A Blueprint for Success: Mitel's Hybrid Communications Strategy

Achieving operational success is no easy task. It is rooted in a core business principle: understand your market, craft a long-term strategy, and execute with precision. In the fast-evolving world of IT, staying disciplined in this approach can be challenging.

Take Apple’s move in the mid-2000s as an example. Recognizing the untapped potential of mobile applications and the rising demand for mobility, Apple seized a market opportunity others overlooked. 4G Wireless Broadband was set for global deployment. Apple knew the power of the application and the power to extend that to mobility, and it set a bold strategy. Despite skepticism about entering a mobile market dominated by established players, Apple introduced the iPhone. Apple revolutionized the industry with a sleek touchscreen interface, intuitive app functionality, and embedded camera technology. Apple created a new device adoption and customer loyalty standard through consistent refinement and alignment with market dynamics.

Unified Communications Market Dynamics and Mitel’s Strategy for Growth

The Unified Communications (UC) market is undergoing a significant shift. For years, the narrative centered on an inevitable move to multi-tenant UCaaS solutions. However, enterprises are increasingly turning to Hybrid Cloud and Hybrid Communications models. Why? The complexity of UC demands solutions that cater to specific business needs.

Enterprises require flexibility to support diverse roles, from knowledge to frontline workers. They need control over their systems to ensure security, compliance, and seamless integration with key applications like CRM and ERP platforms, school alarm systems, nurse call technologies, and financial services workflows. On top of this, businesses are adopting innovations that Generative AI will bring while ensuring that they protect their business from unintended consequences like safeguarding data assets and maintaining compliance with evolving regulations. It is clear: UC implementations must be adaptable, secure, customizable, and integrated with key business workflows.

This shift presents a significant opportunity for Mitel. With decades of experience, we have crafted a Hybrid Communications strategy tailored to meet these changing needs. Our approach is designed to offer flexible, secure, and future-ready communications that empower long-term success.

Delivering on Mitel’s Strategic Focus

Mitel is fully committed to leading the Hybrid Communications space. Our strategy centers on providing unmatched choice and flexibility, empowering customers to deploy the communications solutions that best fit their business needs. To support this, we are focused on advancing key areas, ensuring our solutions remain agile, secure, and aligned with the demands of modern enterprises.

1. Harmonizing the Mitel and Unify Portfolio

With the acquisition of Unify, Mitel gained a robust portfolio of product assets, presenting an opportunity to streamline and enhance our offerings. We have focused on harmonizing these portfolios to deliver greater simplicity and value to customers and partners. The Mitel Common Communications Framework unifies deployment models and licensing structures, helping customers easily align their needs with the right solutions. This framework also provides access to Mitel’s extensive portfolio of vertical applications and third-party integrations, ensuring businesses can deploy the tools that best serve their needs.

We have made strategic decisions about our go-forward solutions to provide clarity and confidence, including discontinuing several small business products. We remain committed to core platforms such as OpenScape Voice/4000, MiVoice Business, MiVoice MX-One/5000, and OpenScape Business. Additionally, we are extending innovations like SIP-DECT mobility across these platforms, ensuring customers have access to advanced, future-ready communications technology.

2. Delivering a Common UC Experience

At Mitel, we are committed to providing a seamless and consistent UC experience for all users, regardless of the platform. With a broad range of core call control solutions and high switching costs, we focus on unifying our portfolio to a single user experience.

Considerable progress has been made in this area, including UI enhancements that deliver a cohesive look and feel across collaboration solutions. Whether users are accessing UC or contact center applications, they can expect a consistent experience. Additionally, we have introduced Unify Phone across all Mitel solutions, offering a streamlined, serverless UC option for deployments that do not require full collaboration and meeting features.

3. Integrate Unified Communications Both Horizontally and Vertically

In today’s workplace, businesses rely on multiple collaboration and meeting solutions to meet the diverse needs of employees. Mitel embraces this reality by ensuring seamless integration with both horizontal and vertical applications.

A prime example is our strategic partnership with Zoom, which was announced in September. Together, we are launching an AI-first Hybrid Communications solution in Q1 2025, enabling our customers to scale with Mitel and reach new market segments. Additionally, we have enhanced our integration capabilities with Microsoft Teams, including launching our OpenScape SBC for deployment with any Mitel solution. These efforts position Mitel as the ideal partner for businesses seeking flexible, interoperable communications.

4. Tailored Vertical Solutions for Frontline Workers

Supporting all frontline or knowledge workers is central to Mitel’s strategy. Frontline workers represent an underserved market. Mitel’s unique expertise at the intersection of hardware, software, and integrations with vertical applications enables us to provide tailored solutions for these specific needs.

Our suite of vertical applications includes the Virtual Care Collaboration Service, a telehealth solution for healthcare workers and businesses featuring online appointment bookings, video meetings, diagnostic tools, and integration with Electronic Healthcare Record systems. For organizations requiring multi-line communication, such as financial traders, transportation dispatchers, or traffic controllers, OpenScape Xpert delivers critical simultaneous call management functionality in volume with high reliability. We have also added a Critical Event Management platform, designed to support everything from emergency response centers to general alerting and broadcast notifications, integrated with Mitel core solutions.

In the enterprise space, frontline customer experience agents are essential to operational success. To serve this segment, we have enhanced our CX solutions with Generative AI-powered tools like agent assistants, call transcription, and language support. These innovations, available with MiContact Center Business, will form the foundation of future Mitel CX offerings.

5. Next Generation CX

A key pillar of Mitel’s strategy is developing our next-generation Customer Experience (CX) solution. Incremental advancements across customer engagement needs drive this journey.

We have recently launched a major update for MiContact Center Business, introducing features like WebRTC-powered softphones, enhanced accessibility (WCAG compliance), compatibility across all Mitel UC solutions, and Generative AI capabilities. We have aligned the MiCC-B Ignite agent and supervisor interface to ensure consistency with our UC experience.

Additionally, Mitel Interaction Recording solutions now offer AI-driven capabilities like real-time transcription, keyword spotting, sentiment analysis, and call analytics. These features are available as stand-alone solutions or integrated with Mitel contact center offerings, helping businesses extract valuable insights from customer interactions.

We are excited to launch Mitel CX, our all-in-one, AI-assisted CX platform. Set to launch in Q1 2025, Mitel CX will support omnichannel interactions—including voice, video, chat, and social—enabling businesses to connect with customers seamlessly across any channel.

Our focus on elevating our Customer Experience offering is significant to our strategy, and we are well on our way to competing with today's CCaaS competitors with a comparable desired Hybrid Customer Experience solution.

Methodical Business Execution: A Model for Long-Term Success

Mitel is positioning itself for long-term success in a shifting UC market. As the industry adapts, many competitors may not fully grasp the dynamics at play, particularly the shift that Generative AI will trigger: the need to manage communications, customer experience, and computing at the edge within hybrid communications networks.

Mitel offers tailored choice and flexibility through our Mitel Common Communications Framework, grounded in hybrid communications principles. We are executing our strategic plan methodically and have made significant strides in 2024. While progress has been made, there is still more to come.

In 2025, we will continue to advance our strategy and meet our customers' evolving needs. Stay tuned to the Mitel Blog for updates on product enhancements, and watch the market as businesses make decisions regarding the next wave of communications and customer experience deployments.