Mitel CTO Jim Davies at Mitel's Partner Conference

Jim Davies, Chief Technical Officer of Mitel, speaks with Blair Pleasant at the Mitel Partner Conference in Hollywood, FL.

Blair Pleasant: I am here at the Mitel Partner Conference with Jim Davies. Jim is CTO of Mitel. So Jim, tell us what some of the highlights were today.

Jim Davies: Well, the highlights to me, I think, over and above the energy and excitement in the place, I think was very clear from the speakers that we had today was the alignment between Mitel and our partners. We had an excellent talk from the head of sales worldwide at VMWare. And he went through the VM strategies and how it linked into Mitel. I and some of my colleagues went through the Mitel view. And what I think is really quite exciting was, because of schedules and various other things, we didn't have time to collaborate ahead of time on the particular presentations. We have been collaborating quite a lot as companies and that came out in our presentations that they looked like they were authored by the same folks-a really sincere and honest connection of how well we have partnered with VMWare.

Blair: Some of your competitors are also partnering with VMWare; what are you doing differently?

Jim: Partnership is a very broad word, from "I know how to spell your name," to "absolutely committed." I think there are a number of data points that we could show, too, that Mitel is not just out with VMWare, but it's driven to the core of what we think is important. So to start with, every single application that Mitel develops can be run in a virtualization environment. There is no incremental cost; if you have purchased your software or bought a subscription to your software in a nonvirtualized environment, you can move seamlessly across to it.

And we are taking virtualization to the next degree. So we are not just talking about, hey we bought that VMWare certification, and being certified to run on VM platforms, we are also taking it to the core of our products in the way we do backups and restore, maintenance and management, are all being driven now for our applications only over VM. It's not an option, it's the only way to do it. So from our perspective - my perspective, anyways - Mitel is very committed. I think the analogy I used in the morning was the breakfast analogy, right? In the equation of eggs and bacon, chicken's involved in breakfast, the pig is committed - we're committed, we're very committed.

Blair: Great, well thank you very much.

Jim: You are welcome.