Cisco wasn't the only company with an announcement today attacking the challenge of realtime performance for virtualized desktops. In conjunction with the announcement of its new "Freedom" architecture, Mitel announced a partnership with VMWare that will, next year, produce a communications client for a virtualized desktop.
I talked with Stephen Beamish, Mitel's VP of Global Marketing and Business Development, and he said Mitel is working with VMWare on softphones as well as video issues in a virtualized desktop environment, and he acknowledged that, "Where the work [still] needs to be done is scalability."
One approach to scalability--specifically, Cisco's--involves putting extra processing power on each desktop, but that's not a route Mitel is going with its desktop virtualization. However, as one of the pioneers in virtualization for communications systems, and a longtime partner with Sun and VMware, Mitel is well positioned to take its own path to solving the realtime challenge for virtualized desktops.
Another key element of the newly-announced Freedom vision is Mitel AnyWare, a hosted service that Mitel will provision out of its own datacenter in Seattle, charging $35/month per user for features including web and audio conferencing, voice mail with email forwarding, screen pop and click to dial, unlimited local and long distance, DID numbers, and twinning with mobile devices.
Mitel is both a registered CLEC in several jurisdictions, and a major provider of managed services, thanks in great part to its acquisition of Inter-Tel; so the AnyWare service is a natural, and well timed given the increasingly high profile that managed/hosted communications services are receiving in the industry.
Mitel will sell AnyWare on a three-year contract with a minimum of 10 seats; Stephen Beamish told me that most of Mitel's early deployments have been in smaller customers, sub-100 users, but that they've begun bidding 1,000-plus-user opportunities and expect the size of installations to grow.
Another announcement was availability of Mitel's UC Advanced client for the Android platform, with iPad, BlackBerry and RIM PlayBook (tablet) versions to follow. The UC Advanced client provides IM, video, unified messaging, presence, softphone, mobile client/web access, and dynamic extension.
Stephen Beamish told me in no uncertain terms that Mitel would not be following the example of Avaya and Cisco, who have released or will release proprietary tablets. "We feel the position of building yor own tablet is really an uphill battle when you're competing against something like the iPad," Stephen said. "Mitel's a software company. We integrate our software into other [i.e., hardware] solutions."
