel relationships, develop new products and service offerings and successfully execute our marketing and sales strategies. If we are not able to execute on this strategy successfully or if our investments in these activities do not yield significant returns, our business may not grow as we anticipated, we could devote significant financial and other resources to developing products and services that never reach commercial success, which could adversely affect our operating results. In addition, if the UC industry transitions in a way we did not anticipate, we may not be able to shift our strategies and products rapidly enough to respond to such changes and we may not receive any return from such investments. Our competitors may also be developing new products to address transitions in the UC industry. If we are unable to successfully establish our new products and services, if our competitors’ products and services are better received, or if we fail to execute our strategies, our financial condition or results of operations could be negatively impacted and our ability to grow our business may be impacted.

There can be no assurance that our exploration of strategic alternatives will result in any transaction being consummated, and speculation and uncertainty regarding the outcome of our exploration of strategic alternatives may adversely impact our business.

We are exploring strategic alternatives, including a sale and other strategic proposals and our Board of Directors has formed a special Strategic Advisory Committee of independent directors to lead this process. There can be no assurance that any transaction will be consummated, and the process of exploring strategic alternatives will involve the dedication of significant resources and the incurrence of significant costs and expenses. In addition, speculation and uncertainty regarding our exploration of strategic alternatives may cause or result in:

If we are unable to mitigate these or other potential risks related to the uncertainty caused by our exploration of strategic alternatives, it may disrupt our business or adversely impact our revenue, operating results, and financial condition.

The market in which we operate is intensely competitive, and many of our competitors are larger, more established and better capitalized than we are.

The industry for Unified Communications is extremely competitive. Our competitors include 8x8, Avaya, Broadsoft, Cisco, Microsoft, Mitel, RingCentral and Vonage. In addition, many of our hosted customers are not subject to long-term contractual commitments to purchase our services and can terminate our service and switch to competitors' offerings on relatively short notice.

Many of our competitors are substantially larger and have greater financial, technical, research and development, sales and marketing, manufacturing, distribution and other resources. We could also face competition from new entrants, whether from new ventures or from established companies moving in to the industry. Some competitors have advantages over us, including:

Given their capital resources, many of these competitors are in a better position to withstand any significant reduction in capital spending by enterprise customers on telecommunications equipment and are not as susceptible to downturns in a particular industry. This risk is enhanced because we focus our business primarily on the enterprise IP telecommunications industry.

Because some of our competitors have greater financial strength than we do and are able to offer a more diversified bundle of products and services, they have offered and in the future may offer telecommunications products at lower prices than we do. In order to remain competitive from a cost perspective, we have in the past reduced the prices of our products, and we may be required to do so in the future, in order to gain enterprise customers. Price reductions could have a negative effect on our gross margins.

Our competitors may also be able to devote more resources to developing new or enhanced products, including products that may be based on new technologies or standards. If our competitors’ products become more accepted than our products, our competitive position will be impaired and we may not be able to increase our revenue or may experience decreased gross margins. If any of our competitors’ products or technologies become the industry standard, if they are successful in bringing their products to market earlier, or if their products are more technologically capable than ours, then our sales could be materially adversely affected. We may not be able to maintain or improve our competitive position against our current or future competitors, and our failure to do so could materially and adversely affect our business.

As voice, video, messaging and data networks converge, we are likely to face increased competition from companies in the information technology, personal and business applications and software industries.

The convergence of voice, video, messaging and data networks and their wider deployment by enterprises has led information technology and communication applications deployed on converged networks to become more integrated. This integration has created an opportunity for the leaders in information technology, personal and business applications and the software that connects the network infrastructure to those applications, to enter the telecommunications industry and offer products that compete with our systems, commonly referred to as Unified Communications. Competition from these potential entrants may take many forms, and they may offer products and services similar to those we offer.

If the solutions offered by new competitors achieve substantial market penetration, or if we cannot integrate our products with such solutions, we may not be able to maintain or improve our market position, and our failure to do so could materially and adversely affect our business and results of operations.

If we fail to manage our growth effectively, our business could be harmed.

We plan to further expand our operations to support the growth of our business. We will need to increase our spending in order to fund this development. This growth may place a significant strain on our management, administrative, operational and financial infrastructure. Our success will depend upon our ability to manage this

growth effectively. If we do not increase our revenues commensurate to our increased spending, we may not be profitable. To manage the expected growth of our operations and personnel, we will need to continue to improve our operational, financial and management controls and our reporting systems and procedures. Failure to effectively manage growth could result in difficulty in filling enterprise customer orders, declines in product quality or customer satisfaction, increases in costs, production and distribution difficulties, and any of these difficulties could adversely impact our business performance and results of operations.

The gross margins on our products and offerings may decrease due to competitive pressures or otherwise, which could negatively impact our profitability.

It is possible that the gross margins on our products and/or services will decrease in the future in response to competitive pricing pressures, including the bundling of more offerings included in a base price, new product introductions by us or our competitors, changes in the costs of components or telecommunications costs, manufacturing issues, the shift in our channel distribution model towards more value-added distributors, royalties we need to pay to use certain intellectual property, growth of our international business, or other factors. The margins on our hosted telephony service are also impacted by the fact that we also sell the broadband connection, which is typically a lower-margin business. In addition, until we achieve a sufficient base of cloud-based customers, the gross margins on our cloud services will tend to be lower. If we experience decreased gross margins and we are unable to respond in a timely manner by introducing and selling new, higher-margin products and services successfully and continually reducing our product and hosting costs, our gross margins may decline, which will harm our business and results of operations.

If we fail to respond to technological changes and evolving industry standards, our products and services could become obsolete or less competitive in the future.

Our industry is highly competitive and characterized by rapidly changing technologies and standards. Accordingly, our operating results depend upon, among other things, our ability to develop and introduce new products and services and our ability to reduce production costs of existing products and costs of providing our hosted services. Our long-term success will depend on our ability to stay ahead of these changes and avoid obsolescence of our products and services.

In addition, as industry standards evolve, it is possible that one standard becomes predominant in the market. This could facilitate the entry into the market for competing products and services, which could result in significant pricing pressure. Additionally, if one standard becomes predominant and we adopt that standard, enterprises may be able to create a unified, integrated system by using phones, switches, servers, applications, or other telecommunications products produced by different companies. Therefore, we may be unable to sell complete systems to enterprise customers because the enterprise customers elect to purchase portions of their telecommunications systems from our competitors.

We have made acquisitions in the past and expect to acquire other companies or technologies, which could divert our management's attention, result in additional dilution to our stockholders, increase expenses, and otherwise disrupt our operations and harm our operating results.

We have in the past and may in the future acquire or invest in other businesses, products or technologies. Acquisitions may divert the attention of management and cause us to incur various expenses in identifying, investigating and pursuing suitable acquisitions, whether or not they are consummated. We cannot assure you that we will realize the anticipated benefits of these acquisitions.

There are inherent risks in integrating and managing acquisitions. We may not be able to integrate the acquired personnel, operations, product lines and technologies successfully, or effectively manage the combined business following an acquisition. We may also incur indebtedness in connection with any future acquisitions. We also may not achieve the anticipated benefits from the acquired business due to a number of factors, including:

In addition, a significant portion of the purchase price of the other companies that we acquire may be allocated to goodwill and other indefinite lived intangible assets, which must be assessed for impairment. In the future, if our acquisitions do not yield expected returns, we may be required to take charges to our operating results based on this impairment assessment process which could harm our results of operations. Also, any contingent consideration related to the acquisitions may be remeasured to fair value at each reporting period, with any changes in the value recorded as income or expense, which could adversely affect our operating results in a particular period.

Acquisitions could also result in dilutive issuances of equity securities or the incurrence of debt, which could adversely affect our operating results. In addition, if an acquired business fails to meet our expectations, our operating results, business and financial condition may suffer.

We rely on third-party resellers and distributors to sell our products and services, and disruptions to, or our failure to develop and manage our distribution channels could adversely affect our business.

A significant portion of our hosted and product, support and services revenue is generated through indirect channel sales. These indirect sales channels include third-party resellers and distributors that market and sell other products and services to customers. We expect indirect channel sales will continue to generate a significant portion of our revenue in the future. Therefore, our success is highly dependent upon establishing and maintaining successful relationships with third-party resellers and distributors, and the financial health of these resellers and distributors.

Recruiting, launching and retaining qualified channel partners and training them in our products and services requires significant time and resources. In order to develop and expand our distribution channel, we must continue to recruit larger and more productive channel partners. We must also scale and improve our processes and procedures that support our channel, including investment in personnel, systems and training, and those processes and procedures may become increasingly complex and difficult to manage.

We have no long-term contracts with any of our channel partners, and our contracts with these channel partners do not prohibit them from offering products or services that compete with ours. Our competitors may be effective in providing incentives to existing and potential channel partners to favor their products or to prevent or reduce sales of our products. Our channel partners may choose not to offer our products or services exclusively or at all. Our failure to establish and maintain successful relationships with channel partners would likely materially adversely affect our business, operating results and financial condition.

In addition, we rely on these entities to provide many of the installation, implementation and support services for our products. Accordingly, our success depends in large part on the effective performance of these channel partners. If a partner’s performance is ineffective, it may reflect poorly upon ShoreTel or negatively impact our business. By relying on channel partners, we may in some cases have little or no contact with the ultimate users of our products, thereby making it more difficult for us to establish brand awareness, ensure proper delivery and installation of our products, service ongoing enterprise customer requirements and respond to evolving enterprise customer needs. Additionally, some of our channel partners are smaller companies that may not have the same financial resources as other of our larger channel partners, which exposes us to collections risks.

Our future success depends on our ability to attract, integrate and retain sales, technical and key personnel, and our failure to do so could harm our ability to grow our business.

Our company strategy and future success will depend, to a significant extent, on our ability to attract, integrate and retain our sales, technical and key personnel, namely our management and executive team and experienced sales and engineering personnel. We may experience difficulty assimilating our newly hired personnel, which may adversely affect our business. Competition for skilled personnel is intense, particularly in many of the cities in which we operate. In addition, we must retain and motivate high quality personnel, and we must also attract and assimilate other highly qualified employees. Competition for qualified management, sales, technical and other personnel can be intense, and we may not be successful in attracting and retaining such personnel. In addition, even if we succeed in hiring additional sales personnel, it may take some period of time before they become productive compounding any harm in the growth of our business from our inability to retain such sales personnel. Competitors have in the past and may in the future attempt to recruit our employees, and our management and key employees are not bound by agreements that could prevent them from terminating their employment at any time. If we fail to attract, integrate and retain key employees, our ability to manage and grow our business could be harmed, particularly if the departure of any executive or key employee results in a business interruption, or if we are not successful in preserving material knowledge of our departing employees.

The impact of the current economic climate and possible adverse credit markets may impact customer demand for our products and services.

Our business depends on the overall demand for information technology. Many of our existing and target customers are in the small and medium business sector. Our target customers may be more likely to be significantly affected by economic downturns than larger, more established businesses. Additionally, these customers often have limited discretionary funds which they may choose to spend on items other than our products and services. The purchase of our premise solution involves significant upfront expenditures. If credit is not available to them, it may be difficult or impossible for our resellers and/or end customers to purchase our premise products. If small and medium businesses experience economic hardship, this could negatively affect the overall demand for our products and services, delay and lengthen sales cycles and lead to slower growth or even a decline in our revenue.

A higher rate of customer terminations associated with our hosted services would negatively affect our business by reducing our revenue or requiring us to spend more money to grow our customer base.

Our churn rate, as defined in Item 7, for our hosted services could increase in the future if customers are not satisfied with our service. Other factors, including increased competition from other VoIP providers, alternative technologies, and adverse business conditions also influence our churn rate.

