5 Ways Mitel Aligns Portfolio and Future Innovations

In October 2023, Mitel surprised the Unified Communications (UC) market by acquiring Unify and assuming the most extensive installed base of UC seats. Nine months later, let’s see how Mitel integrates the broadest portfolio of UC products and creates a single, go-forward hybrid cloud strategy.

1. Focus on Hybrid Cloud

As Martin Bitzinger, SVP of Product Line Management, wrote, an increasingly more significant proportion of Enterprise customers are seeking more control over their communications infrastructure to integrate with business applications that drive their business, to serve their frontline workers with specialized solutions to drive productivity along with their knowledge workers and to ensure compliance with an ever-changing regulatory environment depending on the geographies that they operate within. A hybrid cloud communications approach gives CIOs the most significant degree of control. As a result, Mitel is dedicating 100% of its focus and development to forwarding hybrid cloud communications solutions.

2. Aligning a Broad Portfolio

Mitel has a broad portfolio of UC platforms, collaboration products, contact centers, and devices to serve customers, regardless of size or geography. MiVoice Business and OpenScape Business serve small businesses stretching into Mitel’s traditional strength, the mid-market. OpenScape Voice, OpenScape 4000, and MiVoice MX-ONE serve large enterprise customers with tens of thousands of seats. We’ve assessed our portfolio and notified our partner community that our MiVoice Connect and MiVoice Office 400 products have transitioned into an end-of-cycle lifecycle process. Suppose you currently use one of those products. In that case, Mitel will continue to support your installation for many years, so speak to your partner about how you can take advantage of Mitel’s support and transition paths to serve your future needs.

We’ve decided on the best of our MiVoice and OpenScape portfolio as we develop for the future. As customers assess their future needs, Mitel has built strength in our professional services and ability to serve the market alongside our partners. Mitel Professional Services portfolio offers consultancy, implementation, and fully managed services to augment our partner's service levels with technical specialties where needed or to serve our customers directly where customer business needs or scale are required.

We’ve analyzed the broadest UC portfolio of products in the industry today, made necessary strategic decisions, and are moving our customers forward to serve them with future innovative solutions.

3. Converging to a Common UC Experience

Mitel will leverage our CloudLink microservices application architecture to support multiple call control platforms and align our customers with the one thing that matters: a common UC user experience. Mitel will take all users and converge to a single, clean, next-generation collaboration experience. This journey is already underway and beginning to become visible as we enable elements of this experience to be available across our UC platform suite. Initially, these will be architectural changes, but our users will also experience the visual advances as early as 2024.   

This core common experience is Mitel’s cornerstone, providing the centerpiece to integrate horizontally and vertically. Horizontal UC integrations enable Mitel to launch pre-selected video collaboration apps and integrate Mitel elements, such as more efficient call control, into third-party collaboration and meeting solutions. Vertical integrations provide collaboration capabilities built into purpose-built business applications. Mitel’s UC experience is critical in delivering common quality calling, messaging, and collaboration within end-to-end workflows to accelerate your business success.

4. Extension to Contact Center

We won’t stop there. We are integrating that common experience into the contact center for frontline workers and customer experience agents who work around the clock to satisfy your customers and need simple, intuitive client interfaces. You have a recipe for rapid resolution when you connect your agents and real-time customer issues to the remainder of the business’s employee base. While doing that, we look forward to some new developments from Mitel as we align contact centers and bring Generative AI (GenAI) to our customer experience solution.

5. Focus on Vertical Solutions

In addition to this renewed foundation, Mitel continues to evolve our core value of delivering solutions to key vertical markets to serve their frontline workers. Healthcare has nurses, financial services has branch and contact agents, education has teachers, hospitality has guest services and restaurant staff, and governments have various frontline workers. All need communication in a form factor that fits the tasks they perform. Yet, they all need the ability to communicate seamlessly with the knowledge worker community within their organization. Along with our broad Mitel Solutions Alliance partner ecosystem, Mitel provides applications that fit specific vertical business needs, deep integrations that allow Mitel solutions to operate seamlessly, and the opportunity for CIOs and business leaders to bring together end-to-end solutions for their business. Let’s look at a couple of examples.

With pressure on healthcare services and aging communities, the need for efficient remote healthcare services is ever-increasing. It is critical to bring the required healthcare personnel together (doctor, nurse, or specialist) with the patient at the exact location (physical or virtual) at the right or designated time to ensure specialized resources are fully utilized. It is one of the fundamental communications challenges in healthcare that is constantly being refined.

Now, the demand to manage these consultations remotely adds additional challenges. Mitel provides a deeply integrated Virtual Care Collaboration Service (VCCS) to enable patients to generate online appointments, conduct virtual video-based appointment consultations, and draw in information for quick analysis and attention for medical staff with full EHR medical record integration opportunities. The promises of GenAI also bring near possibilities for appointment transcription and doctor or nurse assistance.

In the financial services industry, traders need the ability to interact with multiple lines of communication and services to enable rapid communication within trading environments. Mitel OpenScape Xpert, a multiline turreted communication solution, provides these capabilities. In addition, Banks and credit unions can integrate contact centers with voice biometrics for quick account holder identification, integrations with AI for Agent Assist walk-throughs that drive agent-assisted loan application processing, and integration with standard banking CRM systems to provide end-to-end banking workflow solutions.

Mitel has these tools to deliver solutions to frontline workers in specific verticals that fit their communication and form factor needs.

Innovating with GenAI: Mitel's Focus on Practical AI Solutions for UC

There is no company in the tech space that is not considering GenAI for the future, and Mitel is no exception. Mitel has delivered AI solutions for nearly five years, integrating Agent Assist and Virtual Agent into our contact center solutions. But now, GenAI brings democratization and AI solutions that customers can implement quickly and economically. And that is where Mitel is focusing: Private GPT solutions targeted at verticals, simple information guest services AI solutions for hospitality organizations, integration of AI for transcription in VCCS, and implementation of GenAI for call evaluation, sentiment analysis rating and analysis of calls within Mitel Interaction Recording (MIR). All of this is coming soon. So look out for future product announcements highlighting each of these developments.

We’re staying busy. Mitel is integrating the most extensive UC portfolio in the industry. We are focusing on solutions that serve both frontline and knowledge workers. We are designing innovative solutions that are not just for the lab; they are deployable by our customers today. Mitel has been innovating for over 50 years and is continuing to look for ways for enterprises to take control of their communications with the hybrid cloud.