Today, Mitel continues to be one of the most powerful, and influential comms businesses in the world, specifically within the UCaaS sector. Their buy-and-build approach to business has helped them to gain a huge portion of the market share, making them the number one /unified-communications/ucaas company for Western Europe and EMEA, as well as one of the top UCaaS organisations in the world. However, since Mitel made their recent ShoreTel acquisition, they've evolved from being just "one of" the biggest UCaaS companies to be the second largest provider in the world.
By collaborating with a business that's on very much the same path as them, Mitel has opened up a whole new range of opportunities for the future. Today, I got the opportunity to chat with Graham Bevington, EVP Business Development for Mitel, so I could discuss the future of the growing UCaaS giant.
What Does the Future Hold for Mitel and ShoreTel?
As Mitel has announced during their previous press releases, the main aim behind the Mitel and ShoreTel deal is to ensure that Mitel customers have a better, more customised strategy for moving into the cloud. As Graham said himself: "I think we've seen the move to the cloud growing more significant over the last few years. Our customers, partners, and even the whole world are moving towards a more software-focused approach to business."
While Mitel certainly had a great deal of power to deliver their own cloud approaches to their customers before the ShoreTel acquisition, reaching out to a company with a hugely successful cloud strategy has given them more solutions to work with.
"By getting together with ShoreTel, we became the second biggest UCaaS provider in the world overnight. It's not just the scale that's important either. We gave ourselves access to more customers, but we've also created a stronger experience for those customers by connecting with a company who was already on the same track as us for cloud migration."
Both Mitel and ShoreTel were already doing the same thing, by taking premise-based businesses to the cloud. Both were developing applications and services that gave their customers real reasons to migrate into the cloud environment. Now, by working together, they can deliver an even greater experience.
"We believe we're better together. ShoreTel and Mitel combined can bring more innovation to the market, and do it faster than ever too."
Do You Think the Aastra Deal Has Prepared You for This One?
While Graham reminded me that the Aastra deal with Mitel took place around three and a half years ago, I felt it was worth drawing attention to in light of the latest purchase. Three and a half years isn't a long time to incorporate a huge company into another organisation, but Mitel managed to do it impeccably well, becoming the number one vendor throughout Western Europe, and EMEA.
I wondered whether the Aastra acquisition had any impact on the way Mitel felt about the latest ShoreTel integration. According to Graham:
"When we became number one after Aastra, we opened ourselves up to a range of new opportunities, experimenting with things we could never access before. Now, we're exploring the same experience with ShoreTel. As the second largest UCaaS provider in the world, we're sure we'll be able to deliver more to the marketplace."
Graham noted that integrating a software-based business with another business focused on software development could be a lot simpler than some other acquisitions. However, he also commented that Mitel feels absolutely confident about their ability to integrate with ShoreTel.
