Cloud Contact Center Featured Article

Mitel Talks About Mobile-First Strategy, including Contact Center

By Paula Bernier
Executive Editor, TMC

Mitel (News - Alert) today laid out its strategy for taking the contact center to the next level in what it refers to as a mobile-first world. The news comes the same month that rumors are flying about a potential Mitel-Polycom merger.

That includes a new agreement with Twilio (News - Alert) that will enable it to provide contact center solutions that can route and allow its customers to respond to text messages – and to provide those responses in the medium of the end user’s preference, Rebecca Wormleighton, Mitel’s new director of technical marketing for contact centers, told TMCnet in an interview yesterday. It also involves a new relationship with Nuance (News - Alert) that brings to the Mitel MiContact Center solution text-to-speech and speech recognition capabilities, she said. Other enhancements, she added, involve new bundled options, out-of-the-box CRM integrations, availability, and scalability.

In an interview last month at CTIA (News - Alert), Mitel’s CTO of Mobile Terry McCabe noted that Mitel recently acquired Mavenir, which has voice, video, and messaging solutions – including VoLTE, VoWiFi, and rich communications – for the mobile carrier. T-Mobile U.S. is/was the company’s biggest customer and in early September the carrier announced a video over LTE for which Mitel is providing the infrastructure. He also said that Mitel has been working with Apple (News - Alert) and T-Mobile on a network continuity service that enables users to receive calls on secondary devices.

A press release the company issued today also talks about easy tap-to-connect communications and collaboration tools optimized for smartphones, the fact that its first-to-market VoWiFi solution is now available on three continents and in use by T-Mobile U.S., that it has expanded its MiCloud platform into France, Germany, and the U.K.; and new mobile capabilities its delivering to the hospitality vertical so companies in that space can deliver personalized guest experiences.

The company’s overall mobile enterprise strategy aims to allow service providers to deliver rich new mobile services to support real-time collaboration, video, and voice services; small businesses to be able to take advantage of capabilities that in the past were available only to large enterprises; and large enterprises to gain flexibility and speed in mixed hardware and software environments. Mitel also mentioned it has an accelerator initiative through which it works with customers to create, develop, and test new cloud services real-time mobile applications.

Mitel is a leader in unified communications and collaboration solutions, including contact center solutions. Its portfolio includes MiVoice business phones and UC platforms; MiCollab solutions that combine collaboration, mobility and messaging; and MiContact Center solutions.