Mitel Fends Off Rumors About Position on UC, UCaaS

… ‘What have we done to connect with our entire customer base?’ People are talking to them from the UCaaS side … that’s what our competitors are doing. They don’t care if it’s their customer or someone else’s; they’re hitting it every day.”

Mitel completed its ShoreTel acquisition just over a year ago and Abbott said the integration has gone “very well.”

“We have been retooling our business from a systems, go-to-market and channel-program standpoint significantly over the last 12 months,” he said. “The big thing we’re going to be doing in [the first quarter of 2019] and to [the second quarter] is really going through a simplification of the pricing of our products to make us a much easier company to do business with. We’re focused on getting what I like to refer to as the friction out of the system. Anytime it requires some type of communication engagement to be able to respond to a customer situation, that’s friction.”

This requires a lot of rebuilding systems, “but we’re doing the heavy lifting and spending an awful lot of time, effort and money … to make this as efficient of a channel as possible to the customer,” Abbott said.

Packet Fusion previously partnered with ShoreTel and “we were foes (with Mitel) for many years,” but after the Mitel acquisition, “we’re all one big happy family now,” said Matthew Pingatore, Packet Fusion’s CEO.

“It’s been great,” he said. “There were definitely some troubles trying to join your enemy to begin with, but the executive team at Mitel has been greeting us with open arms and being very truthful. There were some troubles for sure, but they listened to us and they fixed them, and we can all now go on, which is forward and global domination.”

Mitel and its partners can’t turn their back on traditional on-premises UC because “that’s what pays our bills as we fund the transition to the cloud,” Pingatore said.

“We are all doing that transition to the cloud and we’re all doing it together,” he said.

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