On the heels of the January 31 close of the Mitel acquisition of Aastra, the company on Wednesday made a major new release of its MiContact Center solution, 7.0. But it is the June 2013 acquisition of prairieFyre that brought some of the new capabilities now being added to MiContact Center.
As Mitel had been OEMing the prairieFyre application even before the acquisition, why are new features coming so quickly to the Mitel offer? My theory is that in the two years before they were acquired, prairieFyre had been working on a lot of new capabilities to support their Microsoft Lync contact center solution, an offer that Mitel was not reselling. Now that whatever walls which existed between the two companies have been knocked down, the development teams are free to be a little more creative about how to bring functionality that was initially created for the Microsoft Lync offer to the versions that work with Mitel infrastructure.
A great example of this is the complete refresh of the client user interface, based on an Office 2013 and Windows 8 look and feel. In addition, the release supports supervisor mobility with native Windows 8 Tablet support (right) and VMware View support for Apple IOS and Android tablets.
Another carryover from prarieFyre's earlier work on its Microsoft Lync contact center solution is a new Visual Workflow Designer. Earlier it supported only IVR design; now it adds interaction flow designer for all media types as well as post-call survey support.
Multimedia handling has also been upgraded, especially email handling. In earlier releases, only Microsoft Exchange email was supported, and interactions could only be delivered via an Outlook client. MiContact Center is now email system-agnostic. In terms of social media handling, MiContact Center continues to route these interactions like emails (as do many contact center solutions) but has added integrations to three new social media partners: Imooty, trackur, and BizVuSocial.
I asked Glenn Ala, Director, Product Management, MiContact Center why the integrations were, at least to my mind, less well-known social media handling solutions. Ala gave two reasons: each of these solutions offers entry level price points that are attractive to mid-market customers; and they are the ones that Mitel partners have asked for. He was quick to point out that additional integrations, if requested by customers or partners, would not be difficult to add.
Finally, Mitel has added predictive outbound to the solution. In earlier versions of MiContact Center, predictive dialing was only available via a professional services engagement. Mitel now has a productized offer, OEMed from UK-based Noetica. The outbound solution is integrated with MiVoice call control, with support for Windows Server Clustering and VMware. It's also:
* compliant with worldwide regulations on outbound calling,
* compatible with Active Directory
*PCI compliant and
*scales to 400 concurrent agents.
As is true for several enterprise communications vendors (Cisco, ShoreTel and Unify), contact center at Mitel is a major strategic initiative. In all of these companies, the contact center revenue growth has outpaced unified communications. Each also has reported in 2012 and 2013 that increased attention to contact center has resulted in improved attach rates (i.e., an increasing percentage of companies including contact center licenses in enterprise communications deals).
NOTE: as mentioned by Dave Michels' No Jitter post earlier this week, and reiterated in my conversation with Glenn Ala, Mitel will continue to offer both MiContact Center and the Aastra Solidus eCare contact center solutions for the foreseeable future.
Sheila McGee-Smith leads Enterprise Connect's Contact Center Track--learn about market trends, emerging technologies, and more!
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