Because of churn, we have to acquire new customers on an ongoing basis or sell additional services to existing customers to maintain our existing level of customers and revenues. As a result, marketing expenditures are an ongoing requirement of our business. If our churn rate increases, we will have to acquire even more new customers in order to maintain our existing revenues. We incur significant costs to acquire new customers, and those costs are an important factor in determining our net profitability. Therefore, if we are unsuccessful in retaining customers or are required to spend significant amounts to acquire new customers beyond those budgeted, our revenue could decrease and our net income could decrease.

Success of our hosted services is dependent on the general growth and public acceptance of hosted communications.

Our future success depends on our ability to significantly increase revenues generated from our hosted services. Because the use of a hosted solution requires that the user be a subscriber of a broadband Internet service, slow or limited adoption of broadband Internet service could adversely affect the growth of our subscriber base and revenues.

In addition, VoIP networks must improve quality of service for real-time communications, managing effects such as packet jitter, packet loss, and unreliable bandwidth, so that toll-quality service can be consistently provided. VoIP telephony equipment and services must achieve a similar level of reliability that users of the PSTN have come to expect from their telephone service, and the cost and feature benefits of VoIP must be sufficient to cause customers to switch away from traditional telephony service providers. Substantial, ongoing

interaction with our customers in order to train and assist them with the deployment and use of our solutions over these networks is sometimes required. If any or all of these factors fail to occur, our business may be affected adversely.

Our business may be harmed if our contract manufacturers are not able to provide us with adequate supplies.

We outsource the manufacturing of our telephones and switches. Our reliance on contract manufacturers involves a number of potential risks, including the absence of adequate capacity, financial viability, ownership of certain elements of electronic designs, the ongoing viability of those contract manufacturers, and reduced control over delivery schedules.

We depend on our contract manufacturers to finance the production of goods ordered and to maintain adequate manufacturing capacity. Global economic conditions could adversely impact the financial condition of our contract manufacturers and their suppliers that could impact our contract manufacturer’s ability to procure components or otherwise manufacture our products. We may be unable to procure timely delivery of acceptable products to our enterprise customers or incur substantially higher product costs if we move production to other contract manufacturers.

Our contract manufacturers may not have sufficient capacity to enable them to meet the demand for our products. Our contract manufacturers could have manufacturing engagements with companies that are much larger than we are and whose production needs are much greater than ours. As a result, our contract manufacturers may choose to reallocate resources to the production of products other than ours if capacity is limited.

In addition, our contract manufacturers do not have any written contractual obligation to accept any purchase order that we submit for the manufacture of any of our products nor do we have any assurance that our contract manufacturers will agree to manufacture and supply any or all of our requirements for our products. Furthermore, our contract manufacturers may unilaterally terminate their relationship with us or seek to increase the prices they charge us upon written notice subject to the terms of our agreement. As a result, we are not assured that our current manufacturers will continue to provide us with an uninterrupted supply of products at an acceptable price in the future.

Even if our contract manufacturers accept and fulfill our orders, it is possible that the products may not meet our specifications. Because we do not control the final assembly and quality assurance of our products, there is a possibility that these products may contain defects or otherwise not meet our quality standards, which could result in warranty claims against us that could adversely affect our operating results and future sales.

If our contract manufacturers are unable or unwilling to continue manufacturing our products in required volumes and to meet our quality specifications, or if they significantly increase their prices, whether caused by uncertain global economic conditions, tightening of the credit markets, their weak financial condition or otherwise, we will have to procure components on their behalf in the short term and identify one or more acceptable alternative contract manufacturers. The process of identifying and qualifying a new contract manufacturer can be time consuming, and we may not be able to substitute suitable alternative contract manufacturers in a timely manner or at acceptable prices. Additionally, transitioning to new contract manufacturers may cause delays in supply if the new contract manufacturers have difficulty manufacturing products to our specifications or quality standards and may result in unexpected costs to our business.

Any disruption in the supply of products from our contract manufacturers may harm our business and could result in a loss of sales, an increase in lead times on inventory orders and an increase in production costs resulting in lower gross product margins, which could adversely affect our business and results of operations.

If the emerging market for enterprise IP and hosted telecommunications systems does not continue to grow and if we do not increase our market share, our future business could be harmed.

The market for Unified Communications is evolving rapidly and is characterized by an increasing number of market entrants. As is typical of a rapidly evolving industry, the demand for and market acceptance of, enterprise IP and hosted telecommunications systems products and services are uncertain. Some analysts have estimated that revenue in the Worldwide Enterprise IP Telephony industry has declined and will continue to decline. We cannot assure you that enterprise telecommunications systems that operate on IP networks will become

widespread. In particular, enterprises that have already invested substantial resources in other means of communicating information may be reluctant or slow to implement an IP telecommunications system that can require significant initial capital expenditures. If the demand for enterprise IP and hosted telecommunications systems fails to develop or develops more slowly than we anticipate, our products and services could fail to achieve market acceptance, which in turn could significantly harm our business.

Moreover, as IP-based data communications and telecommunications usage grow, the infrastructure used to support these services, whether public or private, may not be able to support the demands placed on them and their performance or reliability may decline.

Our sales cycle can be lengthy and unpredictable, which makes it difficult to forecast the amount of our sales and operating expenses in any particular period.

The sales cycle for our products and services typically ranges from six to twelve months, or longer. As a result, we may have limited ability to forecast whether or in which period a sale will occur. The success of our sales process is subject to many factors, some of which we have little or no control over, including:

We may expend substantial time, effort and money educating our current and prospective enterprise customers as to the value of, and benefits delivered by, our products and services and ultimately fail to produce a sale. If we are unsuccessful in closing sales after expending significant resources, our operating results will be adversely affected. Furthermore, if sales forecasted for a particular period do not occur in such period, our operating results for that period could be substantially lower than anticipated and the market price of our common stock could decline.

Our products incorporate some sole sourced components and the inability of these sole source suppliers to provide adequate supplies of these components may prevent us from selling our products for a significant period of time or limit our ability to deliver sufficient amounts of our products.

We rely on sole or limited numbers of suppliers for several key components utilized in the assembly of our products. We do not have supply agreements with our sole source suppliers, and the components for our products are typically procured by our contract manufacturers. If we lose access to these components we may not be able to sell our products for a significant period of time, and we could incur significant costs to redesign our products or to qualify alternative suppliers.

In addition, any increase in the price of these components could reduce our gross margin and adversely impact our profitability. We may not be able to obtain a sufficient quantity of these components to meet the demands of enterprise customers in a timely manner or prices of these components may increase. In addition, problems with respect to yield and quality of these components and timeliness of deliveries could occur. These delays could also materially and adversely affect our operating results.

If we fail to offer high quality customer support and services, our business could suffer.

Our customers depend on our support organization and/or our channel partners to resolve any issues relating to our products and services. A high level of customer support and services is important for the successful marketing and sale of our products and services. If we or our channel partners do not help our customers quickly resolve post-deployment issues and provide effective ongoing support, our ability to sell our products and services to existing customers could suffer and our reputation with potential customers could be harmed. Many of our channel partners offer primary support for the products they sell to customers. If the channel partners fail to provide timely and effective services, our business could be harmed. As we expand our sales, we will be required to hire and train additional support personnel. In addition, as we expand our operations internationally,

our support organization will face additional challenges including those associated with delivering support, training and documentation in languages other than English. If we fail to maintain high quality customer support or to grow our support organization to match any future sales growth, our business may suffer.

If we fail to accurately forecast demand for our hardware products, we may have excess or insufficient inventory, which may increase our operating costs, decrease our revenues and harm our business.

We generate forecasts of future demand for our hardware products several months prior to the scheduled delivery to our prospective customers and typically prior to receiving a purchase order from our customers. We therefore make significant investments before our resellers or customers place orders to purchase our products and before we know if corresponding shipment forecasts will be changed. Our resellers and customers are not contractually bound by the forecasts they provide us until they sign a purchase order, and the orders we ultimately receive often differ from original forecasts. If we underestimate demand for our hardware products, we will have inadequate inventory, which could result in delays in shipments, loss of orders and reduced revenues. This is exacerbated by the fact that lead times for materials and components that we need can vary significantly and depend on factors such as the specific supplier, contract terms and demand for each component at a given time. On the other hand, if we overestimate demand for our products and increase our inventory in anticipation of customer orders that do not materialize, we will have excess inventory and we will face a risk of significant inventory write-downs. Our failure to forecast demand accurately on a timely basis could result in a decrease in our revenues and gross margins.

If we fail to develop and introduce new products, services and features in a timely manner, or if we fail to manage product transitions, we could experience decreased revenue or decreased selling prices in the future.

Due to the complexity of the type of products we produce, there are significant technical risks that may affect our ability to introduce new products and features successfully. In addition, we must commit significant resources to developing new products, services and features before knowing whether our investments will result in products and services that are accepted by the market. The success of new products and services depends on many factors, including the ability of our products and services to compete with the offerings from our competitors, cost, and reliability.

If we are unable to develop and introduce new products and services in a timely manner or in response to changing market conditions or enterprise customer requirements, or if these products and services do not achieve market acceptance, our operating results could be materially and adversely affected.

Introductions by us in future periods may also reduce demand for, or cause price declines with respect to, our existing products and services. As new or enhanced products and services are introduced, we must successfully manage the transition from older products, avoid excessive levels of older product inventories and ensure that sufficient supplies of new products can be delivered to meet enterprise customer demand. Our failure to do so could adversely affect our revenue, gross margins and other operating results.

Our products and services are highly complex and may contain undetected software or hardware errors, which could harm our reputation and future sales.

Because our customers rely on our products and services for critical aspects of their business, any failure to provide high quality and reliable products and services, whether caused by our own failure, failures by our contract manufacturer or suppliers or outages in our data centers, could damage our reputation and reduce demand for our products and services. Software products may contain defects, and as such our products have in the past contained, and may in the future contain, undetected errors or defects. Some errors may only be discovered after a product has been installed or a service has been introduced and used by customers. Any errors or defects discovered after commercial release could result in loss of revenue, loss of customers and increased service and warranty costs, any of which could adversely affect our business. In addition, we could face claims for product liability, tort or breach of warranty. Our purchase orders contain provisions relating to warranty disclaimers and liability limitations, which may not be upheld. Defending a lawsuit, regardless of its merit, is costly and may divert management’s attention and adversely affect the market’s perception of us and our products. In addition, if our business liability insurance coverage proves inadequate or future coverage is unavailable on acceptable terms or at all, our business, operating results and financial condition could be adversely affected.

As we expand our international operations, we could be exposed to significant risks.

The future success of our business will depend, in part, on our ability to expand our operations and customer base successfully worldwide. Operating in international markets requires significant resources and management attention and will subject us to regulatory, economic and political risks that are different from those in the United States. Our international expansion efforts may not be successful. In addition, we will face risks in doing business internationally that could adversely affect our business, including:

Our failure to manage any of these risks successfully could harm our future international operations and our overall business.

The agreement governing our loan imposes restrictions on our business that may limit our business opportunities and hinder our ability to execute our business strategy.

Our Amended and Restated Credit Agreement (the “New Credit Facility”) contains, and other agreements we may enter into in the future may contain, covenants imposing restrictions on our business, and requires us to maintain certain financial covenants. These restrictions and covenants may affect our ability to operate our business and may limit our ability to take advantage of potential business opportunities as they arise. These covenants place restrictions on our ability to, among other things, incur additional debt, create liens, consolidate or merge, dispose of any property, redeem common stock or make other distributions to stockholders, make investments or enter into transactions with affiliates.

Although we believe we are in compliance with all of our non-financial and financial covenants under the New Credit Facility, our future ability to comply with these covenants may be affected by events beyond our control, including prevailing economic, financial, and industry conditions. In the event of our default under the

New Credit Facility, our lender could declare all amounts borrowed to be due and payable, together with accrued and unpaid interest. If we were unable to repay any debt owed, the lender could proceed against the collateral securing that debt.

