When my editor asked me to write an article on Mitel Summit, I was a little confused. At first, I assumed it was a Mitel event. I don't usually cover events so you can see my confusion. When he told me that it was Mitel's CPaaS offering, my interest was piqued but it left me wondering. How could a UC player as big as Mitel, have a CPaaS offering without me hearing about it? One of us isn't doing our job properly.
Hosted First
Before I accidentally bash Mitel, which is not my intention, I must make a confession. I always thought of players like Mitel, Avaya and even Cisco until fairly recently as leaders in the tin market. The on-premises phone system market is not one that I found greatly attractive. Dan Barrett, Senior Sales Training Manager for EMEA at 8x8, summed me up the first time we met. I briefed him on my experience in the UC world and he labelled me as "first generation hosted". Of course, he was correct. Which is why I both queried why I had never heard of Mitel Summit and looked forward to seeing what their play was in the CPaaS market.
Mitel Summit
Mitel Summit is the CPaaS output of Mitel's acquisition of ShoreTel in September 2017. At the time, Rich McBee, President and Chief Executive Officer of Mitel, said,
"In an apps economy and IoT world that depends on real-time communications, providing an agile, responsive and brilliantly simple customer experience becomes wildly important".
This statement has aged incredibly well. The app economy, as Rich coined it, is booming. According to Statistica, 23.14 billion IoT devices were installed worldwide at the end of 2018. My excitement that Mitel Summit could be a genuine CPaaS contender started to build.
As I scoured the internet for information of Mitel Summit, my excitement dwindled. Mitel's product page left me wanting and the page redirect classified Summit in the "other" category.
