By Martin Bitzinger, SVP, Mitel Product Management
When you’re competing in a dynamic and high-growth industry like Unified Communications, the ability to deliver ongoing innovation is table stakes. But, when you’ve committed to deliver those innovations simultaneously — across a wide range of deployment options — the level of difficulty increases and requires a multi-pronged innovation strategy.
As Mitel customers face the challenges of mastering hybrid work environments and increasing their competitive agility, they will need:
- UC&C platforms and applications that meet their requirements today, yet provide them with the freedom and state-of-the-art technology to evolve and adapt to meet tomorrow’s challenges.
- Solutions tailored to their business operations, scope of resources, and region-specific security and compliance requirements.
- An intuitive, robust, and flexible UC&C user experience designed to optimize the core processes they use most frequently.
To amplify the impact of our R&D, Mitel is pursuing the following four vectors of innovation that will combine to empower customers and partners with robust, multi-faceted UC innovations today and tomorrow.
Innovation Vector 1.Become the experts in hybrid and edge technology
Today, when organizations evaluate their communications infrastructure needs, they tend to focus on the ability to increase efficiencies, improve manageability, comply with regional requirements, and consider their existing investments.
But, deployment flexibility will continue to be an area of significant change and innovation going forward. In the future, organizations will seek increasing control over where data is processed, how it is stored, how it is transmitted and where it is sent. Customers will want to be able to use their data in the place that makes the most sense. These are some of the reasons why we believe the majority of companies will ultimately want to adopt a hybrid cloud deployment model in the future.
We also believe customers will want their business communications platform to provide them with the flexibility to accomplish real-time processing at the edge. Communications applications are always time-sensitive, and the success of some business-critical use cases like special call routing or emergency communications hinges on enabling near real-time performance and local site survivability in edge devices. As 5G networks grow more pervasive and mobile devices continue to gain processing power, Mitel anticipates that this type of edge-based communications use case will only increase.
Mitel has four decades of experience with dedicated instance solutions and we intend to build on it. We’ve demonstrated a strong track record of enabling high-performance edge solutions and can apply that expertise to private cloud deployments that may be better suited for use cases requiring edge processing. Further, we can design CloudLink applications that support more processing at the edge.
By maximizing our expertise in hybrid and edge deployments, Mitel will be able to anticipate customer requirements and pave the way to provide with more best-in-class choices that deliver ‘your UC&C, your way.’
Innovation Vector 2. Enable ongoing innovation via CloudLink
In the past, after a technology provider launched a new product, it began working on the next. To get the latest features, customers who‘d purchased the first had to upgrade to the new version.
But cloud-enabled APIs and software updates have fundamentally changed that model, and thankfully, everyone wins. Here’s how Mitel will innovate via CloudLink to create new opportunities — for our customer and partners.
Eliminating trade-offs across deployment options. Some vendors have labeled on-premises and private cloud instances as ‘outdated and expensive’ deployment options when compared to the cloud-enabled efficiencies offered by UCaaS. We think that’s a short-term view. In fact, Mitel believes dedicated instance solutions are exciting, adaptable deployment options when assisted by cloud technology like CloudLink. CloudLink enables true hybrid cloud scenarios by building a bridge between latest public cloud technology and dedicated instance solutions, eliminating previous limitations by accelerating and simplifying delivery of new features, updates and functions. That’s why we plan to use CloudLink to enhance existing deployments across every Mitel platform, providing Mitel customers with future-proof functionality, continuous improvement, higher ROI, and the confidence they can rapidly adapt to the next challenge ahead.
Unleashing partner innovation. Mitel partners provide new products and valuable customization to meet their customers‘ specific needs. With Mitel’s CloudLink technology, Mitel partners will have the power to deliver more innovation more quickly. By downloading APIs from the Mitel CloudLink portal, partners can connect core Mitel software functionality to efficiently build public cloud offerings and develop new services for their customers.
Innovation Vector 3. Continuously add customer-centric value
Mitel has built its successful track record by listening to the experts — our customers. Based on their first-hand experiences using our solutions in day-to-day operations, we gain a steady stream of ideas about the useability and feature innovations they need to be more successful. Then we deliver them.
Mitel’s portfolio spans a wide range of platforms, applications, and deployment types — for businesses ranging from enterprise to SMB — that operate in regions with different security and compliance requirements that change on an ongoing basis. To optimize each customer segment’s performance, each Mitel solution must be the ‘right fit.’
To deliver that perfect fit, Mitel will deliver customer-driven feature innovations that:
1. Adapt to changing regional requirements. Security and compliance regulations change frequently and our solutions must rapidly change with them.
2. Deliver an enhanced user experience. Employees utilize UC&C solutions all day, every day. The better the fit, the better the experience. From software functionality, to system manageability, to the headsets employees wear — Mitel’s goal is to deliver transparent technology that allows people to work better and easier.
3. Transform the way business gets done. While the word ‘transformation’ may be overused today, it accurately describes the new product breakthroughs Mitel achieves by working with our customers to understand their challenges. Mitel Voice Assist and Mitel Insights are two perfect examples. In each case, Mitel identified an opportunity to convert an inefficient workflow our customers used frequently into an intelligent UC&C solution that not only generates efficiencies, but results in fundamentally better business outcomes.
Listening to and acting on customer feedback is part of Mitel’s culture. Our history of delivering on customer commitments has created a powerful sense of partnership with our customers. They know that when they are more successful, Mitel is more successful. So they keep sharing their ideas, and everyone benefits.
Innovation Vector 4. Deliver vertical UC&C solutions
One of the primary benefits UC&C solutions deliver is enhanced employee productivity. So, anything we can do to drive greater productivity improvements strengthens our customers’ — and Mitel’s — competitive advantage.
The enemy of employee productivity is friction. Whenever an employee needs to stop one activity to start another, time is lost. Mitel has eliminated friction through our UC&C integrations with the enterprise applications employees use every day. Meanwhile, our partners have embarked on delivering another complementary and powerful source of eliminating friction — integrating UC&C into vertical workflows.
This is an exciting new vector of innovation for Mitel, our partners, and our customers. We will be working with partners who are innovating in the hospitality, healthcare, state and local government, and education industries to ideate and develop UC-enhanced workflows, applications, and solutions that can be embedded at the workflow level to facilitate higher productivity and better customer service.
Innovating in parallel to deliver perpetually best-in-class solutions
The UC&C industry is rapidly evolving. Consequently, a sequential innovation strategy will be insufficient to keep up with customer expectations.
When you consider each of Mitel’s four vectors of innovation independently, each will deliver significant value to customers. By simultaneously pursuing these four vectors, however, Mitel will be able to raise the UC&C bar by delivering more rapid and continuous innovations in parallel—across our portfolio.
As Mitel approaches its 50th year of operations, we are more committed than ever to driving customer success through innovative business communications solutions designed to fit their specific requirements.
When you’re in it for the long-haul, you look ahead at the big picture through your customers’ eyes. It’s both an exciting and demanding time to be a business. Our customers are pioneering a fundamentally new way of working. It will be a time of experimentation to see what works and rapid adaptation. And to pave that path, they need best-in-class communications technology that’s designed — from the ground up — for leading performance, flexibility, and continuous improvement. And that’s what simultaneous innovation on these four vectors will provide.
My team and I look forward to sharing these innovations with you in what will be a very busy and exciting year.