Category: Mitel
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Seeing IP Phones In Hotels, Banks, Offices…
Continue Reading: Seeing IP Phones In Hotels, Banks, Offices…“Hey, that’s a Mitel IP phone… I remember when that handset was introduced. It was very different from the previous one but had better ‘shoulderability’ … it created a bit of a stir among customers, though. Hmmm… I wonder what model IP phone that is……”
All of this was running through my head during a routine visit to my bank this morning while waiting at a counter talking to someone. He had to call another office so there I was looking at his desk phone.
It happens to me all the time!
Even though I left Mitel way back in 2007… and really left IP telephony when I left Voxeo in 2011… IP telephony hasn’t left me!
I’ll be at a hotel… and I am checking out their phone system. A bank… an office… Wherever! There’s a Cisco IP phone… there’s an Avaya… there’s a Mitel… a snow… a I-have-no-clue…
I guess it’s just an occupational hazard of having been a product manager for IP phones during my time at Mitel… or maybe just the 6 years I spent there learning about IP telephony… but I just always see the IP phones. 🙂
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Catching Up With Mitel …
Continue Reading: Catching Up With Mitel …By way of a tweet I stumbled upon analyst Blair Pleasant’s UC Strategies post, “Change – The Only Thing That’s Constant“, that showed me that while I’ve been off in the worlds of IPv6 and DNSSEC there has been a great amount of activity happening in the world of my former employer Mitel.Heck, I didn’t even realize they had a new logo! 🙂
But indeed they do (apparently back in 2013 in October 2014 (see comments))… and Blair’s great look at the world of Unified Communications mentions that and a good bit more. I was aware of the acquisition of Aastra, but did not realize that PrairieFyre had finally been folded into Mitel (it had always seemed to be a likely acquisition candidate as its products worked primarily with Mitel’s systems).
With my focus changing a bit, and most of my interest here on Disruptive Telephony focused around WebRTC and some of the newer disruptions to Internet communications, the last time I really mentioned Mitel was back in April with the passing of Simon Gwatkin. My posts about Mitel prior to that go back to 2011 and before.
In looking at Mitel’s web site, their rebranding is clear…
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R.I.P. Simon Gwatkin
Continue Reading: R.I.P. Simon GwatkinI was greatly saddened to learn today of the death of Simon Gwatkin this past weekend. For those of us in the VoIP / telecom space, the world is a little bit darker now.I came to know Simon when I worked at Mitel Networks in Ottawa from 2001-2007, although it wasn’t really until the later years when I wound up working in Mitel’s Office of the CTO and looking more strategically at what the future might hold for companies like Mitel. A lot of my research and time wound up being spent looking at social media and the changing communication landscape. With Simon’s role as head of strategic marketing at Mitel we wound up having any number of quite lengthy conversations about where things were going. We didn’t always agree, which led to very useful and valuable discussions. Simon also got me engaged with industry analysts and helped set me down a path that was quite useful in many later years.
I also spent a good bit of time interacting with some of the startups that were being nurtured under the umbrella of Wesley Clover, the investment vehicle of Sir Terry Matthews. Simon was involved with Terry’s investments there…
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Mitel Rolls Out UC Apps for iPhone and iPad
Continue Reading: Mitel Rolls Out UC Apps for iPhone and iPadGood to see that Mitel is joining the iOS application space with Unified Communications apps for the iPhone and iPad. These apps will work with Mitel’s “Freedom” architecture to allow people to use their own iPhone or iPad device with the Mitel corporate phone system.Per Mitel’s news release, the app allows users to:
- Search the corporate directory and click-to-dial from corporate contact list to place calls through the corporate network.
- View missed, dialed, and received calls.
- Access visual voicemail from your office extension and manage messages by preference rather than sequence.
- Automatically update presence status and call routing preferences based on your location, or time of day.
Given enterprise users’ desire to use their own devices, it is not surprising to see these type of apps coming out from a vendor like Mitel. It will be interesting to see how this helps Mitel in the marketplace.
Kudos to the Mitel team for creating the apps.
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Mitel Reorganizes – President Leaves, Business Units Simplified, More Changes
Continue Reading: Mitel Reorganizes – President Leaves, Business Units Simplified, More ChangesMitel today announced a series of organizational changes, including the departure of Paul Butcher, Mitel’s President and Chief Operating Officer. The news release indicates they are merging together various sales organizations and simplifying the business units into three:- Mitel Communications Solutions: responsible for delivering unified communications and collaboration products and services to businesses.
- Mitel NetSolutions: responsible for network and hosted services, mobile services, and broadband connectivity.
- Mitel DataNet: responsible for the distribution of third-party products to partners and customers.
It also briefly mentions the departure of Paul Butcher as of Saturday. From a product point-of-view, there were two statements I found interesting:
- “a re-direction of our R&D investment to products serving the high-growth market of 100 to 2,500 user organizations.” Which makes sense, given that this area is one in which Mitel has traditionally done well.