We might require additional capital or debt to support our business in the future, and this financing might not be available on acceptable terms, or at all.

If our cash and cash equivalents balances are not sufficient to meet our future cash requirements, we will need to seek additional capital, potentially through additional debt or equity financings, to fund our operations. We may also need to raise additional capital to take advantage of new business or acquisition opportunities. We may seek to raise capital by, among other things:

We may not be able to raise needed cash on terms acceptable to us or at all. Financings, if available, may be on terms that are dilutive or potentially dilutive to our stockholders. The holders of new securities may also receive rights, preferences or privileges that are senior to those of existing holders of common stock. In addition, if we were to raise cash through a debt financing, such debt may impose conditions or restrictions on our operations, which could adversely affect our business. If new sources of financing are required but are insufficient or unavailable, we would be required to modify our operating plans to the extent of available funding, which would harm our ability to maintain or grow our business.

Any denial or disruption of our hosted services whether from cyber attacks or failure in our physical infrastructure could lead to significant costs, reduce our revenue, and inhibit our ability to obtain future orders.

Our hosted services may be interrupted for a variety of reasons, including without limitation, cyber attacks or failures in the physical infrastructure network. We may be the subject of unauthorized entry, computer viruses, malicious software programs, or other forms of cyber attacks aimed to disrupt our services. While we implement backup systems, mitigation efforts and procedures and other security protocols to mitigate such attacks, we cannot assure you that such protocols will be sufficient now or in the future to prevent such cyber attacks.

The physical infrastructure network for our hosted services is operated by external companies in data centers. The network and data centers are subject to various points of failure. Problems with cooling equipment, generators, power supply, routers, switches, or other equipment, whether or not within our control, could result in service interruptions for our customers as well as equipment damage. Because our services do not require geographic proximity of our data centers to our customers, our infrastructure is consolidated into a few large facilities. Any failure or downtime in one of our leased data center facilities could affect a significant percentage of our customers. The destruction or severe impairment of any of our leased data center facilities could result in significant downtime of our services and the loss of customer data. Additionally, in connection with the expansion or consolidation of our existing leased data center facilities from time to time, there is an increased risk that service interruptions may occur as a result of server relocation or other unforeseen construction-related issues.

Because our ability to attract and retain customers depends on our ability to provide customers with highly reliable service, even minor interruptions in our service could harm our reputation. We have taken and continue to take steps to improve our infrastructure to prevent service interruptions. However, service interruptions continue to be a significant risk for us and could materially impact our business.

Any future service interruptions could:

Any of these events could materially increase our expenses or reduce our revenue, which would have a material adverse effect on our operating results.

We could be the subject of malicious cyber acts or experience other breaches of network security.

In providing our services, we store, process and transmit confidential and sensitive information including financial, credit card, account and personal information which may be protected by regulations. We may be subject to cyber threats and network security breaches by employees or third parties. Our ability to securely handle such sensitive information is critical to our business. In addition, laws requiring notification of individuals regarding security breaches related to their personal information continue to be adopted and evolve. Security breaches regarding personal information and compliance with such notification requirements could lead to significant costs for compliance, regulatory fines and other liability. Such security breaches could also harm our reputation and negatively impact our ability to attract new customers or retain existing customers.

Further, to the extent that we represent to our customers that we are compliant with particular laws regulating the handling of confidential or sensitive information, such as HIPAA or PCI, any network security breach relating to such information may expose us to claims of unfair trade practices for misrepresenting our level of compliance, truth in advertising claims, investigations by federal and state law enforcement agencies, fines, penalties and other legal liability.

We continuously monitor the security of our networks and implement protective measures to prevent cyber threats. However, as cyber threats continue to evolve and become more sophisticated, we may not be able to address all such cyber threats, and the costs to continually protect against or remediate such cyber threats may adversely impact our profitability or increase the price of our offerings making them less competitive.

We could experience breaches in physical security or problems with our information systems.

Our business and operations depend on information systems, including those of third parties, to process customer orders, bill customers, provide technical support, and support accounting functions and financial planning. We have in the past and may in the future experience problems with our information systems that cause interruption in our business operations and our ability to respond to customer needs. Information systems are vulnerable to interruption for a variety of reasons, including without limitation, computer viruses, breaches of physical security, breaches of information security, and problems with third-party providers. The implementation of new information systems and the maintenance or upgrading of existing information systems may cause disruption to our operations and business and damage our reputation with customers. Such implementations can also be more expensive than estimated and divert management attention.

Fraudulent schemes could harm our business reputation and have a material adverse effect on our financial results.

Our products and services may be subject to fraudulent schemes. Third parties have in the past and may continue to attempt in the future to defraud our customers and us by fraudulently inducing employees or consultants into disclosing account information, user names, passwords, personal identification numbers, or customer proprietary network information. Other fraudulent schemes can result in unauthorized use of services or access to customer account information or data. Breaches of network security, or the failure to mitigate such fraud or breaches may adversely affect our operating results. For example, we may be unable to prevent our customers from incurring charges from fraudulent international toll calls made with their phone numbers. We may be required to pay such fraudulent charges without reimbursement from our customers, and our reputation may be harmed. If our customer credit cards are compromised or people use stolen credit cards to pay for services, we may incur costs which may not be reimbursed or we may not be able to recover payment for our services.

If third-party technology and intellectual property included, or that we intend to include, in our products becomes unavailable to us, our product releases could be delayed while we license or develop equivalent technology or intellectual property, which could harm our business.

We incorporate certain third-party technologies and intend to utilize additional third-party technologies in the future. However, licenses to relevant third-party technology or updates to those technologies may not continue to

be available to us on commercially reasonable terms, or at all. Therefore, we could face delays in product releases until equivalent technology can be identified, licensed or developed, and integrated into our current products and services. These delays, if they occur, could materially adversely affect our business.

If a third party asserts that we are infringing on its intellectual property, whether successful or not, it could subject us to costly and time-consuming litigation or expensive licenses, which could harm our business.

There is considerable patent and other intellectual property development activity in our industry. Our success depends, in part, upon our not infringing upon the intellectual property rights of others. Our competitors, as well as a number of other “non-practicing entities” and individuals, own or claim to own intellectual property relating to our industry and may have substantially larger and broader patent portfolios than we do. From time to time, third parties have in the past and may in the future claim that we are infringing upon their intellectual property rights, and we may be found to be infringing upon such rights. Third parties have in the past sent us correspondence regarding their intellectual property and have filed litigation against us, and in the future we may receive claims that our products infringe or violate their intellectual property rights. Furthermore, we may be unaware of the intellectual property rights of others that may cover some or all of our technology or products. Any claims or litigation could cause us to incur significant expenses and, if successfully asserted against us, could require that we pay substantial damages or ongoing royalty payments, prevent us from selling our products, damage our reputation, or require that we comply with other unfavorable terms, any of which could materially harm our business. In addition, we may decide to pay substantial settlement costs in connection with any claim or litigation, whether or not successfully asserted against us. Even if we were to prevail, any litigation regarding our intellectual property could be costly and time-consuming and divert the attention of our management and key personnel from our business operations.

Litigation with respect to intellectual property rights in our industry is not uncommon and can often involve patent holding companies who have little or no product revenue and against whom our own patents may provide little or no deterrence. We may also be obligated to indemnify our customers or business partners in connection with any such litigation, which could further exhaust our resources. Furthermore, as a result of an intellectual property challenge, we may be required to enter into royalty, license or other agreements. We may not be able to obtain these agreements on terms acceptable to us or at all. We may have to incur substantial cost in re-designing our products to avoid infringement claims. In addition, disputes regarding our intellectual property rights may deter distributors from selling our products and dissuade potential customers from purchasing such products. As such, third-party claims with respect to intellectual property may increase our cost of goods sold or reduce the sales of our products and services, and may have a material and adverse effect on our business.

Failure to protect our intellectual property could substantially harm our business.

Our success and ability to compete are substantially dependent upon our intellectual property. We rely on patent, trademark and copyright law, trade secret protection and confidentiality or license agreements with our employees, enterprise customers, strategic partners and others to protect our intellectual property rights. However, the steps we take to protect our intellectual property rights may be inadequate. We cannot assure you that any additional patents will be issued. Even if patents are issued, they may not adequately protect our intellectual property rights or our products against competitors, and third-parties may challenge the scope, validity and/or enforceability of our issued patents. In addition, other parties may independently develop similar or competing technologies designed around any patents that may be issued to us.

In order to protect our intellectual property rights, we may be required to spend significant resources to monitor and protect such rights. We may not be able to detect infringement, and may lose our competitive advantage before we are able to do so. In the event that we detect any infringement of our intellectual property rights, we intend to enforce such rights vigorously, and from time to time we may initiate claims against third parties that we believe are infringing on our intellectual property rights if we are unable to resolve matters satisfactorily through negotiation. Litigation brought to protect and enforce our intellectual property rights could be costly, time-consuming and distracting to management and could result in the impairment or loss of portions of our intellectual property. Furthermore, our efforts to enforce our intellectual property rights may be met with defenses, counterclaims and countersuits attacking the validity and enforceability of our intellectual property rights. Our failure to secure, protect and enforce our intellectual property rights could harm our brand and adversely impact our business, financial condition and results of operations.

If we fail to establish and maintain proper and effective internal control over financial reporting, our operating results and our ability to operate our business could be harmed.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 requires, among other things, that we establish and maintain internal control over financial reporting and disclosure controls and procedures. In particular, under the current rules of the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), we must perform system and process evaluation and testing of our internal control over financial reporting to allow management to report on the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting, as required by Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Our independent registered public accounting firm is also required to report on our internal control over financial reporting. Our and our auditor’s testing may reveal deficiencies in our internal control over financial reporting that are deemed to be material weaknesses and render our internal control over financial reporting ineffective. We have incurred and we expect to continue to incur substantial accounting and auditing expense and expend significant management time in complying with the requirements of Section 404. If we are not able to comply with the requirements of Section 404, or if we or our independent registered public accounting firm identify deficiencies in our internal control over financial reporting that are deemed to be material weaknesses, the market price of our stock could decline and we could be subject to investigations or sanctions by the SEC, The NASDAQ Stock Market, or NASDAQ, or other regulatory authorities or subject to litigation. To the extent any material weaknesses in our internal control over financial reporting are identified in the future, we could be required to expend significant management time and financial resources to correct such material weaknesses or to respond to any resulting regulatory investigations or proceedings.

Catastrophic disasters or other events beyond our control such as earthquakes and hurricanes could damage our facilities or the facilities of our contract manufacturers, which could cause us to curtail our operations.

Our principal offices and some of our disaster recovery sites are located in California near known earthquake fault zones and, therefore, are vulnerable to damage from earthquakes. We are also vulnerable to damage from other types of disasters, such as power loss, fire, floods and other similar events beyond our control such as acts of war or terrorism. If any disaster were to occur, our ability to operate our business could be seriously impaired. For example, power loss from natural disasters could cause outages to our data centers and interruption of service to our customers. Such outages could have an adverse effect on our brand, cause us to issue credits to our customers, increase our expenses from replacing equipment, and have other adverse effects on our results of operations. Natural disasters could also cause interruption of our information systems preventing us from responding to customer needs. In addition, we may not have adequate insurance to cover our losses resulting from disasters or other similar significant business interruptions.

Our success also depends on our ability to handle a large number of simultaneous calls, which our network may not be able to accommodate.

We expect the volume of simultaneous calls to increase significantly as our subscriber base grows. Our network hardware and software may be strained by heavy volume. If we fail to maintain an appropriate level of operating performance, or if our service is disrupted, our reputation could be hurt and we could lose customers or have to issues credits or refunds, all of which could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition or operating results.

Our hosted services must comply with industry standards, federal, state and local regulations, and compliance may be costly and/or require us to modify existing services.

