One of the most intriguing subplots behind Mitel‘s great success in recent years has been its decision to move away from UCaaS offerings to focus on its core products, base and partners — a strategy that has reaped rewards.
Mitel shocked the UC and collaboration industry when it announced its unique UCaaS partnership with RingCentral in 2021. RingCentral became Mitel’s “exclusive UCaaS partner” after the pair announced a new collaboration. The deal involved Mitel nudging its customer base of 35 million users towards RingCentral’s Message Video Phone (MVP) platform.
RingCentral has other partnerships with Avaya and Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. However, Avaya and Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise retain the customer as they are repackaging RingCentral’s UCaaS technology, while Mitel is handing the customer over.
On the face of it, this would appear to have been a challenging transitional process. However, Mitel’s Head of UKISA, Nick Riggott, told UC Today that the strategy around the deal did not centre on challenges but “the opportunity presented” by a partnership with RingCentral.
“Our core focus is the mid-market and enterprise space,” Riggott said. “We deliver those solutions via our partners into the market in a private cloud, an on-premises or a hybrid solution of the two. The way we saw the market moving led to a requirement for more of a non-one-size-fits-all approach.”
“RingCentral, as an organisation, has been delivering a market lead and MVP proposition for years,” Riggott continued. “It’s kind of a no-brainer for customers who are looking for a public cloud solution.”
The partnership also entailed Mitel’s private equity backers investing $200m in RingCentral. RingCentral, in turn, announced the $650m acquisition of Mitel’s CloudLink technology, a cloud platform that allows migration from on-premises PBX to the cloud.
In the spring of 2022, RingCentral CEO Vlad Schmunis said that RingCentral had enjoyed early Mitel migration success. RingCentral said it had already won contracts valued in the seven figures as part of the Mitel alliance, crediting this to its work with channel partners. Schmunis described those early months of the deal as a “very promising start”.
The benefits of the partnership were naturally two-sided. RingCentral and Mitel launched the first certified devices of their UCaaS partnership last year, with Mitel’s 6900 range of business phones being endorsed for use on RingCentral’s MVP platform.
Mitel CEO, Tarun Loomba, said of the deal at the time of its announcement: “The unique depth of this partnership furthers our strategy of delivering world-class communications to our customers and providing them a clear and flexible path for the future.”
Eighteen months after the deal was first revealed, has “the unique depth” of the relationship endured or even blossomed further for Mitel?
“We’re able to focus on the areas that we’re really good at,” explained Riggott. “We’re brilliant at call control, collaboration and contact centre software and the support in technologies. Other organisations are better placed to be able to offer those services to any customers should they want to go down a public cloud route.”
Similarly to how a productivity app helps employees to streamline their workflow by eliminating inefficiencies, the RingCentral partnership enables Mitel to redirect its resources and attention to products and services that will maximise the value of its specific expertise and further bolster its reputation as a leading communications provider.
Mitel did not rest on its laurels following the RingCentral deal and launched new offerings to enhance its UC portfolio. In March 2022, Mitel announced it would make all of its flagship products available on subscription models, including MiVoice Business, MiVoice Office 400, MiVoice 5000 and MiVoice MX-ONE.
This allowed business customers more flexibility without having to move thousands of users to UCaaS models. High-profile customers adopted the new subscription-based solutions, including Carlsberg. Mitel was partly empowered to produce these solutions because of the strategic freedom afforded by the RingCentral deal.
“I think it’s really about focusing on our core areas of strategy and playing absolutely to our strengths,” Riggott added. “That’s what we’re looking to do for our partners and also for our customers, and by doing central tech for those customers, they’re not able to be served by Mitel’s core portfolio. It’s just the right thing to do.”
As with Mitel’s acquisition of Unify, scheduled to be finalised during Q3 this year and which Riggott similarly described as a “significant opportunity”, the RingCentral partnership is ultimately in service to Mitel’s overarching strategy of maximising its core base, engaging its partners and a commitment to growth. This strategy hasn’t fundamentally changed direction during the company’s 50 years of existence.
“I think our strategy is probably one that’s been in place for ad infinitum,” Riggott said. “It’s about trying to continually push forward with an evolving solution for partners and customers to maximise the channel relationships that we have, to consolidate the market space from a UC perspective globally. So, our strategy, as far as Mitel is concerned, is continuing on as we are.”
Mitel’s partnership with RingCentral doesn’t look as unique as it is singularly compelling in the context of that sophisticated strategy. The results of the collaboration speak for themselves too.
