On the Road

Mitel is taking its message on the road in the United States via the Mitel Freedom bus, which is a showcase for all the applications on the company’s cloud service menu. It carries its own server. The bus was photographed at its Aug. 15 stop in San Jose, Calif.

Mitel’s business suite includes customizable ERP, CRM, email, virtual desktop infrastructure, a mobile gateway and a port for other Web services. Because these are virtualized using VMware’s hypervisor, they can run on any type of network, Mitel said, and have been designed for use on any type of user device.

The idea of a unified enterprise communications system is that disparate applications residing on different platforms can be brought into one control module for centralized administration to enable many more efficiencies.

Just as applications such as human resources, backup storage and private cloud-type value chain apps can be virtualized, Mitel has made telecommunications agile via VMware’s hypervisor. After all, voice transmissions are also data files—just a different type of data than documents, photos, video or spreadsheets.

Mitel Freedom can be housed on a server of any type, the voice quality is guaranteed by Mitel, and it is scalable enough for SMBs.

In this example of a current customer, Mitel’s virtualized telecommunications system is running several applications through the main network to a few small branch offices, which serves a number of mobile users. Little or no modification to an existing IT system is necessary.

The Mitel virtualized voice system can scale up to handle a couple of data centers, as shown here, behind the router and firewall. However, it pretty much resembles the previous SMB use case thereafter, with little or no changes needed in the network to include branch offices.

A year after launch, the Mitel virtualized system has a list of features currently available and a few still on the drawing boards for launch in the next few months.

Due to its unique virtualization deployment, Mitel currently resides alone in Gartner Research’s upper right Magic Quadrant. Competitors include Alcatel-Lucent, Siemens, Cisco Systems, Avaya, Shoretel and Microsoft.

VMware’s hypervisors are currently running a high percentage of the world’s virtualized workloads and that Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, Red Hat and others are trailing.