UCaaS Migrations Made Easy for Mitel Customers in 2023

3 min read

Blair Pleasant | January 25, 2023


If you’re like most people, you didn’t wake up this morning thinking, “I’d really like to migrate my business phone system to a new UCaaS cloud provider.”


This generally isn’t a ritual most people opt for or look forward to, but for some Mitel customers, this is precisely what needs to be done to drive business continuity, efficiency, and employee productivity.


The Mitel-RingCentral partnership allows Mitel customers to seamlessly migrate to RingCentral MVP's all-in-one messaging, video, and phone solution. For Mitel customers looking for a UCaaS cloud provider, RingCentral is the obvious choice.


Tackling Migration Challenges


Let’s face it, migrating a business communication system can be a hassle. Moving to a modern UCaaS architecture is a journey that requires a well-thought-out approach. The time, cost, and ease of deployment must be carefully considered, followed by a careful evaluation of the value of the new solution.


Migrating from one vendor’s service to another involves several challenges, so choosing the right cloud provider and minimizing business disruptions is critical. There are various factors to consider when it’s time to make a move.


Time and Cost


Perhaps the biggest issue is the time and cost involved, including potential service cancellation penalties, replacing desk phones, and more. There are headaches and costs associated with the migration itself, which can disrupt worker productivity. Cloud migrations aren’t something that generally happens overnight, and it takes time to transition phone numbers, call flows, and user data to ensure a seamless transition. Any customization or third-party integrations to business-critical applications must also be considered part of this process.


Ease of Deployment


The next consideration is the ease of deployment to minimize business disruption. Businesses generally want to ensure feature parity and an enhanced user experience without impacting IT resources or requiring extensive administrative and end-user training.


Total Cost of Ownership


At the same time, businesses want to improve the total cost of ownership (TCO) by re-using existing hardware while ensuring the new solution addresses unique end-user communication needs within a company. A seamless migration depends on the accessibility and accuracy of the communication system and customer data. If any platform’s system and customer data are well understood, this can simplify the implementation efforts, user experience, and deployment times.


There’s no shortage of UCaaS services in the market today, so how do you decide which provider is right for you? And how can you minimize the business disruptions from migrating to a new UCaaS service? RingCentral and Mitel are working collaboratively across joint processes, device options, migration tooling, and incentives to ensure Mitel customers receive the most seamless and cost-effective migration experience possible.


Why RingCentral for Mitel Customers


Mitel’s focus and strategy are all about choice – providing a full spectrum of solutions for customers and partners throughout their communications lifecycle when considering on-premises, hybrid public/private cloud, or a full UCaaS offering.


Mitel selected RingCentral, a UCaaS leader, as its exclusive UCaaS partner, giving customers access to RingCentral’s Message, Video, Phone offering. While Mitel customers have options and can move to any UCaaS solution, they’ll experience the fastest and easiest transition when moving to RingCentral.


The RingCentral MVP microservices-based architecture and global network backbone support multiple redundant data centers, providing a 99.999% SLA. This makes it easier to rapidly deploy new services, features, and capabilities, enabling RingCentral and its customers to keep up with the rapid pace of change.


RingCentral MVP customers can be assured of significant continuous innovation. For example, in the past year, RingCentral released several new feature enhancements for its platform, including RingCentral Webinar, advanced call and fax blocking, next-gen analytics for lines of business, configurable dashboards and custom reporting, and more. In addition, RingCentral is dedicated to security and data privacy, embedding state-of-the-art capabilities such as end-to-end encryption into its portfolio.


Taking the Pain Out of Cloud Migration


Cloud migration involves many steps and processes, including:

  • Information gathering to map the existing communication system to the new one
  • Solution design and provisioning
  • Acceptance testing
  • Deployment
  • Training

Mitel and RingCentral have developed migration tools and services for each step to make the transition as painless as possible. For example, Mitel and RingCentral provide tools and processes for a comprehensive audit of the existing system to replicate the current Mitel cloud configuration on RingCentral MVP. These tools provide the necessary user details, phone numbers, profiles, device configuration, and call flows optimized for RingCentral MVP, along with automated attendant audio files and a list of Mitel phone MAC addresses for the provisioning of phones..


The Mitel-RingCentral migration experience is different from any other, as Mitel and RingCentral provide visibility into the customer system profiles. Moving system profiles to another system is generally challenging, lengthy, and costly. But as part of the RingCentral migration, Mitel makes the customer user and profile data available for the RingCentral configuration and implementation, simplifying the migration and getting the service up and running more quickly. Call flow settings and components and auto attendant prompts can be shared and uploaded to the RingCentral MVP service. Mitel will also provide a customer service record (CSR) to transfer the numbers to RingCentral. In addition, RingCentral provides various implementation services, including service programming/configuration, number porting, and customer training. These migration tools are only available to Mitel customers moving to RingCentral MVP.


Device integration is another issue that organizations need to deal with, as migrating to a new UCaaS solution generally requires replacing the existing devices. Regardless of your current Mitel system and the phones you currently use, Mitel and RingCentral offer a device migration path to RingCentral MVP. As part of their partnership, Mitel and RingCentral let customers keep certain Mitel phones via zero-touch provisioning, providing investment protection. End users can take advantage of RingCentral MVP features and continue using their familiar devices, reducing or eliminating any impact on the user experience.


This helps minimize system downtime while reducing the strain on IT resources. Based on Mitel and RingCentral migration tools, Mitel customers can deploy services four times faster and save significant migration costs by moving to RingCentral rather than another UCaaS provider.


Minimize Business Disruption During Migration with Mitel and RingCentral


Organizations need to minimize business disruption when migrating to a new UCaaS solution. Together with RingCentral, Mitel is heavily investing in simplifying the migration efforts to make the transition as painless as possible, from device transfers to migration tooling, plus exclusive incentives for customers to optimize the cloud experience. Mitel’s migration tools and Mitel device integration provide significant time and cost savings for the Mitel-to-RingCentral transition.


If you’re a Mitel customer considering a UCaaS cloud solution, Mitel and RingCentral’s partnership ensures a seamless and hassle-free migration experience. Visit the upgrade experience page for more details on upgrading to RingCentral.

Blair PleasantPresident & Principal Analyst of COMMfusion LLC and Co-founder of UCStrategies, now BCStrategies

With over 20 years of experience as an industry analyst, Blair understands these areas' market dynamics and challenges and provides clients with an objective perspective and insights. Blair is a frequent speaker and participant in industry conferences, webinars, podcasts, and other events to help educate customers, solution providers, channel partners, investors, and others about the evolving Unified Communications and Collaboration and Contact Center markets.

Her blogs and articles can be found on www.bcstrategies.com and nojitter.com. She also tweets on Twitter as @blairplez, and you can find her on LinkedIn. She received a BA degree in Communications from Albany State University, an MBA in marketing, and an MS in Broadcast Administration from Boston University.

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