Contact Center OEM PrairieFyre Acquired by Mitel

Mitel has acquired the privately held Ottawa-based prairieFyre, which is an important supplier of Mitel's contact center portfolio.

The company is paying around $20 million for prairieFyre. For the last 15 years, the latter has been the OEM for the majority of Mitel's contact center suite.

The CFO at Mitel, Steve Spooner, said that the company was seeking to invest in its contact center business, and that the relationship with prairieFyre means the acquisition is a logical step.

Spooner said: "The most logical candidate to bring into the fold, so to speak, was prairieFyre."

The contact center business from Mitel provides both on-premise and hosted solutions, and according to Spooner, is increasingly developing within Mitel, with the exception of its cloud business. This is due to contact center solutions being seen as a must-have buy by most organizations, particularly as they are 100 percent customer-facing.

Spooner said: "In a challenging economic environment where customers will defer an IP telephony purchase, they are not as likely to defer a contact center purchase."

The former CEO of prarieFye, Chris Courneya, will lead the Mitel- prairieFyre partnership. Courneya is the current vice president and general manager of Mitel Contact Centers.

Courneya stated that prairieFyre and its almost 1,200 solution providers will be migrating to Mitel with him; he emphasized that this move will be straightforward and seamless for partners, particularly because they have always distributed prairieFyre solutions under the Mitel brand as they have already been certified by Mitel to do so.

Courneya said: "We've built a really strong channel over the past 15 years with Mitel."

Spooner commented that the competitors of Mitel who have criticized the company in the past for failing to develop its own contact center solutions in-house will be quieted as a result of this acquisition.

Spooner stated: "We wanted to get that issue off the table."

The acquisition of prairieFyre by Mitel closed on Monday, and the latter said that the move will be accretive in the first year. (CY) Link