Management
Nice to meet you
ShoreTel’s Cloud Division Executive Management Team
Keith Nealon – President & General Manager
Keith Nealon brings almost 20 years of strategy, sales and marketing experience to the ShoreTel Sky team. A well known figure in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) space Keith has grown several SaaS companies to a market leadership position. This includes Conductor, a leading enterprise SaaS platform to optimize organizations natural search performance, and Eloqua, a marketing automation platform company. During his four years at Eloqua, he helped scale the company from a small startup to what became known as “the 800lb gorilla in the space,” with global operations, an average compound growth of 80% year over year, and over 30,000 users in 30 countries. Prior to Eloqua, Nealon held various sales leadership positions at Navisite, Inc. (acquired by Time Warner Cable) where he helped build company revenues from $30 million to $125 million in just 3 years. Earlier in his career Nealon was CEO and co-founder of Nebula Technologies, an award winning international systems integration and consulting firm. The company enjoyed an average of 50% year over year growth and was ultimately sold in 2002. Nealon holds a double major in Math & Computer Science from the University of Dublin, Trinity College.
Michael McGuirl – Division CFO
Michael is a business executive and financial leader with background across all functional areas of a business. As the leader of the Cloud division finance team, he is responsible for operational finance support and controllers functions for the division. Michael provides the leadership for FP&A, SOX compliance, operational Governance and metrics as well as forecast modeling and analysis. Prior to joining ShoreTel, Michael held various financial leadership positions at Avaya and served as a Vice President at AT&T after working across 9 different business units and eight functional areas. Michael has an MBA in finance from Columbia University and a bachelor degree in accounting from James Madison University. He enjoys spending time with his wife Linda and three grown children in New Jersey as well as playing golf, tennis and basketball in his spare time.
Benjamin Irvine – Division VP, Operations
Irvine, VP of Operations, leads the team responsible for deploying and providing account management for clients. Irvine brings extensive expertise in managing operational teams that provide high touch service and has over five years experience working with VoIP. He also has a great deal of experience with Salesforce.com and was instrumental in the development and launching of ShoreTel Sky′s salesforce.com integration – ShoreTel Sky Connect for Salesforce. Before joining M5 Networks (now ShoreTel’s Cloud Division) in 2008, Irvine was the CEO of Octopus Networking, Inc., an IT consulting company that specialized in small and medium size businesses. After growing Octopus for seven years, Irvine led the effort to sell the company which resulted in a sale to All Covered, Inc. Prior to Octopus, he worked in as the CTO of a Latin American focused music website called www.dgolpe.com where he was responsible for software development and networking. Irvine received his BA in political science from University of Colorado at Boulder.
Heather Bennett – Division VP, Learning
Heather Bennett oversees the People department at ShoreTel’s Cloud Division. Believing that employee satisfaction is key in helping any organization reach its business objectives, the People team supports corporate learning, human resources, performance management, recruiting, employer branding and employee satisfaction. Bennett’s expertise in sales and education leads the growth of ShoreTel′s culture by encouraging staff to be successful contributors to the ShoreTel Sky story.
Throughout her career, Bennett has contributed her innovative sales and education approach to clients in many industries including technology, insurance, manufacturing, retail distribution, agriculture and health care. Previously, she was Vice President of Marketing for M5 Networks (now ShoreTel’s Cloud Division), President of a start-up consulting company, a NYC Teaching Fellow, and a sales executive in the IT industry. Bennett earned a B.A. from New York University and a M.A. from City University of New York.
Dennis Schmidt – VP, Network and Systems
Dennis Schmidt comes to ShoreTel’s Cloud division from Hewlett Packard where he spent the last 3 years, most recently responsible for driving world wide datacenter deployments, client engineering, operations, tooling, and management for the Unified Communications portfolio. Dennis has over 19 years experience working with and building teams to design and deliver complex, next generation networks and solutions with start-up wireless, CLEC, and DLEC communications providers and Fortune 50 Corporations. He started his career during law school when he began technical sourcing and contract negotiations for post Divestiture “start-up” CAP companies and CLECs. Mr. Schmidt has grown through a series of highly diverse roles which have placed him in technical management positions for telecom, network, and IT organizations including but not limited to delivery,engineering, governance, provisioning, sourcing, risk management, Global Business Development and world wide build and delivery.
Paul Weismantel – Senior Director, Product Management
Paul Weismantel heads ShoreTel Sky Product Management helping to lead the market in innovative Cloud based communication and information solutions. He is a proven leader, driven by a strategic vision, operational excellence, and a relentless commitment to continuous development of a championship caliber team. He has a standout track record delivering new leading edge high technology hardware & software products while continuing to build the business on extended life-cycle performance. Deep experience in meeting diverse needs of geographic and stratified markets with global solutions that scale and differentiate.
Prior to joining ShoreTel, Paul lead cross functional teams at Siemens, Avaya and NEC focused on productization, introduction and lifecycle efforts. Paul has a love of mentoring teams & a commitment to enlist functional partners in a matrix organization as trusted advisors for sustained optimal performance.
Jason Harper - Senior Director, Cloud Software Development
Jason is responsible for managing product development for ShoreTel Sky. His career has included engineering and engineering management roles at a variety of start-ups, mid-sized and large companies. Jason joined ShoreTel in 2006 and has held several engineering management roles, including managing the switch software and phone software teams. He has been in the telecommunications industry for the past 15 years, working at Aspect Communications prior to joining ShoreTel. Jason holds a Masters of Engineering in Electrical Engineering from Stanford and a Bachelors of Engineering from the University of Michigan.