Category: Mitel
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Tune in to the Mitel / Sun Webinar tomorrow (Aug 21) at 1pm EDT
Continue Reading: Tune in to the Mitel / Sun Webinar tomorrow (Aug 21) at 1pm EDTIf you are free tomorrow, Thursday, August 21st, at 1pm US Eastern time, I’d encourage you to listen in to a joint Mitel / Sun Microsystems webinar. Details are available on the Mitel web page.Why am I encouraging readers to tune into this webinar? Especially when I no longer work for Mitel and have really nothing to do with them any more? Two words:
Terry Matthews.
During the time that I worked for Mitel from June 2001 up until last October (2007), the telecom industry went through some pretty bleak periods. Some very bleak periods. Mitel was not immune and there were certainly some tough times there. There were multiple times when friends seriously questioned why I continued to work there amidst some of the challenges and headaches. And while I admittedly had a few of those moments myself, I kept on working hard at Mitel because of the tremendous people I worked with there… and ultimately because of the vision and enthusiasm of Terry Matthews.
If you aren’t familiar with Sir Terrence Matthews, his Wikipedia biography and Wesley Clover (his investment firm) biography give a taste of the man. Terry is at this point a billionaire serial entrepreneur…
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Attempt to join a VoiceCon/Mitel presentation on UC foiled by Real Player on Mac
Continue Reading: Attempt to join a VoiceCon/Mitel presentation on UC foiled by Real Player on MacSo today my participation in a VoiceCon webinar was foiled by “fun” with RealPlayer and my MacBook Pro. The VoiceCon team was running a webinar called ‘Demystifying Unified Communications’ and I was curious to check it out as it was sponsored by my prior employer, Mitel, and the speaker was Mitel’s Doug Micheaelides who I know well. I was just curious more than anything else to see if Mitel’s marketing had changed in the six months since I left. I’m also one to often listen to analyst presentations – it’s part of what I do.It was not to be. Now, admittedly, this is largely my fault for not checking whether the webinar system would work with my Mac in advance. But attending the webinar was low priority to me and something I would just try to “fit in” if I could do so. Since it looked like I could, I jumped over to the page, registered and clicked the link to launch the presentation…
Oops.
Turns out that the web presentation system the VoiceCon folks are using needs Real’s player and as shown in the image to the right, my browser wasn’t very happy with that.
Naturally, I did…
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Mitel/Inter-Tel integration plan restructures me out of a job…
Continue Reading: Mitel/Inter-Tel integration plan restructures me out of a job…UPDATE – October 23, 2007 – As of yesterday, I started employment with Voxeo. MANY thanks to all of you who offered kind words, job leads, references and help in many other ways. Thank you!
UPDATE – Sept 13, 2007 – Because I have been repeatedly asked about the type of roles I am seeking, I posted some thoughts on the kind of positions I would ideally like to pursue.
UPDATE – Sept 9, 2007 – My resume is now available for those wanting more information on my background.
"Every new beginning starts with some other beginning’s end."
I found myself humming that chorus from the song "Closing Time" by the band Semisonic late on Tuesday after a very frank and cordial call with my manager (Mitel’s CTO), who has always been great to work with and with whom I’ve had a wonderfully open relationship. Some of you may have seen the news – there was a "reduction in headcount" at Mitel on Tuesday as part of the "integration plan" resulting from the merger with Inter-Tel. This is pretty much inevitable in any merger as there is always some duplication and some need to reduce the overall number of…
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Mitel and Inter-Tel announce the completion of their merger (and there was much rejoicing!)
Continue Reading: Mitel and Inter-Tel announce the completion of their merger (and there was much rejoicing!)Very good news here in Mitel-land today – at about 4pm the merger of Mitel and Inter-Tel was completed! At least, in the legal sense… obviously there will be more work to be done on the integration, but for now the celebrations can begin. The company has now doubled in size, gained a very strong US organization and is all-around well-positioned for growth. As the news release stated:
The company will now be #1 in the North American SMB market1, #2 in the Western European IP PBX market2, the overall leader in the U.K. communications market3 and continues to grow its operations globally. With three trusted brands (Mitel, Inter-Tel and Lake), the company offers customers a broad choice of solutions from the very small to the very large, from IP enabled to pure IP unified communications, from standard solutions to tailored, from single site to multi-site and from outright capital purchase options through sophisticated managed services.
It should be a fun ride to see where this all winds up!
Technorati tags: mitel, inter-tel -
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UC Strategies podcasts with Mitel executives about unified communications, Microsoft, Sun, HP and more…
Continue Reading: UC Strategies podcasts with Mitel executives about unified communications, Microsoft, Sun, HP and more…Back at our Mitel Forum event in late June, analyst Blair Pleasant from Unified Communications Strategies recorded a couple of podcasts[1] with Mitel executives and I’ve been meaning to write about them here. (Full Disclosure: While Mitel has no direct connection to this blog, I do work for Mitel.)