Our hosted services rely on communication standards such as SIP and network standards such as TCP/IP and UDP to interoperate with other vendors' equipment. There is currently a lack of agreement among industry leaders about which standard should be used for a particular application, and about the definition of the standards themselves. As standards evolve, we may be required to modify our existing products or develop and support new versions of our services.

We must also comply with certain federal, state and local requirements regarding how we interact with our customers, including marketing practices, consumer protection, privacy, law enforcement and billing issues, the provision of emergency calling services and the quality of service we provide to our customers. The failure of our services to comply, or delays in compliance, with various existing and evolving regulations could delay or

interrupt the sales of our services, subject us to fines or other imposed penalties, or harm the perception and adoption rates of our service, any of which would have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition or operating results.

Our emergency calling services are different from those offered by traditional wireline telephone companies and may expose us to significant liability. There may be risks associated with limitations associated with emergency dialing with our services.

Our emergency calling service differs from the emergency calling services offered by traditional wireline telephone companies. In each case, the differences may cause significant delays, or even failures, in callers' receipt of the emergency assistance they need.

We route emergency calls to a service aggregation vendor, who in turn routes the calls to the local Public Safety Answering Point, or PSAP. The PSAP should have automatic access to the customer's telephone number and registered location information. If the number is not associated with an address in an emergency call, then the call is routed by the vendor to an emergency response center where a live answer takes place and the address is determined for routing to the correct PSAP. If a customer moves their service to a new location, the customer's registered location information must be updated and verified by the customer. Until that takes place, the customer will have to verbally advise the emergency dispatcher of his or her actual location at the time of an emergency call. This can lead to delays in the delivery of emergency services.

In addition, in the event that a customer experiences a broadband or power outage, or if a network failure were to occur, the customer will not be able to reach an emergency services provider using our services. Delays our customers may encounter when making emergency services calls and any inability of the answering point to automatically recognize the caller's location or telephone number can result in life threatening consequences. Customers may, in the future, attempt to hold us responsible for any loss, damage, personal injury or death suffered as a result of any failure of our emergency calling services.

There may be risks associated with our ability to comply with the requirements of federal law enforcement agencies.

The FCC requires all interconnected VoIP providers to comply with the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (“CALEA”). The FCC allows VoIP providers to comply with CALEA through the use of a solution provided by a trusted third party with the ability to extract call content and call-identifying information from a VoIP provider's network. While the FCC permits companies like us to use the services provided by these third parties to comply with CALEA, we are ultimately responsible for ensuring the timely delivery of call content and call-identifying information to law enforcement, and for protecting subscriber privacy. While we believe we are currently CALEA compliant, we could be subject to an enforcement action by the FCC or law enforcement agencies for any delays related to meeting, or if we fail to comply with, any current or future CALEA obligations.

Reform of federal and state Universal Service Fund programs could increase the cost of our service to our customers diminishing or eliminating our pricing advantage.

The FCC and a number of states may consider reform or modifications to Universal Service Fund programs. Should the FCC or certain states adopt new contribution mechanisms or otherwise modify contribution obligations that increase our contribution burden, we will either need to raise the amount we currently collect from our customers to cover this obligation or absorb the costs, which would reduce our profit margins. Furthermore, the FCC has ruled that states can require us to contribute to state Universal Service Fund programs. A number of states already require us to contribute, while others are actively considering extending their programs to include the services we provide. We currently pass-through Universal Service Fund contributions to our customers which may result in our services becoming less competitive as compared to those provided by others.

Changes in regulatory compliance obligations of critical suppliers may adversely impact our operations.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, (“Dodd-Frank Act”), includes Section 1502, related to additional disclosure requirements for certain minerals sourced from the Democratic Republic of Congo and surrounding countries, or conflict minerals, for which such conflict minerals are necessary to the

functionality of a product manufactured, or contracted to be manufactured, by an SEC reporting company. The metals covered by the rules include tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold. Our suppliers may use these materials in the production processes. We will have to perform supply chain due diligence, third-party verification and possibly private sector audits on the sources of these metals. Global supply chains are complicated, with multiple layers and suppliers between the mine and the final product. Accordingly, we could incur significant cost related to the compliance process. While the impact of Section 1502 on our business is uncertain at this time, we could potentially have difficulty in procuring needed materials from conflict-free sources.

Increased taxes or regulatory fees on our services will increase our customers' cost of using our services and/or reduce our profit margins (to the extent the costs are not passed through to our customers) and we may be subject to liabilities for past sales and additional taxes, surcharges and fees.

Where we have filed federal, state and municipal tax returns such as sales, excise and ad valorem taxes, fees or surcharges for the services we provide, the interpretation and application of the tax laws and regulations applicable in such jurisdictions may be in conflict with the interpretation held by the states and municipalities where we do business. Any increase or changes in our collection of these taxes, fees or surcharges may have the effect of decreasing any price advantage we may have over other providers. Our compliance with these tax initiatives may make us less competitive with those competitors who choose not to comply with these tax initiatives. We have accrued for taxes that we believe are required to be remitted. If our ultimate liability exceeds the accrued amount, it could result in a material adverse effect on our earnings.

Changes in telecommunications regulation and tariffs could harm our business.

Changes in telecommunications requirements, or regulatory requirements in other industries in which we operate, in the United States or other countries could affect the sales of our products and services. Future changes in tariffs by regulatory agencies or application of tariff requirements to currently untariffed services could affect the sales of our products and services for certain classes of customers. Additionally, in the United States, our products and services must comply with various requirements and regulations of the Federal Communications Commission and other regulatory authorities. In countries outside of the United States, our products must meet various requirements of local telecommunications and other industry authorities. These changes could have a material adverse effect on our business, operating results, and financial condition.

We are subject to environmental and other health and safety regulations that may increase our costs of operations or limit our activities.

We are subject to environmental and other health and safety regulations relating to matters such as reductions in the use of harmful substances, the use of lead-free soldering and the recycling of products and packaging materials. These regulations generally require electronics producers to bear the cost of collection, treatment, recovery and safe disposal of past and future products from end users and to ensure that new electrical and electronic equipment does not contain specified hazardous substances. The cost of these regulations to us may be substantial and may divert resources, which could detract from our ability to develop new products or operate our business, particularly if we increase international operations. We may not be able to comply in all cases with applicable environmental and other regulations, and if we do not, we may incur remediation costs or we may not be able to offer our products for sale in certain countries, which could adversely affect our results.

Our business depends on continued and unimpeded access to the Internet and the development and maintenance of Internet infrastructure.

The adoption of any laws or regulations that adversely affect the growth, popularity or use of the Internet, including laws impacting Internet neutrality, could decrease the demand for our solution and increase our operating costs. For example, in 2015, the FCC adopted rules intended, in part, to maintain net neutrality and to prevent network operators from discriminating against legal traffic that transverse their networks. To the extent network operators attempt to use other laws or regulations to extract fees from us to deliver our services or otherwise engage in discriminatory practices, our business could be adversely impacted. Internationally, government regulation concerning the Internet, and in particular, network neutrality, may be developing or non-existent. Within such a regulatory environment, we could experience discriminatory or anti-competitive practices that could impede our domestic and international growth, cause us to incur additional expense or otherwise negatively affect our business.

We rely on third party network service providers to originate and terminate a significant portion of our public switched telephone network, or PTSN, calls, which could lead to business disruption if service providers ceased operations or terminated their services.

We leverage the infrastructure of third party network service providers to provide telephone numbers, PSTN call termination and origination services, private network access and local number portability for our customers rather than deploying our own networks. This decision has resulted in lower capital and operating costs for our business in the short term but has reduced our operating flexibility and ability to make timely service changes. If any of these network service providers cease operations or otherwise terminate the services that we depend on, the delay in switching our technology to another network service provider, if available, and qualifying this new service could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition or operating results.

While we believe that relations with our current service providers are good, and we have contracts in place, there can be no assurance that these service providers will be able or willing to supply cost-effective services to us in the future or that we will be successful in signing up alternative or additional providers. Although we could replace our current providers, if necessary, our ability to provide service to our subscribers could be impacted during this timeframe and this could have an adverse effect on our business, financial condition or results of operations. The loss of access to, or requirement to change, the telephone numbers we provide to our customers also could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition or operating results.

Due to our reliance on these service providers, when problems occur in a network, it may be difficult to identify the source of the problem. The occurrence of hardware and software errors, whether caused by our service or another vendor's products, may result in the delay or loss of market acceptance of our products and any necessary revisions may force us to incur significant expenses. The occurrence of some of these types of problems may seriously harm our business, financial condition or operating results.

Our products contain third-party open source software components, and failure to comply with the terms of the underlying open source software licenses could restrict our ability to sell our products.

Our products contain software modules licensed to us under “open source” licenses. From time to time, there have been claims against companies that distribute or use open source software in their products and services, asserting that open source software infringes the claimants’ intellectual property rights. We could be subject to suits by parties claiming infringement of intellectual property rights in what we believe to be licensed open source software. Use and distribution of open source software may entail greater risks than use of third-party commercial software, as open source licensors generally do not provide warranties or other contractual protections regarding infringement claims or the quality of the code. Some open source licenses contain requirements that we make available source code for modifications or derivative works we create based upon the type of open source software we use. If we combine our proprietary software with open source software in a certain manner, we could, under certain open source licenses, be required to release the source code of our proprietary software to the public. This would allow our competitors to create similar products with lower development effort and time and ultimately could result in a loss of product sales for us.

Although we monitor our use of open source software to avoid subjecting our products to conditions we do not intend, the terms of many open source licenses have not been interpreted by United States courts, and there is a risk that these licenses could be construed in a way that could impose unanticipated conditions or restrictions on our ability to commercialize our products. In this event, we could be required to seek licenses from third parties to continue offering our products, to make our proprietary code generally available in source code form, to re-engineer our products or to discontinue the sale of our products if re-engineering could not be accomplished on a timely basis, any of which requirements could adversely affect our business, operating results and financial condition.

Risks Related to Ownership of Our Common Stock

Our stock price in the past has been volatile, and may continue to be volatile or may decline regardless of our operating performance, and investors may not be able to resell shares at or above the price at which they purchased the shares.

Since our stock began trading in July 2007, our stock price has fluctuated significantly. At times the stock price has changed very quickly. If investors purchase shares of our common stock, they may not be able to resell those shares at or above the price at which they purchased them. The market price of our common stock may fluctuate significantly in response to numerous factors, many of which are beyond our control, including:

In addition, the stock markets, and in particular the NASDAQ Global Select Market, have experienced extreme price and volume fluctuations that have affected and continue to affect the market prices of equity securities of many technology companies. Stock prices of many technology companies have fluctuated in a manner unrelated or disproportionate to the operating performance of those companies. In the past, stockholders have initiated securities class action litigation following declines in stock prices of technology companies. Any litigation may subject us to substantial costs, divert resources and the attention of management from our business, which could harm our business and operating results.

Our operating results may fluctuate in the future, which could cause our stock price to decline.

Our historical revenues and operating results have varied from quarter to quarter. Moreover, our actual or projected operating results for some quarters may not meet our own expectations, or the expectations of stock market analysts and investors, which may cause our stock price to decline. In addition to the factors discussed elsewhere in this “Risk Factors” section, a number of factors may cause our revenue to fall short of our expectations or cause fluctuations in our operating results, including:

Because our operating expenses are largely fixed in the short-term, any shortfalls in revenue in a given period would have a direct and adverse effect on our operating results in that period. We believe that our quarterly and annual revenue and results of operations may vary significantly in the future and that period-to-period comparisons of our operating results may not be meaningful. You should not rely on the results of one period as an indication of future performance. If our revenues and operating results do not meet the expectations of our investors or securities analysts or fall below guidance we may provide to the market, the price of our common stock may decline.

