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Sprint’s Emerging Solutions & Global Wholesale division and Mitel announced a partnership to help support resellers of the cloud services market for small and midsize businesses (SMBs) in the United States.
Mitel is a cloud and premises-based unified communications and collaboration (UCC) solutions specialist.
Building on an existing relationship, the agreement will see the Mitel-hosted PBX cloud communications service be included in Sprint’s Wholesale Cloud Services, helping Sprint’s SMB-focused resellers launch in the cloud services marketplace.
The partnership will also enable the two companies to extend their addressable markets and capitalize on the adoption of cloud services worldwide, allowing Sprint’s wholesale customers to market services such as hosted voice, unified communications, email, Web collaboration, archiving and Web commerce on a secure cloud-based infrastructure.
According to a recent forecast from IT research firm IDC, worldwide spending on hosted private cloud (HPC) services–an operational model for deploying computing infrastructure services of many types via a cloud model–will be more than $24 billion in 2016. Virtual private clouds are also expected to make steady gains in part because of its similarity to public cloud, particularly public infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which many IT buyers are already using as a cost-saving alternative to replacing aging infrastructure.
“Organizations worldwide are turning to cloud services that support their business requirements in a timely and cost-efficient manner,” Matt Carter, president of Sprint Emerging Solutions & Global Wholesale, said in a statement. “This agreement with Mitel augments our Wholesale Cloud Services offer with the industry’s leading unified communications solution. This ensures we continue to enable our resellers with easy-to-use, affordable and high-performance cloud solutions that they can quickly take to market without the expense and hassle of having to create their own services.”
In addition, Mitel will now be able to market Sprint’s Wholesale Cloud Services portfolio directly to its SMB customers nationwide, providing a comprehensive suite of services for its U.S. business customers. Sprint’s Wholesale Cloud Services portfolio offers a range of software as a service (SaaS) and communications as a service (CaaS) cloud services consisting of trusted, brand-name offerings to help Sprint Wholesale partners launch more quickly and with less capital outlay than if they were to procure the services themselves.
“This is a win-win for Sprint and Mitel,” Mitel NetSolutions President Jon Brinton said in a statement. “The cloud market is predicted to explode in 2013, and our partnership with Sprint means that we are fully equipped to benefit from this growth. We can now address multiple aspects of the cloud market through either direct or reseller channels, and deliver a comprehensive and flexible offer across the full spectrum of products, applications and support.”