Mitel - Mobile First, Cloud Enabled, Millennial Focused

In New York City recently, I had the opportunity to attend Mitel's annual industry analyst conference, and of course get my fill of NY bagels and pizza. Mitel explained how the company has become mobile first, cloud enabled, and millennial focused. CMO Wes Durrow pointed out that "Most businesses don't have their business communications environment integrated with their mobile environment; we haven't unified UC." Much of the discussion over the next day and a half was about the role of mobility in business communications, which ties in nicely with Mitel's acquisition of Mavenir earlier this year.

The company is positioning itself to target the intersection of where real time enterprise communications meet with mobile and the cloud. As CEO Rich McBee pointed out, the intersection of these three areas is where the next wave of innovation will come from, and that he's betting the company on it. To that end, Mitel created a new platform called Mitel Next and an accelerator group to link real time communications with skills-based workflows into applications such as field service, for example. Leveraging its new mobility business (which includes software for voice over LTE and voice over Wi-Fi, IP Multimedia Subsystem, and rich communication services), Mitel hopes to bring true mobile capabilities back into each of its other businesses. This will be described in more detail in the coming months.

McBee explained that the company's mission is to make communications and collaboration seamless, enabling "one touch to connect in real time." I 100% agreed with him when he noted that, "Customers don't care about the magic behind the curtain. They want to be able to connect and have things work seamlessly." He described how Mitel is "passionately focused on making communications and collaboration seamless - any way, any media, any device, any time. That is a herculean task but it's what we're focused on."

Of course the cloud was a big topic of conversation. Jon Brinton, executive VP and GM Cloud Services, noted that Mitel expects its cloud business to grow from 12 to 19 percent of its business by 2018. Brinton explained, "Our growth and success in the cloud business isn't by accident. We're on the sixth generation of our virtualized call control, and we've supported hybrid cloud since 2010." Over five years ago, Mitel realized that they should provide their own services, which was called Mitel AnyWare and recently became Mitel Cloud Services. Following the theme of the conference, Brinton added that, "To be the enterprise cloud leader requires mobile + enterprise + cloud. We're bringing them together in a mobile enterprise cloud."

I had the opportunity to speak with several of the Mitel execs to get more insights about Mitel's direction.

Here's my interview with Jim Davies, VP Vertical Solutions about how Mitel views vertical applications and the role of cloud and mobility.

I also spoke with Wes Durow, CMO, about Mitel's mobile first, cloud enabled strategy.

Last but not least, I spoke with Brian Spencer, GM of Contact Center, about Mitel's contact center business and where things are headed.

While there was lots of information presented at the event, I would have liked to have heard more about Mitel NEXT, as well as the new collaboration solution that will be announced in the coming months. I'm looking forward to seeing what comes next.