A substantial portion of our product orders are usually received in the last month of each fiscal quarter, with a concentration of such orders in the final two weeks of the quarter. While we typically ship products shortly after the receipt of an order, we may have orders that have not shipped at the end of any given quarter. Because the amount of such product orders may vary, the amount, if any, of such orders at the end of a particular quarter is not a reliable predictor of our future performance.

Our charter documents and Delaware law may inhibit a takeover that stockholders consider favorable and could also limit the market price of our stock.

Our restated certificate of incorporation and bylaws and applicable provisions of Delaware law may make it more difficult for or prevent a third party from acquiring control of us without the approval of our board of directors. These provisions:

In addition, Section 203 of the Delaware General Corporation Law generally limits our ability to engage in any business combination with certain persons who own 15% or more of our outstanding voting stock or any of our associates or affiliates who at any time in the past three years have owned 15% or more of our outstanding voting stock. These provisions may have the effect of entrenching our management team and may deprive you of the opportunity to sell your shares to potential acquirers at a premium over prevailing prices. This potential inability to obtain a control premium could reduce the price of our common stock.

None.

Our headquarters, which is located in Sunnyvale, California, is a 63,781 square foot leased facility. This lease expires in September 2019. We also occupy leased facilities elsewhere in the United States, Europe, Canada, India, Singapore and Australia.

We maintain a shipping and warehouse facility in Newark, California for our inventory and we rent space as needed at various third-party warehouses throughout the world.

We believe that our current facilities are suitable and adequate to meet our current needs, and we may add new facilities or expand existing facilities as we add employees. We believe that suitable additional or substitute space will be available on commercially reasonable terms as needed to accommodate our operations.

Information with respect to this item may be found in Note 13 to the Consolidated Financial Statements in Item 8, which is incorporated herein by reference.

Not applicable.

PART II.

Market Information

Our common stock has been traded on The NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol “SHOR” since July 3, 2007. The following table sets forth for the periods indicated the high and low sale prices of our common stock, as reported by The NASDAQ Global Select Market.

On August 26, 2016, the last reported sales price of our common stock on the NASDAQ Global Select Market was $7.98 per share.

Holders of Record

As of August 26, 2016, there were 63 stockholders of record of our common stock, although we believe there are approximately 6,000 beneficial owners since many brokers and other institutions hold our common stock on behalf of stockholders.

Dividend Policy

We have never declared or paid dividends on our common stock. We intend to retain any future earnings for use in our business and therefore we do not anticipate declaring or paying any cash dividends in the foreseeable future.

Issuer Purchases of Equity Securities

In May 2016, the Board of Directors authorized us to repurchase up to $20.0 million of the Company's common stock from time to time at the discretion of our management. This stock repurchase authorization has no expiration date.

During fiscal 2016, we repurchased approximately 126,000 shares of our common stock for $0.8 million. As of June 30, 2016, we had a remaining authorization of $19.2 million for future share repurchases. The number of shares to be repurchased and the timing of such repurchases will be based on several factors, including the price of the Company's common stock and liquidity and general market and business conditions.

The following table summarizes the activity related to stock repurchases for the three months ended June 30, 2016:

Stock Performance Graphs and Cumulative Total Return²

The following graph shows the cumulative total stockholder return of an investment of $100 in cash on June 30, 2011 through June 30, 2016, for (i) our common stock, (ii) the S&P Small Cap 500 Index and (iii) the NASDAQ Telecommunications Index. Pursuant to applicable SEC rules, all values assume reinvestment of the full amount of all dividends, however no dividends have been declared on our common stock to date. The stockholder return shown on the graph below is not necessarily indicative of future performance, and we do not make or endorse any predictions as to future stockholder returns.

This performance graph shall not be deemed “filed” for purposes of Section 18 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, or the “Exchange Act,” or incorporated by reference into any filing of ours under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, or the Exchange Act, except as shall be expressly set forth by specific reference in such filing.

$100 invested on June 30, 2011 in stock or index. Fiscal year ending June 30,

Equity Compensation Plan Information

The following table summarizes information about our equity compensation plans as of June 30, 2016. All outstanding awards relate to our common stock.

The following selected consolidated financial data should be read in connection with our consolidated financial statements and notes thereto and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” included elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Our historical results are not necessarily indicative of the results to be expected in any future period.

The following discussion and analysis of our financial condition and results of operations should be read in conjunction with the consolidated financial statements and related notes included elsewhere in this document. This discussion contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Our actual results could differ materially from those discussed below. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include, but are not limited to, those identified below, and those discussed above in the section entitled “Risk Factors.” We report results on a fiscal year ending June 30. For ease of reference within this section, 2016 refers to the fiscal year ended June 30, 2016, 2015 refers to the fiscal year ended June 30, 2015, and 2014 refers to the fiscal year ended June 30, 2014.

Overview

ShoreTel is a leading provider of brilliantly simple business communication solutions. We focus on the small and medium sized businesses seeking a Unified Communications (“UC”) solution allowing them to communicate anytime, anyplace and through any device that they chose.

We provide this to the market via two solutions: ShoreTel Connect, our UC solution, and Contact Center offering and ShoreTel Summit, our platform for developers and integrators. ShoreTel Connect delivers a fully featured UC solution and applications such as mobility, collaboration, and workgroups. ShoreTel Connect is unique in that it offers three different delivery models including cloud, onsite and hybrid. Connect Cloud provides a hosted voice solution to our customers. Connect OnSite provides our customers the ability to independently own and operate their equipment. Connect Hybrid enables our customers to use both our cloud and onsite offerings while still delivering the same user experience and providing our customers increased choice and flexibility. Summit, our Communications Platform as a Service (“CPaaS”) offering, delivers the option to either deeply integrate communications into any application or workflow or to create a standalone business communications application.

We believe our solutions address changes in the UC market being driven by both technological advances and new workplace trends. We believe some of the current factors affecting the UC market include: the shift to consuming communications from the cloud, addressing an increasingly mobile workforce, the ongoing need for collaboration, a desire for multiple forms of communication and a need to integrate communications into workflows and applications. Our solutions are sold through our extensive network of over 1,200 authorized resellers and value-added distributors throughout the world served either by national distributors or by ShoreTel directly.

We were originally incorporated in California in September 1996 and reincorporated in Delaware in 2007. ShoreTel is based in Sunnyvale, California, and has regional offices in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Additionally, our cloud-based services are provided from multiple data centers located in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. While most of our customers are located in the United States, we have remained fairly consistent in revenue from international sales, which accounted for approximately 8% of our total revenue for fiscal 2016 as compared with 8% and 9% in fiscal 2015 and 2014, respectively. We expect sales to customers in the United States will continue to comprise the majority of our sales in the foreseeable future.

Key Business Metrics

We monitor a number of key metrics to help forecast growth, establish budgets, measure the effectiveness of our sales and marketing efforts and to measure operational effectiveness.

Deferred revenue.   Deferred revenue relates to the timing of revenue recognition for specific transactions based on delivery of service, support, specific commitments, product and services delivered to our value-added distributors that have not been delivered or sold through to resellers, and other factors. Deferred revenue primarily consists of billings or payments received in advance of revenue recognition from our transactions and are recognized as the revenue recognition criteria are met. Nearly all of our premise system sales include the purchase of post-contractual support contracts with terms of up to five years, and our renewal rates on these contracts have been high historically. We recognize support revenue on a ratable basis over the term of the support contract. Since we receive payment for support in advance of recognizing the related revenue, we carry a deferred revenue balance on our consolidated balance sheet. Almost all of our hosted services are billed a month

in advance. Billings that are collected before the service is delivered are included in the deferred revenue balance on our consolidated balance sheet. These amounts are recognized as revenue as the services are delivered. Our deferred revenue balance at June 30, 2016 was $77.7 million, of which $56.8 million is expected to be recognized within one year.

Gross margin.   Our gross margins for products are primarily affected by our ability to reduce hardware costs faster than the decline in average overall system sales prices. We strive to increase our product gross margin by reducing hardware costs through product redesign and volume discount pricing from our suppliers. In general, product gross margin on our switches is greater than product gross margin on our IP phones. We consider our ability to monitor and manage these factors to be a key aspect of maintaining product gross margins and increasing our profitability.

Gross margin for hosted and related services is lower than the gross margins for support and services and product and is impacted primarily by the reselling of broadband circuits to customers, employee-related expense, data communication cost, carrier cost, telecom taxes, and intangible asset amortization expense. We expect that with the growth in hosted and related services revenue, the gross margins may reflect improvement due to economies of scale, synergies and other cost reductions in our service delivery model.

Gross margin for support and services is impacted primarily by labor-related expenses. The primary goal of our support and services function is to ensure a high level of customer satisfaction and our investments in support personnel and infrastructure are made with this goal in mind. The timing of additional investments in our support and services infrastructure could materially affect our cost of support and services revenue, both in absolute dollars and as a percentage of support and services revenue and total revenue, in any particular period.

Operating expense.   Our operating expenses are comprised primarily of compensation and benefits for our employees and related expenses such as travel. Accordingly, increases in operating expenses historically have been primarily related to increases in our headcount. We intend to expand our workforce as we grow, and therefore, our ability to forecast revenue is critical to managing our operating expenses.

Average revenue per user.   We calculate the average monthly service revenue per user (“ARPU”) for our hosted and related services revenue as the average monthly revenue per customer divided by the average number of seats per customer. The average monthly revenue per customer is calculated as the monthly service revenue from customers in the period, divided by the simple average number of business customers during the period. Our ARPU includes telecommunication internet circuits that we resell that could, as a percentage of our business, decline over time as our average customer size increases and therefore they are more likely to have their own networks already established. Our monthly ARPU for the three-month period ended June 30, 2016, 2015 and 2014 was approximately $51, $54 and $55, respectively. The decrease in ARPU was primarily due to a greater number of volume discounts related to increased sales to larger enterprise customers and a decrease in the resale of internet circuits to new customers as compared to the existing customer base.

Revenue churn.    Revenue churn for our hosted and related services revenue is calculated by dividing the monthly recurring revenue from customers that have terminated during a period by the simple average of the total monthly recurring revenue from all customers in a given period. The effective management of the revenue churn is critical to our ability to maximize revenue growth and to maintain and improve margins. Our annualized revenue churn for the three months ended June 30, 2016, 2015 and 2014 was approximately 6%, 4% and 5%, respectively.

Basis of Presentation

Revenue.   We derive our revenue from sales of our premise IP telecommunications systems, hosted services and related support and services.

Product revenue.   Product revenue consists of sales of our premise solution and telephones for our hosted IP telecommunication systems. Our typical system includes a combination of IP phones, switches and software applications primarily for our premise-based solutions. We sell our products through channel partners that include resellers and value-added distributors. Prices to a given channel partner for hardware and software products depend on that channel partner's volume and other criteria, as well as our own strategic considerations. Product revenue has accounted for 44%, 51%, and 55% of our total revenue for fiscal years 2016, 2015 and 2014, respectively.

Hosted and related services revenue.   Hosted and related services and solutions consist primarily of our proprietary hosted VoIP Unified Communications solution as well as other services such as contact center, mobility, foreign and domestic calling plans, certain UC applications, internet service provisioning, regulatory and telecommunications fees, training and other professional services. Our hosted and related services are sold through indirect channel resellers and a direct sales force. Our customers enter into one to three-year service agreements whereby they are billed for such services on a monthly basis. Revenue from our hosted and related services is recognized on a monthly basis as services are delivered. Revenue associated with various calling plans and internet services are recognized as such services are provided. Hosted and related services revenues accounted for 35%, 29% and 26% of our total revenues for fiscal 2016, 2015 and 2014, respectively.

Support and services revenue.   Support and services revenue primarily consists of post-contractual support, and to a lesser extent revenue from training services, professional services and premise-based installations that we perform. Post-contractual support includes software updates which grant rights to unspecified software license upgrades and maintenance releases issued during the support period. Post-contractual support also includes both Internet- and phone-based technical support. Revenue from post-contractual support is recognized ratably over the contractual service period. Support and services revenues accounted for 21%, 20% and 19% of our total revenue for fiscal 2016, 2015 and 2014, respectively.

