Mitel Virtually Recognized

According to Infonetics, only three enterprise telephony vendors posted year-over-year gains in revenue during 2012. Mitel, Cisco, and ShoreTel. It is hard to attribute success to any one component of a business strategy, but the commitment to virtualization certainly played a major role for Mitel.

This week Frost and Sullivan recognized Mitel with its 2013 North America Award for Product Leadership. "While Mitel has used its first-to-market advantages optimally, it has also regularly improved its single software stream to provide the same features, quality of service, warranty, and software assurance programs, no matter how customers choose to deploy its solutions," said Frost & Sullivan Senior Analyst, Robert Arnold. "The company has streamlined development, sales, training and support, to provide a consistent user experience across private cloud or customer-premises equipment, hosted or public cloud configurations."

It's taken some time, but Mitel is finally seeing the rewards from its early bet on both virtualization and specifically VMware. Mitel and VMware co-developed the first virtualized call control solution. It took awhile to convince that it was possible. The firms continue to share a close go-to-market relationship, in fact Mitel is exhibiting at VMware's Partner event this week in Las Vegas. Mitel created a virtualization designation for its channel partners, and also optimized its Mitel Applications Suite to leverage hypervisor technology. That means a complete Mitel UC solution - call control, instant messaging, and conferencing can run on virtualized servers integrated with VMware vSphere and vCenter. The virtualized solutions can reside with third-party solutions such as video conferencing server software from Vidyo.

Mitel customers have deployed over 4,000 virtual appliances, and its products are also in use with over 45 service providers. More than 40 percent of Mitel's UC application sales are now destined for virtualized deployments. A broad range of growing customers are attracted to hypervisor technology. SMB users benefit from reduced hardware and reduced footprint of space and cooling requirements. Larger organizations seek the operational benefits of a private cloud such as centralized provisioning and faster installation/upgrade cycles. Service providers benefit from dynamic scalability.

Mitel is no longer alone in embracing virtualization, but continues to enjoy benefits from its head start.