Mitel's 2007 acquisition of Inter-Tel seems to have bolstered both its product portfolio and its channel at the SMB end of the market. I had a chance to chat with Doug Michaelides, VP of global marketing at Mitel, and Asif Rehman, the company's director of solutions marketing, and they pointed to Mitel's recent announcement of a new SMB package, as well as to specific progress in expanding Mitel's channel.
Mitel's 2007 acquisition of Inter-Tel seems to have bolstered both its product portfolio and its channel at the SMB end of the market. I had a chance to chat with Doug Michaelides, VP of global marketing at Mitel, and Asif Rehman, the company's director of solutions marketing, and they pointed to Mitel's recent announcement of a new SMB package, as well as to specific progress in expanding Mitel's channel.On the channel side, Doug noted that, pre-merger, Mitel had 25 channel partners carrying exclusively Mitel gear; that figure is now 135--a combination, Doug said, of existing Inter-Tel channel partners signing on with Mitel exclusively, together with other partners liking what they see in the evolution of Mitel's SMB product suite.
That product suite got a shot in the arm with the acquisition of Inter-Tel's 5000 platform. Part of last month's Mitel SMB announcement was the capability to update installed Inter-Tel 5000s to support Mitel's 5300 series IP phones. The upgrade also adds new conferencing, unified communications and mobility features to the Mitel 5000, as the merged product line is called.
While Mitel has embraced the 5000 relatively whole, it discontinued the native-SIP Inter-Tel 7000, because, Doug Michaelides said, it was considered to have too much overlap with Mitel's 3300. But they are leveraging pieces of the 7000's technology. For example, Doug said, the 7000, "had a very effective service creation environment," which Mitel will use as an application development environment to create custom apps for vertical industries. At this point, Mitel is just using this capability internally, and isn't releasing it for developers within enterprises.
Inter-Tel's other calling card was managed services, and this capability has been folded into the Mitel Total Solution Services offer. Mitel is scaling the capacities of this offering to support the higher-end Mitel 3300 platform, which can serve mid- to larger-size enterprises, and will be able to supplement management of the voice gear with programs that support data networking and 3rd party equipment (such as IVR and videoconferencing) that supports capabilities that complement the voice platform. Mitel is also a certified CLEC, allowing it to be a service provider as well.
I asked Doug about his reaction to Brocade's acquisition of Foundry Networks, since Foundry has been one of Mitel's leading data networking partners. He responded that, "Our current view is, we don't see our relationship changing as a result of that acquisition."
So now almost a year and a half out from the acquisition, Mitel's ready for the next phase. "We don't talk integration anymore," Doug Michaelides said. "We talk growth."