Cost of revenue.   Cost of product revenue consists primarily of hardware costs, royalties and license fees for third-party software included in our systems, salary and related overhead costs of operations personnel, freight, warranty costs and provision for excess inventory. The majority of these costs vary with the unit volumes of products sold. Cost of hosted and related services revenue consists of personnel and related costs of the hosted services, data center costs, data communication cost, costs of regulatory and telecommunications fees, carrier cost and amortization of intangible assets. Cost of support and services revenue consists of salary and related overhead costs of personnel engaged in support and service.

Research and development expenses.   Research and development expenses primarily include personnel costs, outside engineering costs, professional services, prototype costs, test equipment, software usage fees and facilities expenses. Research and development expenses are recognized when incurred. We have capitalized development costs incurred from determination of technological feasibility through general release of the product to customers, although capitalized development costs historically have not been significant. We are devoting substantial resources to the development of additional functionality of our Connect solution, Summit Platform and the ongoing development of new product technologies and related software applications to support this solution. We intend to continue to make investments in our research and development efforts because we believe they are essential to maintaining and improving our competitive position.

Sales and marketing expenses.   Sales and marketing expenses primarily include personnel costs, sales and partner commissions, travel, marketing promotional and lead generation programs, branding and advertising, trade shows, sales demonstration equipment, professional services fees, amortization of intangible assets, and facilities expenses. We plan to continue to invest in development of our distribution channel by increasing the size of our field sales force to enable us to expand into new geographies and further increase our sales to enterprise customers. We expect that sales and marketing expenses will be our largest operating expense category.

General and administrative expenses.   General and administrative expenses primarily relate to our executive, finance, human resources, legal and information technology organizations. General and administrative expenses primarily consist of personnel costs, professional fees for legal, board of directors' costs, accounting, tax, compliance and information systems, travel, recruiting expense, depreciation expense and facilities expenses.

Settlements and defense fees.   Settlements and defense fees relate to one-time charges related to probable and estimable settlement amounts and professional fees incurred in connection with an unsolicited acquisition proposal.

Acquisition-related costs.   Acquisition-related costs relate to legal, accounting, consulting, investment banker fees and other costs directly related to acquisitions.

Interest expense. Interest expense primarily consists of interest expense associated with our credit facility.

Interest income and other (expense).   Interest income and other (expense) primarily consists of interest earned on cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments, gains and losses on foreign currency translations and transactions as other miscellaneous items affecting our operating results.

Provision for income taxes.   Provision for income taxes includes federal, state and foreign tax on our income as well as any adjustments made to our valuation allowance for deferred tax assets. Since our inception, we have accumulated substantial net operating loss and tax credit carryforwards. We account for income taxes under an asset and liability approach. Deferred income taxes reflect the impact of temporary differences between assets and liabilities recognized for financial reporting purposes and such amounts recognized for income tax reporting purposes, net operating loss carryforwards and other tax credits measured by applying current enacted tax laws. Valuation allowances are provided when necessary to reduce deferred tax assets to an amount that is more likely than not to be realized.

Results of Operations

The following table sets forth selected consolidated statements of operations data as a percentage of total revenue for each of the periods indicated.

Comparison of Fiscal 2016 to 2015 and Fiscal 2015 to 2014

Revenue

Total revenue increased by $0.6 million in fiscal 2016 as compared to fiscal 2015.

Total revenue increased by $21.4 million, or 6%, in fiscal 2015 as compared to fiscal 2014.

Revenue from customers in the United States accounted for approximately 92%, 92% and 91% of total revenue for years ended June 30, 2016, 2015 and 2014, respectively.

Product revenue

Product revenue decreased by $23.0 million, or 13%, in fiscal 2016 and $3.7 million, or 2%, in fiscal 2015 primarily due to a decline in new customer volume related to less overall demand in the premise-based solution market.

Hosted and Related Services revenue

Hosted and related service revenue increased by $21.3 million, or 20%, in fiscal 2016 as compared to in fiscal 2015. Hosted and related service revenue increased by $17.7 million, or 20%, in fiscal 2015 as compared to in fiscal 2014. The increase in hosted and related services revenue was primarily due to market growth enabling the expansion of our customer base resulting from sales to new customers and additional sales to existing customers.

Support and Services revenue

Support and services revenue increased by $2.4 million, or 3%, in fiscal 2016, as compared to fiscal 2015. Support and services revenue increased by $7.3 million, or 11%, in fiscal 2015 as compared to fiscal 2014. The increase in support and services revenue in both fiscal 2016 and 2015 was primarily due to additional sales to existing customers resulting in higher post-contractual support revenues supported by high renewal rates and continued expansion of our customer base resulting from sales to new customers who contract for support agreements.

Gross margin

Total gross margin increased to 63% in fiscal 2016 as compared to 61% in fiscal 2015 and 60% in fiscal 2014. The increases in total gross margin were primarily due to the increase in hosted and related services gross margin.

Product gross margin

Product gross margins increased to 67% in fiscal 2016 as compared to 65% in fiscal 2015. This increase was primarily due to the recognition of a $1.0 million expense during fiscal 2015 representing settlement of a legal matter with no corresponding charge in fiscal 2016.

Product gross margins remained consistent at 65% in both fiscal 2015 and fiscal 2014.

Hosted and related services gross margin

Hosted and related service gross margins increased to 52% in fiscal 2016 as compared to 43% for fiscal 2015 and 38% for fiscal 2014. The increases from the prior periods were primarily due to operating efficiencies gained in our hosted business model as we have continued to expand our hosted revenue base while managing operational costs and also due to the release of $2.0 million in fiscal 2016 related to certain previously accrued surcharges as a result of favorable resolutions as well as reaching the statute of limitations in those jurisdictions.

Support and Services gross margin

Support and services gross margins remained relatively consistent at 75% in fiscal 2016 as compared to 76% in fiscal 2015.

Support and services gross margins increased to 76% in fiscal 2015 as compared to 74% in fiscal 2014. This increase was driven by operation improvements which allowed lower personnel costs to support a larger customer base and generate a higher revenue amount from the same period in each prior year, coupled with an increase in related revenue from our growing customer base.

Operating expenses

Research and development.    Research and development expense increased by $7.2 million, or 13%, in fiscal 2016 compared to fiscal 2015. The increase in research and development expenses was primarily due to an increase of $6.8 million in personnel costs, including related benefits costs and an increase in the allocation of corporate expenses of $1.1 million. These increases primarily related to an increase in headcount of research and development personnel. The increase in headcount was in part due to the acquisition of Corvisa LLC (“Corvisa”) in January 2016. These increases were partially offset by a decrease in consulting and professional services of $0.9 million.

Research and development expense increased by $3.6 million, or 7%, in fiscal 2015 compared to fiscal 2014. The increase in research and development expenses was primarily due to an increase of $1.7 million in personnel costs, including related benefits costs as well as an increase of $0.6 million in consulting and professional services. The increase in personnel costs was primarily due to an increase in headcount during fiscal 2015, primarily in Bangalore, India.

Sales and marketing.   Sales and marketing expenses increased by $7.2 million, or 6%, in fiscal 2016 compared to fiscal 2015. The increase in sales and marketing expenses from the prior period was primarily due to an increase in personnel costs, including related benefits, bonus and commissions, of $4.9 million primarily related to an increase in headcount, in part due to the acquisition of Corvisa, and increased demand generation, partner commissions and promotional activities of $2.5 million.

Sales and marketing expenses increased by $8.0 million, or 7%, in fiscal 2015 compared to fiscal 2014. The increase in sales and marketing expenses from the prior period was primarily due to increased demand generation, partner commissions and promotional activities of $5.6 million and an increase in personnel related costs including, benefits, bonus and commissions of $2.1 million primarily attributable to an increase in headcount during fiscal 2015.

General and administrative.    General and administrative expenses increased by $2.0 million, or 5%, in fiscal 2016 compared to fiscal 2015. The increase in general and administrative expenses from the prior period was primarily due to an increase in personnel costs, including related benefits costs, of $3.2 million, partially offset by a decrease in information technology related project costs of $0.8 million.

General and administrative expenses decreased by $0.6 million, or 1%, in fiscal 2015 compared to fiscal 2014. The decrease in general and administrative expenses from the prior period was primarily due to a decrease in sales tax expense of $1.8 million, a decrease in facilities costs of $0.6 million, partially offset by an increase in consulting and professional services of $1.8 million.

Settlements and defense fees.   Settlements and defense fees of $0.1 million for fiscal 2016 was comprised of $0.1 million related to tax amounts accrued on the amount recorded in fiscal 2015 related to the Internal Revenue Service proposed withholding tax adjustment for the 2008 through 2012 tax years.

Settlements and defense fees of $8.5 million for fiscal 2015 were comprised of $6.8 million related to a settlement on escrow claims related to the acquisition of M5 Networks, Inc. (“M5”), $1.1 million related to an Internal Revenue Service proposed withholding tax adjustment for the 2008 through 2012 tax years and $0.6 million in professional fees incurred in connection with an unsolicited acquisition proposal. The $6.8 million expense related to the settlement on escrow claims was comprised of a $3.6 million charge related to the impairment of the indemnification asset, a $2.5 million charge for professional fee reimbursement and a $0.7 million modification accounting charge related to the change in fair value of foregone stock per the Agreement and Plan of Reorganization between M5 and the Company. There were no corresponding charges for fiscal 2014.

Acquisition-related costs.   Acquisition-related costs of $1.5 million for fiscal 2016 primarily consisted of direct costs incurred related to the acquisitions of M5 Networks Australia Pty Ltd (“M5 Australia”) and Corvisa. There were no corresponding costs for fiscal 2015 or 2014.

Other income (expense), net

Interest expense. Interest expense remained relatively consistent at $0.5 million for both fiscal 2016 and 2015 and $0.6 million for fiscal 2014.

Interest income and other (expense), net. Interest income and other (expense), net increased by $0.7 million in fiscal 2016 as compared to fiscal 2015 primarily due to amortization expenses.

Interest income and other expense, net increased by $0.3 million in fiscal 2015 as compared to fiscal 2014 due to an increase in our foreign exchange loss due to the strengthening of the U.S. dollar against certain foreign currencies in which we transact.

Provision for income tax

Our effective tax rate differs from the statutory rate largely due to our providing a full valuation allowance on the current year net operating losses. The provision for income taxes in fiscal 2016, 2015 and 2014 was primarily related to state and foreign income tax expense.

Liquidity and Capital Resources

Cash and cash equivalents and investments

The following table summarizes our cash and cash equivalents and short-term investments (in thousands):

As of June 30, 2016, our principal sources of liquidity consisted of cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments of $108.2 million, net accounts receivable of $32.9 million and the balance available of $73.6 million for borrowing under our New Credit Facility (as defined below).

On October 22, 2014, we entered into an Amended and Restated Credit Agreement which was further amended on December 1, 2014 and August 5, 2015 (“New Credit Facility”) which provides for a revolving loan facility for an aggregate principal amount not exceeding $100.0 million. The New Credit Facility amended and restated the prior credit facility. The New Credit Facility matures on October 22, 2019 and is payable in full upon maturity. The amounts borrowed and repaid under the New Credit Facility are available for future borrowings.

The borrowings under the New Credit Facility accrue interest (at our election) either at (i) the London interbank offered rate then in effect, plus a margin of between 1.50% and 2.25%, which is based on our consolidated EBITDA (as defined in the New Credit Facility), or (ii) the higher of (a) the bank’s publicly-announced prime rate then in effect and (b) the federal funds rate plus 0.50%, in each case of (a) or (b), plus a margin of between 0.00% and 0.50%, which will be based upon our consolidated EBITDA. We also pay commitment fees during the term of the New Credit Facility which varies depending on our consolidated EBITDA. The New Credit Facility is secured by substantially all of our assets.

