by Ray Horak, Technology Editor
In the larger sense, Mitel truly needs no introduction, but just in case you don’t know the whole story…. In the late 1970s and early 1980s when I was Director and then AVP of Sales and Marketing at Contel, we sold Mitel TDM PBXs by the truckload. Some of you veterans may have experience with those great SX10, SX20, SX200 and SX2000 systems. The company went through some interesting twists and turns over the years as it went private, merged, shifted its focus from TDM to VoIP and then re-emerged as much larger and stronger public company (NASDAQ: MITL) in April 2010. In another sense, Mitel probably does need a reintroduction. The portfolio of communications solutions has expanded over the years to include managed services and network services designed to improve business performance. Mitel now is at the forefront of the most recent evolution in the market, Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC), combining multiple IT capabilities and, thereby, increasing communications efficiencies and improving the manner in which individuals, groups and organizations conduct business. Mitel has always been a highly innovative company and their solutions, based on my experiences, have always been solid. Add to that the dimension of extreme flexibility—Mitel products and services are sold individually or offered as a complete solution designed to address specific communications needs—and I think Mitel deserves a seat at the table, so to speak.
I was fortunate to spend some time recently with Peter O’Blenis, Director of Solutions Marketing, and to gain an understanding of Mitel’s new service and extended capabilities, including cloud-based UC service, desktop virtualization and extension of UC mobile. O’Blenis explained that “Mitel customers repeatedly have indicated that they want the ability to do more with less; although this is not a new theme, its level of intensity driven by the current state of the economy. As end user organizations across all market sectors have become used to doing more with less, the emphasis on doing so is unlikely to change any time soon. Mitel customers also want communications solutions that adapt to the needs of individuals and organizations, not the other way around, and the ability to integrate best-in class technologies and devices without introducing complexity. That translates into flexible and agile solutions, technically and financially. Finally, customer feedback emphasized the ability to integrate best-in class technologies and devices without introducing complexity. That means bringing in relevant third-party elements and applications to round out complete solutions.”
According to O’Blenis, Mitel has responded with Mitel Freedom, offering one identity, one software stream, one solution. That translates into a single telephone number, a single code base, and an in-office experience anytime and anywhere. The Freedom architecture embraces third-party components and apps and integrates with heritage systems, regardless of origin, thereby offering freedom from the more commonplace monolithic, walled garden architectures. Freedom also means freedom of choice in terms of the financial aspects of system selection, as the full range includes lease, purchase, hosted and hybrid options.
Freedom essentially is a highly flexible embodiment of Mitel Communications Director (MCD). From the IT Manager’s perspective, Freedom is business application software that integrates with other apps and runs on any network, any infrastructure and any platform (i.e., industry standard servers or Mitel 3300 switches). From the end user’s perspective, Freedom offers an in-office experience, anywhere and on any device (e.g., desk phone or mobile device). Freedom scales from MCD to Virtual MCD, and to multi-instance MCD for service providers and large multisite enterprises.
Freedom provides a consistent in-office experience for the desk-bound and mobile worker, alike. Whether employing a hardphone, softphone or mobile device, the user has access to applications including Audio and Web Conferencing, IM, video, Unified Messaging (UM) and presence. As the applications are available individually, the end user organization can ease into Freedom in phases, rather than rip and replace.
Deployment options include onsite (i.e., on-premises), private cloud, fully hosted and hybrid. The hosted, subscription-based model is called Mitel AnyWare and will be available directly from Mitel in the US. Hybrid solutions can include a combination of on-premises, private cloud, hosted and managed services, depending on business requirements. Freedom also supports a variety of ways to spin up the MCD, including integrated appliance, industry standard server and virtualized (VMware). Mitel will add the Virtual Contact Center (VCC) as a virtual appliance at the end of 2010. In 2011, Mitel will add desktop virtualization with VMware View, which will allow you to sit down anywhere and your desktop comes to you.
Freedom supports “Bring Your Own Phone” environments, including PBX and UC integration with a wide range of mobile devices and smartphones including Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Android and iPhone. Mitel currently offers a UC Advanced Mobile Clients for BlackBerry and will add one for Android in Q1 2011, and mass market tablet support for iPad & Playbook in 1stH 2011.
O’Blenis stated that Mitel has silently introduced AnyWare, the purely hosted offering, to a handful of leading customers across a broad spectrum of line sizes and market sectors. “We originally focused Freedom on the SMB, but quickly expanded our field of vision to include single-site and then multisite enterprises. We are now ready to roll on a general release and are ramping up the channel.”
There is a lot more to Freedom than I can cover here. Go to mitel.com/freedom for more.
