Hello, again!
Early on in 2012, there were some bits and pieces of information posted in our blog (here and here) informing you of the new partnership between Compuquip and Mitel for Unified Communications Solutions, specifically Voice-over-IP. As this partnership has developed and we’ve narrowed the scope of what Compuquip’s core offerings in this area will be, I thought it would be a good time to give a quick rundown on the different ways we can help our customers.
Who is Mitel?
Mitel is a Canada-based telecommunications provider who was been in business since 1973. Obviously this industry has changed quite a bit since then, and their specialty is now telephone communication in the digital area (traditional VOIP and all of the associated bells and whistles). Mitel is currently number 3 in both Global and US Market Share for this industry.
More recently, Mitel has made a name for themselves as being the first (and still only) of the name-brand vendors who are fully supported on VMware vSphere deployments, allowing you to, in many instances, leverage your existing infrastructure. Additionally, they are the only name-brand vendor offering their own hosted VOIP Service, which I’ll cover shortly.
What options do the Compuquip / Mitel partnership have for me?
If you are looking to replace your legacy phone system or unhappy with whatever service you currently have, here are a few options:
On-Premise VOIP
At a high level, this is no different than other well-known VOIP vendors: you buy equipment that sits in your office or collocation facility that offers IP-based phone service, and hook this up to your phone service carrier (AT&T, Windstream, Sprint, etc.) or a SIP based service. Typically, the hardware and licensing available from Mitel runs 10%-20% less than most of the other well-known vendors. All of the bells and whistles that VOIP is known for (remote users, 4-digit-dialing, Outlook integration, etc) are available. A big differentiator in an On-Premise deployment is the virtualization option, which enhances the implementation by allowing the VOIP Solution to take advantage of the High Availability features in VMware Infrastructures.
For a case study on an On-Premise VOIP deployment, click right here.
Stay tuned for the next installment,which will cover Hosted VOIP (ie., Cloud).