The New Credit Facility contains customary affirmative and negative covenants, including compliance with financial ratios and metrics. The New Credit Facility and the related amendment requires us to maintain a minimum ratio of liquidity to its indebtedness (each as defined in the New Credit Facility) and varying amounts of Liquidity and Consolidated EBITDA specified in the New Credit Facility throughout the term of the agreement. As of June 30, 2016, we were in compliance with all such covenants and no amounts were outstanding under the New Credit Facility.

Historically, our principal uses of cash have consisted of the purchase of finished goods inventory from our contract manufacturers, payroll and other operating expenses related to the development and marketing of our new products, purchases of property and equipment and acquisitions.

Our future capital requirements will depend on many factors, including our rate of revenue growth, the expansion of our sales and marketing activities, the addition of new business initiatives, the timing and extent of

our expansion into new geographies, the timing of introductions of new products and enhancements to existing products, the continuing market acceptance of our products, common stock repurchases and acquisition and licensing activities. We may enter into agreements relating to potential investments in, or acquisitions of, complementary businesses or technologies in the future, which could also require us to seek additional equity or debt financing. If needed, additional funds may not be available on terms favorable to us or at all. We believe that the available amounts under the line of credit together with our cash flows from our operations will be sufficient to fund our operating requirements for at least the next twelve months.

The following table shows our cash flows from operating activities, investing activities and financing activities for the stated periods:

Cash flows from operating activities

Net loss during fiscal 2016, 2015 and 2014 included non-cash charges of $8.9 million, $8.4 million and $7.3 million in stock-based compensation expense, respectively, and depreciation and amortization of $20.5 million, $19.1 million and $18.3 million, respectively. Net loss during fiscal 2015 included a charge related to the impairment of the indemnification asset of $3.6 million with no corresponding charge in the fiscal 2016 or fiscal 2014.

Cash provided by operating activities of $35.1 million during fiscal 2016 also reflects net changes in operating assets and liabilities, which provided $10.0 million of cash consisting primarily of an increase in deferred revenue of $6.1 million, an increase in accrued employee compensation of $3.1 million, a decrease in accounts receivable of $3.7 million, a decrease in inventory of $2.9 million and a decrease in prepaid expenses and other current assets of $2.1 million. These cash inflows were offset by a decrease in accrued taxes and surcharges of $6.0 million, a decrease in accrued liabilities and other of $1.2 million, and a decrease in accounts payable of $0.7 million.

Cash provided by operating activities of $41.1 million during fiscal 2015 also reflects net changes in operating assets and liabilities, which provided $13.4 million of cash consisting primarily of a decrease in inventory of $11.4 million, a decrease in indemnification asset of $2.0 million, an increase in accrued liabilities and other of $7.7 million and an increase in deferred revenue of $3.8 million. These cash inflows were partially offset by an increase in prepaid expenses of $4.2 million, an increase in accounts receivable of $2.9 million, a decrease in accrued taxes and surcharges of $2.3 million, a decrease in accrued employee compensation of $1.2 million and a decrease in accounts payable of $0.8 million.

Cash provided by operating activities of $35.9 million during fiscal 2014 also reflects net changes in operating assets and liabilities, which provided $10.4 million of cash consisting primarily of an increase in deferred revenue of $11.0 million, an increase in accounts payable of $6.2 million, an increase in accrued employee compensation of $3.4 million, a decrease in accounts receivable of $3.2 million, an increase in accrued taxes and surcharges of $0.9 million and a decrease in indemnification asset of $0.7 million. These cash inflows were offset by an increase in inventory of $7.5 million, a decrease in accrued liabilities and other of $4.1 million, an increase in prepaid expenses and other current assets of $2.1 million and an increase in other assets of $0.8 million.

Cash flows from investing activities

We have classified our investment portfolio as available for sale and our investments are made with a policy of capital preservation and liquidity as the primary objectives. We may hold investments to maturity; however, we may sell an investment at any time if the quality rating of the investment declines, the yield on the investment is no longer attractive or we are in need of cash. Because we invest only in investment securities that are highly liquid with a ready market, we believe that the purchase, maturity or sale of our investments has no material impact to our overall liquidity.

Net cash flow used in investing activities in fiscal 2016 was $63.7 million and primarily consisted of $48.2 million used to purchase investment securities, the acquisition of Corvisa and M5 Australia for $14.3 million, net of cash acquired and $10.8 million used to purchase property and equipment, partially offset by maturities of short-term investments of $9.7 million.

Net cash flow used in investing activities in fiscal 2015 was $19.5 million and primarily consisted of $12.2 million used to purchase investment securities, $11.4 million used to purchase property and equipment and $1.7 million used to purchase patents, technology and internally developed software, partially offset by maturities of short-term investments of $5.8 million.

Net cash flow used in investing activities in fiscal 2014 was $7.0 million and primarily consisted of $11.7 million used to purchase property and equipment and $0.9 million used to purchase investments securities, partially offset by maturities of short-term investments of $5.6 million.

Cash flows from financing activities

Net cash provided by financing activities was $8.2 million in fiscal 2016. In fiscal 2016, we received proceeds of $10.6 million from the issuance of common stock under various equity incentive plans, offset by the payment of $1.3 million for employee tax obligations associated with the vesting of restricted stock units. In addition, we repurchased $0.8 million of common stock during fiscal 2016.

Net cash provided by financing activities was $7.0 million in fiscal 2015. In fiscal 2015, we received proceeds of $9.3 million from the issuance of common stock under various equity incentive plans, offset by the payment of $1.2 million for employee tax obligations associated with the vesting of restricted stock units.

Net cash used by financing activities was $19.2 million in fiscal 2014. In fiscal 2014, we repaid $29.3 million for borrowings made under our previous Credit Facility, payments of $3.4 million of contingent purchase consideration in January 2014 pursuant to our acquisition of M5 and paid $0.9 million for employee tax obligations associated with the vesting of restricted stock units and paid $1.5 million in relation to our capital leases. These payments were partially offset by proceeds received of $15.8 million from the issuance of common stock under various employee benefit plans.

Common Stock Repurchases

In May 2016, the Board of Directors authorized the repurchase of up to $20.0 million of the Company's common stock from time to time at the discretion of our management. This stock repurchase authorization has no expiration date. During fiscal 2016, we repurchased approximately 126,000 shares of our common stock at a total cost of $0.8 million. As of June 30, 2016, we had a remaining authorization of $19.2 million for future share repurchases.

Contractual Obligations

The following is a summary of our contractual obligations as of June 30, 2016:

We contract with independent sources to manufacture our products and purchase components from a variety of suppliers. During the normal course of business, in order to manage future demand for our products and to ensure adequate component supply, we enter into agreements with manufacturers and suppliers which allow us to procure inventory based upon criteria and timing that we define. Certain of these purchase commitments are non-cancelable and unconditional commitments. In certain instances, these agreements allow us the option to cancel, reschedule, and adjust our requirements based on our business needs prior to firm orders being placed.

In addition to our contractual obligations noted above, we have a contractual obligation related to unrecognized tax benefits of approximately $6.3 million as of June 30, 2016.

Off-Balance Sheet Arrangements

We do not have any material off-balance sheet arrangements (other than those disclosed above within Contractual Obligations) nor do we have any material relationships with unconsolidated entities or financial partnerships, such as entities often referred to as structured finance or special purpose entities, which are established for the purpose of facilitating off-balance sheet arrangements or other contractually narrow or limited purposes.

Critical Accounting Policies and Estimates

Our consolidated financial statements are prepared in accordance with U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. These accounting principles require us to make certain estimates and judgments that can affect the reported amounts of assets and liabilities as of the dates of the consolidated financial statements, the disclosure of contingencies as of the dates of the consolidated financial statements, and the reported amounts of revenue and expenses during the periods presented. Although we believe that our judgments and estimates are reasonable under the circumstances, actual results may differ from those estimates.

We believe the following to be our critical accounting policies because they are important to the portrayal of our financial condition and results of operations and they require critical management judgments and estimates about matters that are uncertain:

If actual results or events differ materially from those contemplated by us in making these estimates, our reported financial condition and results of operations for future periods could be materially affected. See “Risk Factors” for certain matters that may affect our future financial condition or results of operations.

Revenue Recognition

We derive our revenue from the sale of hosted and premise based Unified Communication systems and services.

When a sales arrangement contains multiple elements, such as hardware and software products and/or services, we allocate revenue to each element based on relative selling prices. The relative selling price is determined using vendor specific objective evidence of fair value (“VSOE”) when available. When VSOE cannot be established, the Company attempts to determine the third party evidence of selling price (“TPE”) for the deliverables. TPE is determined based on competitor prices for similar deliverables when sold separately by the competitors. Generally, our product offerings differ from those of our competitors and comparable pricing of our competitors is often not available. Therefore, we are typically not able to determine TPE. When we are unable to establish selling price using VSOE or TPE, we use estimated selling prices (“ESP”) in our allocation of arrangement fees. The ESP for a deliverable is determined as the price at which we would transact if the products or services were sold on a stand-alone basis.

Product and Support and services revenues:

The sale of IP telecommunication systems include hardware, primarily phones and voice switches, software components and may also include training, installation, professional services and post-contractual support for the products. Our business strategy is centered on selling to enterprise customers through channel partners rather than directly. Sales to value-added distributors allow us to leverage our existing distribution infrastructure and sales personnel.

The typical system includes a combination of IP phones, switches and software applications. For sales transactions made both directly and to resellers, revenue is recognized at the time of shipment provided that all

the provisions of revenue recognition have been met. For sales to value-added distributors, revenue is initially deferred and is recognized at the time of sale by the distributor to their customer, provided all the provisions of revenue recognition have been met. We refer to this distribution approach as two-tier distribution model and the recognition of revenue at the time of sale by the distributor as the sell through method.

We recognize revenue when persuasive evidence of an arrangement exists, product has shipped or delivery has occurred (depending on when title passes), the sales price is fixed or determinable and free of contingencies and significant uncertainties, and collection is probable. The fee is considered fixed or determinable at the execution of an agreement, based on specific products and quantities to be delivered at specified prices. The agreements with reseller partners generally do not include rights of return or acceptance provisions. Even though substantially all of the contractual agreements do not provide return privileges, there are circumstances for which we will accept a return. We maintain a reserve for such returns based on historical experience with reseller partners. The agreements with our value-added distributors allow for limited rights of return of products generally purchased within the previous 90 days. In addition to such return rights, we generally offer price protection provisions to our distributors when there is a permanent reduction of our sales prices. In such cases, we are obligated to grant the distributor a credit for the difference between the change in the aggregate price of any amounts that have been purchased but unsold by the distributor as of the effective date of such decrease. In addition, certain of our distributors stock phones and switches and purchase licenses only upon sale to a value added reseller or end customer. Revenue is deferred for distributors until the distributor sells the hardware and license to their customer which would constitute a complete configuration of our system. To the extent that our agreements contain acceptance terms, we recognize revenue upon product acceptance, unless the acceptance provision is deemed to be perfunctory. Payment terms to customers generally range from net 30 to net 60 days. In the event payment terms are extended materially from the Company’s standard business practices, the fees are deemed to not be fixed or determinable and revenue is recognized when the payment becomes due. We assess the ability to collect from our customers based on a number of factors, including credit worthiness and past transaction history of the customer. If the customer is not deemed credit worthy, we defer all revenue from the arrangement until payment is received and all other revenue recognition criteria have been met. Shipping charges billed to customers are included in product revenue and the related shipping costs are included in cost of product revenue. Provisions for return allowances and product warranties are recorded at the time revenue is recognized based on our historical experience. The provision for return allowances is recorded as a reduction to revenues on the statement of operations and is included as a reduction to accounts receivable on the balance sheet.

