Mitel WX Takes a Different Approach to UC
Unified communications has traditionally been built around the needs of the desk worker. Give employees a phone, softphone, messaging, meetings, presence, and a collection of collaboration tools, and then try to make those capabilities work for everyone else.
Mitel is taking a different approach with its new Mitel Workforce Experience (Mitel WX). Rather than starting with the communications client and trying to make it work across the organization, Mitel is starting with the employee’s role and the workflows associated with that role.
That distinction could be particularly important as enterprises look beyond the traditional knowledge worker and try to bring better communications capabilities to the large - and often underserved -frontline workforce.
UC Isn't One-Size-Fits-All
During a recent analyst briefing, Mitel executives talked about what they see as a fundamental problem with UC - most UC platforms have historically been designed primarily for knowledge workers sitting at desks. That works reasonably well for employees who spend their days in desktop applications, but it doesn’t necessarily work for a nurse, field service technician, hotel employee, retail associate, or manufacturing work who may spend most the day away from a computer, who represent 80% of the workforce. While the communications requirements of these workers may be dramatically different from deskbound workers, many organizations have essentially given all of them the same communications -tools, which has led to implications like shadow IT.
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Mitel’s answer is a role-based communications framework that can be tailored to the job an employee actually performs.
Mitel WX takes a role-based approach instead. Administrators can create different roles and templates and determine which capabilities are presented to different groups of employees.
The demo presented to the analysts illustrated how this works. Users can have different widgets and applications available depending on their role, while administrators control which capabilities are provisioned. Employees can then customize aspects of their own interface without having to navigate functionality they don't need.
This is more than a user-interface change. If done well, it could make communications technology more relevant to employees who don't spend their days sitting in front of a PC.
That includes what Mitel describes as the frontline or deskless workforce, which represents a significant portion of employees in industries such as healthcare, manufacturing, retail, hospitality and the public sector.
The Hybrid Architecture May Be Just as Important
For Mitel customers, however, I think the architecture may ultimately be as important as the user experience. Mitel has been an early leader in the hybrid architecture approach, which is now seeing a resurgence and is being embraced by companies of all sizes in the AI era, where privacy and security are paramount for both regulated and non-regulated businesses.
Mitel has a large installed base, and many of those customers aren't necessarily looking to rip and replace their communications infrastructure. They may have significant investments in existing Mitel platforms, while also having good reasons for keeping some communications capabilities on-premises or in a private cloud. Mitel WX is designed with that reality in mind.
The new customers can work with existing Mitel call-control platforms, allowing customers to introduce the Mitel WX experience without immediately replacing the underlying infrastructure. The architecture also supports combinations of on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud deployments, including multi-domain environments, providing customers some flexibility in how they modernize.
The cloud migration conversation has often been framed as a binary choice: move everything to the cloud or stay on-premises. That's increasingly unrealistic for large enterprises, particularly in regulated or mission-critical environments. Mitel is instead betting that customers want to determine where different pieces of their communications environment should live. For existing Mitel customers, that could provide a more practical modernization path.
Bringing Communications Into the Workflow
Another interesting aspect of Mitel WX is its emphasis on workflow integration. Mitel is positioning the Mitel WX less as another standalone communications application and more as a platform that can incorporate the applications and information employees need to do their jobs.
The company demonstrated the ability to integrate applications such as CRM and EHR systems and described a marketplace and SDK approach that can allow partners and customers to develop additional widgets and integrations.
This concept isn't entirely new, as most UC vendors talk about integrations. The difference is that Mitel is tying those integrations to the employee's role. The objective isn't necessarily to put every possible application into everyone's communications client. It's to give a particular employee the applications and information that are relevant to the job. That is an important distinction as organizations try to reduce application overload rather than adding another application to the pile.
Where AI Fits In
AI is also part of Mitel's longer-term strategy. Mitel executives talked about voice as a natural interface for AI, particularly for frontline workers. That's an interesting area to watch because much of the current enterprise AI discussion still revolves around knowledge workers interacting with AI through a screen. For a worker in a hospital, factory, hotel or field environment, voice may be a much more practical interface.
Mitel isn't positioning WX simply as an AI product, and I think that's the right approach. The more interesting question is how AI becomes part of the role-based workflows over time. For example, an employee shouldn't necessarily have to open a separate AI application to get assistance. If AI can be embedded into the communication and workflow tools the employee is already using, it becomes much more useful.
What This Means for Mitel Customers
The big question for Mitel customers will be whether Mitel WX can deliver on the promise of modernization without forcing them to abandon what already works. That is particularly relevant for organizations with complex communications environments and significant investments in Mitel infrastructure.
If Mitel WX can provide a modern, role-based employee experience while allowing customers to maintain existing call-control systems and choose where workloads are deployed, it gives Mitel customers another option besides a wholesale platform replacement.
There are still questions around the breadth of integrations, the depth of the workflow capabilities and how the platform will evolve as Mitel adds more AI functionality. Those will be important factors in determining how differentiated WX ultimately is. But I think the basic premise is sound.
The future of enterprise communications isn't necessarily about finding one UC application that works equally well for everyone. It may be about delivering the right communications experience for the job an employee actually performs.
That's a somewhat different way of thinking about UC, and for Mitel customers with large frontline workforces and complex hybrid environments, it could be a useful one.
