Consolidation and Confusion: What’s Going On With Mitel?

In January 25, 2023, Mitel announced it was in talks with Atos to acquire Unify. This follows an 18-month period during which Mitel announced its own products were being discontinued in favour of a RingCentral cloud solution and it lost its place in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for UCaaS.

And unlike a partnership of equals, Mitel simply handed over its UCaaS leads to RingCentral.?

Back in May 2022, Daren Finney, Senior Vice President of Global Channel Sales for Mitel, gave an interview with UC Today, where he claimed that Mitel would now focus on non-cloud-based unified communications. This was despite the industry’s move to cloud-based solutions and given that Mitel was criticised in late 2021 for lagging behind leaders in terms of scalability, innovation and advanced features.

Haemorrhaging customers to RingCentral didn’t seem like a winning solution. But this may be part of its focus on legacy on-premises systems. After all, if you ignore the growing cloud market, it’s the perfect opportunity to grab the remaining share of a shrinking legacy market. Surely that’s a great opportunity for growth … maybe?

We, on the other hand, predict you’ll sell your last PBX in the next 10 years.?

As for Atos, it announced at its Capital Markets Day in June 2022 that it was looking to significantly change the way it operated, given the increasing competition across numerous sectors. The proposal: Split into two companies. What was notable is that it specifically excluded UC&C — Unify — from its proposed split, making it difficult to know what was going on there.?

It seems likely that Mitel had expressed some interest in acquiring Unify during that time — these sorts of plans often take a couple of years to fully come to fruition. RingCentral would be the stopgap measure to ensure Mitel partners could still offer some sort of cloud service while Mitel shored up its fast-fading legacy PBX market.?

So what does this mean for partners?

First, there’s the constant instability. You can’t drastically change your primary cloud-based UC&C offering twice in two years and expect people to keep up. That’s not how partners can do business. And once you start shifting your core business that much — from Mitel to RingCentral to Unify — mistakes happen. Partners end up having to learn how to integrate multiple systems in a very short period of time, each with their own quirks and issues. Will core integrations work? Will other systems that have been carefully created to work with the current iteration continue to work?

Even worse, the year or two of RingCentral use by non-expert customers means that some will be very wary about cloud communications:

That constant shifting of knowledge leads to unhappy customers — and that assumes they’re not going direct to RingCentral now, leaving partners who have worked with them for years.?

And what happens to stability as Mitel seeks to integrate Unify’s products into its own lineup and start modifying them? Those teams of engineers will be competent, but it’s hard to completely learn new systems. Worse, because RingCentral products already have an in-road into Unify systems, there will be a constant process of relearning so much that looks familiar but isn’t.

You can guess what that means during that transition, which should last a few years. And given that Mitel already has a reputation for outages, poor decision-making and unusual pivots, can you really trust them to embrace consistency?

Our opinion is simple: You can’t.?

The move toward solely focusing on on-prem systems is not where the market is going. Cloud services are more convenient, more effective and less costly than the alternative, and that isn’t likely to change in the near future. We see on-prem going the same way as vinyl, cassette tapes and even CDs. While there may be a niche for those in the future, it’s not a formula for growth.?

For partners, Wildix offers consistency. Reliability. Stability.

We’ve been leading the field in so many innovations over the last decade. Need end-to-end security for files? Audio, chat and video? We’ve had that for years as standard, unlike most of our competitors. Use of WebRTC? We’re approaching a full decade of use — not bad for a project that was only released in 2011.?

And we don’t mess around. Wildix solutions have been the go-to for partners around the world thanks to their ease of installation and flexibility. Integrations? Everything from Teams to major CRMs. You’ll find many of them on our integrations page.?

Even better, because we don’t compete against our partners, you get a great solution that’s not constantly attempting to steal your customers away.?

Instead of installing legacy systems that no longer work for you, join Wildix and see your revenue and opportunities grow. Visit here to find out more.?