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Mitel officials are continuing to expand the collaboration company’s mobile capabilities with the introduction of a series of new products and services that fall in line with their contention that the communications industry is rapidly becoming more mobile and cloud-based.
At its Mitel Next event this week in Germany, Mitel unveiled hosted voice services for second- and third-tier mobile carriers and the ability for workers to bring their business and personal phone needs onto a single device. In addition, the company is offering embedded mobile real-time communications for software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, mobile and cloud services for health care environments, and a mobile-first team collaboration solution developed with another vendor.
Mitel also is expanding its cloud services to France and Germany.
The new products and services build on the mobile offerings the company rolled out in October 2015, and squarely fit in with the push the company has made during CEO Rich McBee’s five-year tenure to move rapidly to offer more mobile and cloud-based communications solutions.
“We saw the transitions going on in the industry,” McBee told eWEEK in an interview last year. “It was transitioning to the cloud and, with BYOD [bring-your-own-device] going on in the enterprise, to mobile.”
That fits in with what others in the industry are seeing as well. Other collaboration technology vendors, from Cisco Systems and Microsoft to ShoreTel and Unify, are building out their portfolios with products that leverage the cloud to offer customers easier ways to communicate anywhere, at any time and on any device. Analysts with IHS Infonetics said in March 2015 that more than half of the respondents to a survey said that, by this year, they will be running at least some of their unified communications (UC) services over private or public clouds.
Mitel built out its cloud- and mobile-based capabilities with its $392 million purchase of cloud company Aastra Technologies in 2012 and the March 2015 acquisition of Mavenir Systems, which sold cellular network software to telecommunications companies.
Mitel’s latest offerings are aimed at enabling the mobile cloud, which McBee called “the backbone for seamless, mobile communications.”
“Now, industries across the board, from healthcare to education to sports, can seamlessly bridge what was once a costly and inefficient dividing line between the consumer and enterprise network,” the CEO said in a statement. “This enables a workplace that is ready for the mobile future and the benefits of the connected world brought on by M2M [machine-to-machine communication] and the Internet of Things (IoT).”
With its new Mobile Cloud Suite, Mitel is rolling out a platform that lets second- and third-tier mobile carriers quickly and cost-efficiently host voice-over-LTE (VoLTE), video-over-LTE (ViLTE), voice-over-WiFi (VoWiFi) and advanced messaging services. Mobile Multi-ID enables users to integrate their identity from their individual devices so that their multiple phone lines can be associated on a single device.
Mitel also is unveiling Embedded Communications for the field service industry, which is becoming increasingly mobile. The offering embeds Mitel’s real-time enterprise communications and contact center technologies into mobile field service-scheduling software from FieldAware. Now field service workers will have all the information they need—from location-based capabilities, customer-relationship management (CRM) tools and real-time communication—in a single call.
MiTeam is a mobile-first team solution that offers instant collaboration for work teams, which can start on-the-go screen sharing, content collaboration, and real-time voice and video meetings and extend them to participants outside of the work area, including partners, vendors and customers.
Real-Time Healthcare is aimed at the eldercare segment of the industry. The cloud-based solution integrates mobile and machine-to-machine tools.
In addition, Mitel is launching new MiCloud cloud services in France and Germany.