2011 Summer Notebook Part 2: Mitel Business Partner Conference2011 Summer Notebook Part 2: Mitel Business Partner Conference

Despite widespread support for server virtualization among PBX developers these days, Mitel still claims an edge.

Mitel is another company that earlier this summer held its partner conference, and tacked on an industry analyst track for good measure. The company is still in the process of sorting through issues stemming from its 2007 acquisition of Inter-Tel, particularly in the area of reconciling Mitel's channel-centric sales model with Inter-Tel's approach, which was heavy on direct sales. Keynoting executives proclaiming the end of channel conflict drew applause from the audience, though I worry there's still some left here and there. Last time I checked Mitel AnyWhere was only sold direct...

When it came to products technology, virtualization took center stage at the Mitel event. And rightfully so. Among communications solution developers Mitel is a true pioneer in the brave and still rather new world of virtualization. The company was way ahead of the curve in delivering a desktop virtualization solution in conjunction with Sun. It's been generally available for years now, though customer adoption seems to have been much slower than expected. Upcoming support for VMware View may help kick start customer interest. On the server side of the virtualization front, it was Mitel’s co-development work with VMware that led to vSphere 4's support for real-time applications like telephony call control. (In fact it was at a Mitel conference two years back--or was it three?--that I got my first detailed introduction to server virtualization and UC.) This opened the floodgate to a wide range of PBX developers certifying their various call control platforms, contact center software and UC applications as VMware Ready...or the Citrix equivalent.

Despite widespread support for server virtualization among PBX developers these days, Mitel still claims an edge. Product managers point to the fact the vMCD, as the virtualization-supporting version of Mitel Communications Director is called, can be deployed on any kind of server hardware. At least any server hardware certified support for the specific scalability and application needs of the company deploying it. What Mitel is contrasting this against is Cisco's approach to UC and virtualization, which requires Cisco UCS servers, or Avaya's approach, which requires a specific Avaya-branded appliance. At the conference, Mitel CTO Jim Davies chided competitors for--unlike Mitel--not being able to use VMware management tools to monitor and manage UC applications deployed in virtualized server environments. And he said that Mitel is now utilizing VMware High Availability, a feature of the vSphere software, to provide high availability services for Mitel communications solutions. This complements the application-level resiliency that comes with MCD, providing the option to use one, the other or both. "The benefit of using VMware HA," Mitel portfolio manager Ed Kus notes, "is that the IT department can align and manage their overall application availability across all apps deployed in a data center in a consistent fashion, thereby simplifying the data to data administration and manageability of the solution."

Mitel now needs to demonstrate that its customers, particularly those in the enterprise space, are prepared to leverage virtualization not just to consolidate communications apps in the data center or reduce the number of physical servers they need to buy and manage...but that they are also ready to modify the way they are accustomed to deploying high availability and redundancy services associated with their comms platforms. This is something that I fear that--despite 300 Mitel resellers now promoting its virtualization-ready solutions--may take a while to catch on.

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