Most of the products and services included in a system qualify as separate units of accounting. Many of our products have both software and non-software components that function together to deliver the essential functionality of the integrated system product. We analyze all of our software and non-software products and services and consider the features and functionalities of the individual elements and the stand alone sales of those individual components among other factors, to determine which elements are essential or non-essential to the overall functionality of the integrated system product. We recognize revenue related to installation services and training upon delivery of the service.

Our core software, which we refer to as “essential software,” is integrated with hardware and is essential to the functionality of the integrated system product. We also sell additional software which provides increased features and functions, but is not essential to the overall functionality of the integrated system products, which we refer to as “non-essential software.” At the initial purchase, the customer generally bundles together the hardware, essential software, non-essential software, as needed, and up to five years of post-contractual support. Thereafter, if the enterprise customer increases end users and functionality, it may add more hardware, both essential and non-essential software components, and related post-contractual support by purchasing them separately.

The revenue for these multiple element arrangements is allocated to the non-essential software deliverables and the non-software deliverables based on the relative selling prices of all of the deliverables in the arrangement using the hierarchy in the revenue accounting guidance. The non-essential software deliverables included in a multiple element arrangement are subject to the industry specific software revenue recognition guidance. The relative selling price is determined using vendor specific objective evidence of fair value (“VSOE”) when available. As we have not been able to obtain VSOE for all of the non-essential software deliverables in the arrangement, revenue allocated to the delivered non-essential software elements is recognized using the residual

method in accordance with industry specific software revenue recognition guidance. Under the residual method, the amount of revenue recognized for the delivered non-essential software elements equaled the total allocated consideration less the VSOE of any undelivered elements bundled with such non-essential software elements.

We have been able to establish VSOE for our professional and post contractual support services mainly based on the volume and the pricing of the stand-alone sales for these services within a narrow range. We establish our estimated selling price (“ESP”) for products by considering factors including, but not limited to, geographies, customer segments and pricing practices. The determination of ESP is made through consultation with and formal approval by our management. We regularly review VSOE, the third party evidence of selling price and ESP and maintain internal controls over the establishment and updates of these estimates.

Hosted and related services revenues:

Our hosted and related services and solutions consist primarily of our proprietary hosted VoIP Unified Communications system as well as other services such as minutes usage from foreign and domestic calling plans, certain Unified Communications applications, Internet service provisioning, training and other professional services. Additionally, we offer our customers the ability to purchase phones from us directly or rent such phones as part of their service agreements. Customers are not required to purchase phones from us directly as they can independently purchase such equipment. Our customers typically enter into a 12-month service agreement whereby they are billed for such services on a monthly basis.

Monthly recurring hosted services are recognized in the period when the service is delivered. The installation fees are recognized on a straight-line basis over the estimated customer life.

We bill most of the monthly recurring hosted service revenue a month in advance. Any amounts billed and collected, but for which the service is not yet delivered, are included in deferred revenue. These amounts are recognized as revenues only when the service is delivered.

We maintain a reserve for credits provided to customers for outages, quality issues, billing disputes or changes in the service levels that are included in the amounts that were billed in advance. The reserve for such credits is based on historical experiences and trends. We also maintain a reserve for amounts that are deemed as uncollectible.

Stock-Based Compensation

We measure all share-based payments to employees based on the grant date fair value of the awards and recognize these amounts in our consolidated statement of operations over the period during which the employee is required to perform services in exchange for the award (generally over the vesting period of the award). We amortize the fair value of share-based payments on a straight-line basis. Income tax benefits realized upon exercise or vesting of an award in excess of that previously recognized in earnings are presented in the consolidated statements of cash flows as a financing activity when applicable.

Stock-based compensation expense recognized in the consolidated statements of operations has been reduced for forfeitures since it is based on awards ultimately expected to vest. If factors change and we employ different assumptions in the application of our option-pricing model in future periods or if we experience different forfeiture rates, the compensation expense that is derived may differ significantly from what we have recorded in the current year.

Goodwill and Purchased-Intangible Assets

Goodwill is tested for impairment on an annual basis on June 30th and when specific circumstances dictate between annual tests. When impaired, the carrying value of goodwill is written down to fair value. The goodwill impairment test involves a two-step process. The first step, identifying a potential impairment, compares the fair value of a reporting unit with its carrying amount, including goodwill. If the carrying value of the reporting unit exceeds its fair value, the second step would need to be conducted; otherwise, no further steps are necessary as no potential impairment exists. The second step, measuring the impairment loss, compares the implied fair value of the reporting unit goodwill with the carrying amount of that goodwill. Any excess of the reporting unit goodwill carrying value over the respective implied fair value is recognized as an impairment loss. There was no impairment of goodwill identified in fiscal 2016, 2015, or 2014. The fair value of our single reporting unit was significantly in excess of the carrying value, which includes goodwill.

Purchased-intangible assets are amortized on a straight-line basis over the periods of benefit, ranging from two to eight years. We perform a review of purchased-intangible assets whenever events or changes in circumstances indicate that the useful life is shorter than we had originally estimated or that the carrying amount of assets may not be recoverable. If such facts and circumstances exist, we assess the recoverability of purchased-intangible assets by comparing the projected undiscounted net cash flows associated with the related asset or group of assets over their remaining lives against their respective carrying amounts. Impairments, if any, are based on the excess of the carrying amount over the fair value of those assets. If the useful life of the asset is shorter than originally estimated, we accelerate the rate of amortization and amortize the remaining carrying value over the new shorter useful life. There were no indicators of impairment of purchased-intangible assets identified in fiscal 2016, 2015, or 2014.

Accounting for Income and Telecom Taxes

We account for income taxes using the asset and liability method of accounting for income taxes. Deferred income taxes are recognized by applying enacted statutory tax rates applicable to future years to differences between the financial statement carrying amounts of existing assets and liabilities and their respective tax bases and operating loss and tax credit carryforwards. The effect on deferred tax assets and liabilities of a change in tax rates is recognized in income in the period that includes the enactment date. The measurement of deferred tax assets is reduced, if necessary, by a valuation allowance for any tax benefit of which future realization is uncertain.

In assessing the realization of deferred tax assets, management considers whether it is more likely than not that some portion or all of deferred tax assets will not be realized. The realization of deferred tax assets is based on several factors, including our past earnings and the scheduling of deferred taxes and projected income from operating activities. As of June 30, 2016, we do not believe it is more likely than not that the deferred tax assets relating to U.S. federal and state operations are realizable. We intend to maintain the valuation allowance until sufficient positive evidence exists to support reversal of some or all of the valuation allowance. Our income tax benefit recorded in the future will be reduced or increased in the event changes to the valuation allowance are required.

We had federal net operating loss carryforwards of approximately $93.9 million as of June 30, 2016, which expire at various dates between 2023 and 2036. These net operating loss carryforwards include the effects of a favorable tax ruling determined under Section 382 by the Internal Revenue Service in March 2010 as well as federal net operating loss carryforwards available from prior acquisitions. We have not completed Section 382 studies for net operating losses incurred in the years subsequent to July 2007. Upon the completion of these studies, the amount of net operating losses available for utilization may be limited.

As a provider of communication services, we assess whether to include the taxes and surcharges collected from customers and remitted to government authorities, including Universal Service Fund charges, sales, use, and various surcharges, in our revenues and expenses. This assessment includes whether we are the primary obligor or principal taxpayer for the taxes assessed in each jurisdiction where we do business. In jurisdictions where we determine that we are the principal taxpayer, we record the surcharges within our revenues and cost of hosted and related services. In jurisdictions where we determine that we are merely a collection agent for the government authority, we do not include them in our revenues or cost of hosted and related services.

Recent Accounting Pronouncements

Refer to Note 1 to the Consolidated Financial Statements in Item 8 for a discussion of the expected impact of recently issued accounting pronouncements.

Market Risk

Market risk is the potential loss arising from adverse changes in market rates and prices, such as foreign currency exchange and interest rates. We do not enter into derivatives or other financial instruments for trading or speculative purposes. In the normal course of our business, we are exposed to foreign currency exchange rate risk inherent in conducting business globally in foreign currencies. We are primarily exposed to foreign currency fluctuations related to collections from accounts receivable balances and cash in banks that are denominated in

Australian dollar, British pound, Canadian dollar and the Euro. During the years ending June 30, 2016 and 2015, we used derivative instruments to reduce the volatility of earnings associated with changes in foreign currency exchange rates. We used foreign exchange forward contracts to mitigate the gains and losses generated from the re-measurement of certain foreign monetary assets and liabilities, primarily including cash balances, third party accounts receivable and intercompany transactions recorded on the balance sheet. These derivatives are not designated and do not qualify as hedge instruments. Accordingly, changes in the fair value of these instruments are recognized in other income and expenses during the period of change. As of June 30, 2016 a 10% change in the applicable foreign exchange rates would result in an approximately $0.6 million increase or decrease in our pretax earnings.

In addition, we currently hold our investment portfolio in accounts with two financial firms. If these firms were to experience financial or other regulatory difficulties, it might be difficult for us to access our investments in a timely manner.

Interest Rate Risk

Our exposure to the interest rate risk due to changes in the general level of United States interest rates is due to both our cash equivalents and short term investments and our indebtedness. We maintain an investment portfolio of various holdings, types, and maturities. These securities are generally classified as available for sale and consequently, are recorded on the balance sheet at fair value with unrealized gains and losses reported as a separate component of accumulated other comprehensive income (loss). At any time, a sharp rise in interest rates could have a material adverse impact on the fair value of our investment portfolio. Conversely, declines in interest rates could have a material positive impact on interest earnings for our portfolio. The following table presents the hypothetical change in fair values in the financial instruments we held at June 30, 2016 that are sensitive to changes in interest rates. The modeling technique used measures the change in fair values arising from selected potential changes in interest rates on our investment portfolio, which had a fair value of $50.0 million at June 30, 2016. Market changes reflect immediate hypothetical parallel shifts in the yield curve of plus or minus 100, 50 and 25 basis points.

SHORETEL, INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES
INDEX TO CONSOLIDATED FINANCIAL STATEMENTS

REPORT OF INDEPENDENT REGISTERED PUBLIC ACCOUNTING FIRM

To the Board of Directors and Stockholders of
ShoreTel, Inc.
Sunnyvale, California

We have audited the accompanying consolidated balance sheets of ShoreTel, Inc. and subsidiaries (the “Company”) as of June 30, 2016 and 2015, and the related consolidated statements of operations, comprehensive loss, stockholders’ equity, and cash flows for each of the three years in the period ended June 30, 2016. These consolidated financial statements are the responsibility of the Company's management. Our responsibility is to express an opinion on these consolidated financial statements based on our audits.

We conducted our audits in accordance with the standards of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (United States). Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain reasonable assurance about whether the financial statements are free of material misstatement. An audit includes examining, on a test basis, evidence supporting the amounts and disclosures in the financial statements. An audit also includes assessing the accounting principles used and significant estimates made by management, as well as evaluating the overall financial statement presentation. We believe that our audits provide a reasonable basis for our opinion.

In our opinion, such consolidated financial statements present fairly, in all material respects, the financial position of ShoreTel, Inc. and subsidiaries as of June 30, 2016 and 2015, and the results of their operations and their cash flows for each of the three years in the period ended June 30, 2016, in conformity with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America.

We have also audited, in accordance with the standards of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (United States), the Company's internal control over financial reporting as of June 30, 2016, based on the criteria established in Internal Control — Integrated Framework (2013) issued by the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission and our report dated September 12, 2016 expressed an unqualified opinion on the Company's internal control over financial reporting.

/s/ DELOITTE & TOUCHE LLP

San Jose, California
September 12, 2016

SHORETEL, INC. AND SUBSIDIARIES
   
CONSOLIDATED BALANCE SHEETS
(Amounts in thousands, except per share amounts)