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In today’s digital world, virtually every business is under pressure to accelerate their speed of innovation. Process transformation represents an important innovation opportunity. By integrating communications into the applications and business workflows they use most, organizations can drive a step change improvement in employee productivity and customer satisfaction.
Thankfully, Mitel’s CloudLink allows customers to implement those innovations faster and more easily than ever before.
A great idea that keeps getting better
Mitel created CloudLink to achieve three key benefits:
- Enable the migration to Cloud (private, public, hybrid)
- Build applications once, for deployment across Mitel’s communications platforms
- Accelerate time-to-market, globally
To deliver these benefits, the CloudLink team adopted an agile software development process along with a continuous integration and delivery model. CloudLink has emerged as a means to quickly deploy innovations across Mitel’s communication platforms by providing an efficient microservices architecture, acting as a universal application development and deployment engine, and providing customers with faster access to updates and features.
These benefits were first revealed commercially in February 2019, when Mitel introduced a mobile-first unified communications application, built exclusively on CloudLink, for the MiVoice Office 400 communications platform. Since then, Mitel has expanded the use of CloudLink across many more of its applications. And now, CloudLink is the de facto application platform for Mitel with over 1.2 million active users, while also providing the underpinning for its subscription strategy.
Building more bridges
Use of the CloudLink microservices architecture has allowed Mitel to deliver innovations to large, complex applications more rapidly, frequently and reliably — portfolio-wide. Mitel’s popular product, MiCollab, provides a perfect example as it includes functionality provided by several CloudLink microservices. MiTeam Meetings (a video collaboration application, designed for continuous workspace with video, chat, and file sharing) is another example of an application built via extensive use of CloudLink microservices. Built on this agile foundation, CloudLink can deliver the continuous innovation businesses need to quickly adapt to change, add new capabilities, stay current, and do more with their Mitel investment.
CloudLink remains a critical element of Mitel’s roadmap and a focal development environment for Mitel’s R&D organization. I’m excited to announce that CloudLink will now also become an asset to our partners’ roadmaps, as they explore development opportunities to define vertically aligned communications and collaboration applications as part of their communications portfolio. Ultimately, our joint customers will be the biggest winners, fueled by new, powerful sources of innovation that will help them compete more effectively in our digital world.
That’s why Mitel will continue to bring the value of CloudLink to more platforms and customers in the following ways:
Making more Mitel products CloudLink-ready. To enable CloudLink-based applications to integrate across its entire communications portfolio, Mitel will extend the CloudLink gateway that was first introduced for the MiVoice Office 400 to the other flagship communication platforms – MiVoice Business, MiVoice MX-ONE, and MiVoice 5000 in Q2 2022.
Bridging private and public cloud deployments. Mitel will accelerate hybrid cloud and edge deployments. Customers can leverage the CloudLink platform, applications, integrations, and subscription models to maximize their technology ROI, maintain current on-site platforms, and integrate cloud-based collaboration applications that fit their specific business needs.
Enabling partner-built customizations and integrations. CloudLink will facilitate our partners’ ability to build integrations of 3rd party products and capabilities with Mitel communications platforms and develop their own custom applications using the same APIs that are used by Mitel for its own applications.
CloudLink’s next act: The catalyst for Mitel’s API economy
To date, the innovations contributed by CloudLink have been created by Mitel. But, that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of CloudLink’s potential strategic value. The next exciting phase of CloudLink innovation will be API-enabled and partner-driven.
Businesses need to enable more processes with communications capabilities. An open API ecosystem is the perfect way to deliver this kind of innovation. According to a Google study, APIs enable organizations to speed up new application development (58%), connect internal applications (53%), and create a developer ecosystem (47%). IDC predicts that overall spending on these API-driven projects will reach a historic high totaling $6.8 trillion between 2020 and 2023 . Those initiatives will be enabled by the more than 24,000 APIs that are available today, transforming processes by bridging the gap between old and new applications.
Mitel is becoming part of the API economy by forging an open CloudLink API ecosystem comprised of its global network of technical and channel partners. With deep expertise in delivering customized business communications solutions, these partners are an exceptional source of talent and innovative ideas that solve real business problems. Mitel’s goal is to empower our partners’ ability to convert those ideas into CloudLink-based applications that will ultimately offer Mitel customers greater choice and Mitel partners greater rewards.
We believe CloudLink will provide the framework to organically grow a vibrant communications developer community. By enabling CloudLink for every Mitel platform, our partners will have a significant customer base to serve. And by developing an open API ecosystem for CloudLink, Mitel’s platforms will integrate more easily with other enterprise applications.
In the coming months, Mitel will provide our partner developer community with access to CloudLink APIs, a developer forum, and the comprehensive documentation and tutorials they need to quickly generate new solutions. Stay tuned to the Mitel Blog for further details as Mitel and the developer community bring exciting innovations to market.
In the meantime, we invite our partners to start thinking about what business processes their customers want to ‘communications-enable’ to improve productivity and the customer experience. We are excited to watch the range of new value our partners will create using Mitel’s core platforms in the future!