- “we intend to exploit our significant market leadership in voice virtualization.” i.e. continuing their partnership with VMware. Again this also makes sense given that people are looking for solutions to deploy more applications with less hardware… and looking at virtualization as one of the potential solutions.
To me, all of this is naturally to be expected after Mitel appointed Richard McBee the new CEO…
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Kudos to Mitel on starting to post customer case study videos
Continue Reading: Kudos to Mitel on starting to post customer case study videosKudos to my friends up at Mitel for posting a customer profile to YouTube, this one of Starwood Hotels & Resorts:Sure, it’s a very professionally-produced video that focuses on marketing messages… and yes, many other companies are already doing this… but having spent six years at Mitel (2001-2007) and having been a strong advocate of the company moving into social media, I just admit that I’m personally pleased to see them doing this.
Looking forward to seeing more…
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A *CRAZY* Week In Collaboration / Communications News – A Summary from Dave Michels
Continue Reading: A *CRAZY* Week In Collaboration / Communications News – A Summary from Dave MichelsThis has been an absolutely insane week of announcements relating to the Unified Communications / collaboration / VoIP / etc, etc. space… it’s been a while since I can think of a week that had so much news packed into it.
I think it’s called… “everyone wants to get all their news out before it is US Thanksgiving and people start ignoring news because of the holidays!”
Regardless of why, the fact is that each day I’ve watched the Twitter stream just scrolling by with tons of items I’d love to write about. Unfortunately, I, too, have been slammed – and unable to write all that I’ve wanted to.
Thankfully, Dave Michels pulled together a nice summary over on No Jitter:
Watta Week!
Check there for pointers to stories about Microsoft Lync… Mitel Freedom… Cisco’s zillion video announcements… and news from Polycom, Avaya and HP, too.
Some week, I’m hoping to write about each of these myself… but that week is very definitely NOT this week!
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Mitel files for an IPO (again)
Continue Reading: Mitel files for an IPO (again)Over the holidays I was pleased for all my friends still at Mitel to see in Techcrunch that Mitel filed for an IPO on Tuesday, December 22, 2009. The timing, just a couple of days before Christmas, was definitely not good for publicity, but I’m guessing that they had some reason to file it before the end of 2009. Those who enjoy the gory details can read the full Mitel F-1 form filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.I was employed at Mitel back in 2006 when the company filed for an IPO the first time. As the only “blogger” at Mitel at the time (writing here on this site), we had a number of internal conversations with the communications team about what I could and couldn’t say. The rules for the “quiet period” of an IPO are very strong and at the time it was unclear (to me, anyway) about what could be said in social media. The result, as I recall, was that I didn’t write about Mitel much at all during that time.
That IPO attempt ended with the Inter-Tel acquisition in 2007 (which also ended my employment at Mitel) and the company has been…
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Video: Sir Terry Matthews on startups, Canada, what’s exciting…
Continue Reading: Video: Sir Terry Matthews on startups, Canada, what’s exciting…By way of a tweet from Matt Roberts, a friend from my Mitel days, I learned of this video interview with Sir Terry Matthews on Canada’s Business News Network:Sir Terry Matthews speaks to BNN about the state of the industry in Canada, why he loves home-grown startups and what he sees as the next big thing in technology.
If you’ve not heard him before, the interview is a good view into the passion, enthusiasm and charisma that keeps him starting up companies all over the place. The report says he’s now up to 80 companies or so that he’s started up… and I’m not surprised.
His overall message, though, is what he has been consistent saying for many years now… we are in an age where incredible broadband capacity is coming online – as that happens, what will we do to make use of all that bandwidth?
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Technorati Tags: terry matthews, canada
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“Discover Best Practices for Secure Unified Communications” – a webinar I’ll be giving tomorrow
Continue Reading: “Discover Best Practices for Secure Unified Communications” – a webinar I’ll be giving tomorrowCross-posted from Voice of VoIPSA:What are you doing tomorrow, Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 1pm US Eastern time? If you are around, you are welcome to join a free webinar I’ll be giving on “Best Practices for Secure Unified Communications“.
From time-to-time, you’ll notice that those of us working with VOIPSA will take part in seminars/webinars offered by members of VOIPSA and we definitely enjoy doing so. For instance, as readers of the blog know, I’ve been speaking at Ingate’s SIP Trunking seminars for quite some time now. We’re generally open to speaking at anyone’s event or webinar – as long as they understand that there is no endorsement of the company/vendors’s products/services and that we are there to provide an industry-neutral point-of-view.
So tomorrow at 1pm US Eastern I’ll be speaking as part of Mitel’s “Discovery Series” where they invite in guest speakers from the industry. You can join the webinar for free at Mitel’s site. They asked me to speak about the threats/risks to voice over IP and unified communications and talk about best practices for protecting them. Here’s the abstract:
Discover Best Practices for Secure Unified Communications
Presented by: Dan York, Voice Over IP Security Alliance…
