COMMS VISION 10-12 NOVEMBER GLENEAGLES PREVIEW
www.commsvision.com STAY AHEAD OF THE GAME
The world of voice has changed dramatically in recent years, with unified communications and collaboration (UCC) applications delivering significant and tangible business process improvements to organisations large and small, highlights Graham Bevington, Managing Director at Mitel.
O
ne thing that excites and challenges everyone
in the communications industry, from both the vendor and channel communities, is that change is a constant, says Bevington. “Technology change creates both opportunities and challenges in equal measure,” he commented. “Technology change drives new customer benefits, in turn opening up new revenue opportunities for the channel community. Technology change also puts pressure on the channel community, challenging them to quickly develop new skills within commercial and technical teams.”
With the delivery methods for communications applications increasingly being software not hardware driven, the pace of change is increasing with two significant changes now underway in the industry. “Firstly, analysts widely predict that mobile phones will increasingly become the business device of choice,” observes Bevington. “Secondly, due to the large scale availability of cost- effective bandwidth, cloud computing and virtualisation will become prevalent. Therefore, every vendor and channel in the business of providing enterprise communications needs to embrace this radical change by incorporating mobile and virtualisation into their core portfolios to stay ahead of the game.”
As consumer mobile phones become more and more sophisticated, individuals are increasingly keen to use their own mobile device for business communications. The result can be a nightmare for IT teams who struggle to reconcile employee preference with business needs and priorities. “Mitel has a pragmatic, open and device agnostic approach to this that brings together IP networking with the latest mobile and communications software into a unified communications solution that can be managed from a single point,” added Bevington. “Easy for IT teams, easy for the individual and a fantastic value proposition for channels to offer their clients.”
Mitel Dynamic Extension is at the heart of this mobile working solution, with calls to a single number simultaneously ringing up to eight devices, regardless of type. Individuals are ‘always’ connected to their business network for more effective communication, more immediate problem resolution and better customer service.
“Staff efficiency and service improvements are further enhanced by making presence information available to everyone across an organisation irrespective of their location,” said Bevington. “Mitel Unified Communicator (UC) Advanced empowers business with integrated
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60 COMMS DEALER NOVEMBER 2010
www.commsvision.com Graham Bevington The growth
in mobile is a highly visible trend
presence, secure instant messaging, audio, web and video collaboration. Mitel Presence and availability can be made available anywhere, including on the user’s mobile device. Mobile workers therefore remain fully connected to their business and fully aware of their colleagues’ availability. Mitel UC Advanced Mobile ensures that distributed workgroups can collaborate fully in real-time, with easy to initiate audio and web conferencing supporting effective teamworking and decision- making to maximise productivity levels.”
For those businesses that use Blackberry smartphones for their enterprise mobile communications, Mitel is able to offer another
level of integrated unified communications for mobile workers. In September 2010 Mitel announced the availability of Mitel Mobility for BlackBerry Mobile Voice System 5 (BlackBerry MVS) with voice over Wi-Fi calling, extending Mitel’s unified business communications features to BlackBerry smartphone workers over cellular and Wi-Fi networks. The solution is designed to increase employee responsiveness and productivity and allow users to maintain a single corporate identity.
The growth in mobile working is a highly visible trend given its link to consumer technology as well as enterprise communications. The growth in virtualisation is equally evident as a priority IT strategy for many organisations, in fact the vast majority of larger enterprises. The rapid growth in virtualisation in recent years focused on the virtualisation of IT business applications to reduce server spend, power consumption, IT management time to reduce costs and improve efficiencies.
“Mitel and VMware worked together to be the first to offer voice and unified communications applications in the virtual world,” stated Bevington. “This is a massive step in technology terms and it requires the channel community to rethink how they approach enterprise organisations. For many IT people in those
organisations, including CIOs, voice telephony is a bit of a mystery, often managed as a separate entity, with different technologies, processes and staff. Mitel has now demystified voice for IT teams. With the advent of Mitel Virtual Solutions for Unified Communications, voice can now take its place as a mainstream application in the enterprise data centre. Another major benefit is risk mitigation for business continuity and disaster recovery planning as one plan can now cover the entire IT infrastructure, including voice.”
It is critical that the channel community takes advantage of these key changes in the industry by ensuring that both mobile solutions and virtualisation are core parts of their customer value proposition, pointed out Bevington. “While mobile is perhaps a more ‘natural act’ for many channels with a voice background, virtualisation of IT applications may be considered more challenging. However, it is a challenge that the channel community needs to fully grasp as the compelling benefits of virtualisation ensure that it will only grow as a priority for both large enterprise and SME organisations. Channels either need to engage in VMware’s Partner Program or establish partnerships with organisations that already have VMware skills to ensure that they remain not just ahead of the game, but winning it.” n
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