Mitel CEO Rich McBee on Aastra MergerMitel CEO Rich McBee on Aastra Merger

He sees a complementary picture in channel, geography, and technology for the two companies.

In a phone interview this morning, shortly after his company had announced the acquisition of Aastra, Mitel CEO Rich McBee told me that he expects the new, expanded Mitel to be more competitive in more markets, in terms of global regions, customer size, and technology; that Mitel will have an improvement to its Lync-coexistence story; and that he anticipates little channel conflict as the two companies come together.

Aastra brings strong, complementary products both in the SMB market, as well as with the very large enterprise, McBee said. He called Aastra's large-enterprise Clearspan platform "one of the best-kept secrets" in that market segment, and noted recent wins for the product such as the U.S. Postal Service.

In general, though, McBee said that the place where Aastra gives Mitel a boost in the large enterprise is in Europe, where Aastra enjoys double-digit market share in France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland, according to MZA figures cited by Mitel. The combination would make the new Mitel the market leader in the last three of those countries.

Another "tremendous opportunity" that the deal presents, according to McBee, is for Mitel to "light up" the Aastra installed base with its contact center offerings--which Mitel strengthened earlier this year with another acquisition, of PrairieFyre.

The Prairie Fyre acquisition enabled Mitel to bring its longtime contact center OEM in house, and it also strengthened Mitel's story in Lync environments, since PrairieFyre has one of the strongest Lync integration stories in its market. Mitel also this past year announced a strategy for pitching its voice platforms to Lync users as an alternative to Lync telephony.

Now, with the addition of Aastra, McBee noted that Mitel picks up the provider of one of three certified Lync-compliant phone sets.

"We can go clear to the endpoint," he said. "It completes the picture for us."

Finally, I asked Rich McBee about the last really huge acquisition that Mitel made, which haunted it for years--the $723 million acquisition of Inter-Tel in 2007 (under a previous Mitel regime), which led to prolonged channel conflicts and other integration challenges.

Not surprisingly, McBee said he anticipates no similar problems with the Aastra integration. Inter-Tel sold direct while Aastra is channel-based, so there's no risk of the vendor competing against its channel, as had happened post-Inter-Tel. And of the top 20 channel partners for Aastra and Mitel, there was no overlap. "The channel differences are pretty stark," McBee said. "I think [the two channels are] very compatible."

And while it's too early to get very specific about product line rationalizations, McBee said the fact that Aastra's strength is in Europe will require a very methodical approach to this task. While the U.S. market is relatively consistent across our geography, each country in Europe tends to have its own needs and requirements, which will affect how Mitel approaches that installed base.

"We'll take the time that we need, look at each one of the platforms," he said. "We'll have to look, major country by major country, look at the roadmap and say here's how we'll migrate the customer base over time."

McBee vowed that, "The one thing we're not going to do, we're not going to strand customers."

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