First up, Blair interviewed Mitel CEO Don Smith. They discussed Mitel’s view of unified communications, business process improvement, the use of SIP and XML interfaces and much more. Don discussed the importance of presence and availability, the need for “in the moment” communication and the importance of “presence everywhere”. He also offers his view of the greatest challenges facing Mitel and the industry in the time ahead and his view of where Mitel is heading.
Second, Blair interviewed Stephen Beamish, Mitel VP of Business Development and Strategic Alliances about the partnerships Mitel has with Microsoft, HP and Sun. Given the announcement before Mitel Forum of the partnership with Sun, this interview gives one of the first views into the Mitel-Sun relationship. Blair and Stephen also, of course, discuss Mitel’s relationship with Microsoft, especially in light of the Microsoft-Nortel relationship as well as Microsoft’s other partners. Stephen also talks about the…
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TMC.net interviews me: "Security and Disaster Recovery for IP Telephony Systems"
Continue Reading: TMC.net interviews me: "Security and Disaster Recovery for IP Telephony Systems"Just out yesterday, TMC.Net published an interview with me titled, “Security and Disaster Recovery for IP Telephony Systems“, by Mae Kowalke, where I talk about general VoIP security issues and then get into specifics about Mitel solutions. Given that the author nicely gave me the chance to review the text and offer feedback before she published it, I have to say I’m pleased with how it came out. 🙂
(And yes, I normally blog about VoIP security over on the Voice of VOIPSA weblog, but I just field weird about posting something like this over on that site.)
Technorati tags: mitel, security, voip security, voipsecurity, dan york -
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Remote VoIP teleworker sets serve as an Internet connectivity warning device…
Continue Reading: Remote VoIP teleworker sets serve as an Internet connectivity warning device…Here’s a great side benefit of having an IP phone in teleworker mode hanging off of a system somewhere out there on the Internet – you have a close-to-instant warning system about Internet connectivity issues.
Take this morning… I walk into my home office and see that one of my phones has come out of its sleep status and the backlight is on and showing "CONNECTION PENDING…" with these black square boxes next to it. I glance at another IP phone: "PLEASE WAIT"
Oh, %#$#?!. It’s going to be that kind of Monday morning!
Yes, indeed, as I woke up the PCs, I did indeed have no connectivity. Couldn’t get to any websites and all the IM clients were cycling waiting to get connected. After doing the usual power-cycling of the cable modem and verifying that I could get an address but couldn’t ping beyond the next hop router, a relatively-quick call to Comcast brought the word that there was a "partial outage" in my area and that connectivity might be going up and down for the next two hours.
Great. Wonderful way for a home office worker to start a Monday.
But it did remind me of one great…
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YouTube video from Sun blogger sets shots of Sun/Mitel gear to hip-hop…
Continue Reading: YouTube video from Sun blogger sets shots of Sun/Mitel gear to hip-hop…Following on my previous post about Sun blogger Craig Bender, I should note that he also posted a video to YouTube that is the first time I can honestly say that I’ve ever seen shots of Mitel and/or Sun gear set to hip-hop music! Enjoy…
Technorati tags: mitel forum, mitel, sun, sun microsystems, sun ray -
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YouTube video shows the Sun / Mitel collaboration – voice/data hot desking via card…
Continue Reading: YouTube video shows the Sun / Mitel collaboration – voice/data hot desking via card…One of the many cool things I’ve been hoping to find the cycles to write about coming out of Mitel Forum last week is the collaboration occurring between Mitel and Sun Microsystems. First announced June 19th, there are really two components to the collaboration: 1) the Multi-Instance Call Server (MICS) that can have up to 200 instances of our 3300 ICP call control software running on a Sun server; and 2) a very cool integration of a SunRay thin client computer into the base of one of our phones. With the phones, a user can simply insert their “Java card” into the base of the phone and the user is automagically signed onto the computer and to the phone. Pull the card out, the user is logged out. Insert another user’s card and the computer and the phone are logged in as that user. It takes the “hot desking” we’ve had for years and extends that to now also include the PC. As I said, it’s very cool!
The good news is that I can actually share a bit of the experience with you courtesy of Sun blogger Craig Bender, a.k.a. the “Thin Guy”, who writes the Sun Ray Blog. I…
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Returning from Mitel Forum…
Continue Reading: Returning from Mitel Forum…It’s been an absolutely exhausting week out in Las Vegas for Mitel Forum. Presentations, meetings and events basically from dawn until late in the evening both Tuesday and Wednesday… travel all day yesterday… I’m tired. Very tired. But… I do have to say that it was an absolutely outstanding event. Great meetings with our resellers/solutions providers. Excellent sessions with analysts. Great exhibits showing the work of many of our partners – many cool things to write about here in the days ahead! There was such a level of excitement there at the event… it’s definitely a great time to be part of Mitel.
Hopefully we will be able to follow some of the analysts’ blog postings as they get home and start writing… right now, though, a Technorati search on Mitel is just a wee bit preoccupied with other recent news releases. 🙂
Technorati tags: mitel forum, mitel, voip