David Petts On Mitel, ShoreTel, and Unify

TalkingHeadz is an interview format series featuring the movers and shakers of enterprise communications - we also have great guests.  In this episode, we check in with David Petts, SVP Cloud to Cloud Business Group at Mitel. 

Our podcast was recorded just a few days after Mitel announced its acquisition of Atos Unify. We do discuss it, but there's more unknowns than knowns. 

David Petts is a seasoned sales and customer success executive with a proven track record of driving revenue growth and profit improvements across multiple product segments. With extensive expertise in enterprise servers, PC's, systems management software, business mobility, unified communication, and content licensing, David has a comprehensive understanding of the technology industry.

David is well-versed in adapting go-to-market strategies to the specific dynamics of different geographic. David is a team-oriented leader who values collaboration and is dedicated to achieving success for both his team and the company.

Mitel is a leading global provider of communications and collaboration solutions. Founded in 1972, the company has a long history of innovation in the telecommunications industry and has grown to serve customers in more than 100 countries around the world.

Mitel's product portfolio includes a wide range of solutions for businesses of all sizes, from small and medium-sized enterprises to large enterprises and government agencies. In addition to its core products, Mitel is also known for its commitment to customer service and support. 

Transcript

Dave Michels: 0:00

Hey welcome to Talking here, Snake Evan and I will be talking with David pets from Mitel. But before that, Evan, I gotta say, you know, at the recent cloud Communications Alliance, you did a fantastic job of telling people how to do social. I learned so much from your session. I thought that was great.

Evan Kirstel: 0:28

I've been telling you for years, but for some reason, you finally decided to listen. And I'll give you a rare compliment. You had your first live stream at Dave Michaels on LinkedIn. It was called influence me. Yep. Which is getting influencers on to change your mind.

Dave Michels: 0:44

I realized no one's talking to the influencers. And so you're talking to all these different companies, other people talking to companies and says, I know some of the influencers. I'll do that once.

Evan Kirstel: 0:51

I've tried to change your mind for a decade, I've failed miserably. I still have an Android.

Dave Michels: 0:58

You have a microphone, you seem to have so much more credibility when you explain this to me. But it was interesting, the kinds of questions you were getting. And I think we should have a little brief recap here because it was very interesting. What the hell do we do with Twitter? Is Twitter dying? I mean, a lot of people are abandoning it. The system is not as stable. What's your advice? I mean, you're still active on Twitter. What do you think?

Evan Kirstel: 1:19

I think we're at peak Twitter and I don't think there's anywhere to go but slowly downhill. In fact, the service itself seems degraded the responsiveness, the glitches, there strange anomalies using the service. There's things that have been discontinued, like the review newsletter, I mean, had 20,000 Review newsletter, which luckily, I managed to take away but these gradual the third party, which is off one day, and yeah, third party clients, it's still chaotic. And and while Musk has these grand schemes and ambitions, why don't you get the product, get the service, right? And then focus on all these these wider dreams. So I think people are gonna get annoyed over time and gradually move on. Look, I mean, things last a long time, we still have Yahoo email ids and aol.com as a thing and fax machine. So I think Twitter will be around but whether it's the hotbed of engagement and and media journalism that it once was, I really doubt it can sustain

Dave Michels: 2:26

that that's got to be painful to say that

Evan Kirstel: 2:28

LinkedIn is going going well, and engagement is high. And Microsoft is not ruined it, thank goodness. And your live stream, for example, had dozens and dozens of comments.

Dave Michels: 2:38

But that was eye opening. Because of course, I put your advice. I streamed into both Twitter and LinkedIn at the same time, and LinkedIn did have much more engagement. And I've noticed that on a number of posts I've done and so you know, thanks, Ilan, I didn't really know about LinkedIn before. So

Evan Kirstel: 2:53

the next battleground is Reddit. So we're gonna have to up our game. Get on Reddit. And you should check out Cora Cora is an amazing content repository, people asking q&a s and upvoting and, you know, no nonsense

Dave Michels: 3:08

information repository, amazing information repositories. Let's get to our interview with David.

Evan Kirstel: 3:13

Yeah, he has a lot of info to share. Looking forward to it.

god: 3:16

Talking it's it's a semi monthly podcast with interviews of the top movers and shakers and enterprise communications and collaboration, your host Dave Michaels and Evan Kirkstall, both of which offer extraordinary services including research, analysis and social media marketing. You can find them on Twitter, LinkedIn, or at talking points.com. That's points with the Z and Evan curse. school.com. That's ki r s t e l.

Dave Michels: 3:45

Welcome to toffee has today we have with us David pets. Evan, you probably knew David back at shortfill. Is that right?

Evan Kirstel: 3:52

Well, I do have David David has a long and distinguished career short sell Nokia, HP. So David, you're pretty old, I think essentially. Right.

David Petts: 4:04

Thanks. Thanks for that introduction. Yeah, I've been around a bit. Let's put it that way. But yeah, so as you said shorter was the lead in connection to my hotel. HP and, and even before

Dave Michels: 4:17

you miss that connection, I mean, it's just so easy. You work in a company, you get acquired and you end up at a new company, but you didn't do that.

David Petts: 4:23

That's true. That's a nature of acquisitions, I guess, you know, in that particular circumstance, there might our team were acquiring shorter and they elected to keep the executive team intact. So myself and actually myself and all of my colleagues at shorter have moved on to other things at that point.

Dave Michels: 4:39

That motel which is during my time in your career, motel was kind of the kind of like the Borg we ought to talk to you about we want to talk we want to talk about my tail we want to talk about the big news with a toast that was just announced. But first I want to talk a little bit about short tail. Now when you think about short tail, I have a feeling and I'm just guessing here, you kind of have a smile

David Petts: 4:59

in it. context have fond memories of a good time and I was with the short sale for about seven years. Obviously the company was around longer than that. I enjoyed it short. I think we had had a good company and I think Mitel acquired a great asset. I enjoyed my time there so to that degree, absolutely look back with it.

Dave Michels: 5:18

How many CEOs Did you work for at sore toe

David Petts: 5:21

to to Peter Blackmore, and then Don Joe's?

Dave Michels: 5:25

And I'm guessing one of them you liked?

David Petts: 5:29

I like the both Peter and I actually didn't know each other from HP days. I knew Peter before I went

Dave Michels: 5:37

through that avenue said, yeah, he's PRN. Yeah, I didn't connect that.

David Petts: 5:42

And even before that Compaq, which because HP acquired compact. So Peter, I've known for a long time, about I enjoyed working with both. Peter was only about a year of my time, but short also longer time with Don as at the helm. And certainly with Dawn, it was the transformative period where we were really driving the company to focus much more on the UCaaS transformation that was occurring. We were very, very heavily US centric, as I'm sure you know. It was a fun transformation project with it with a company that ultimately ended up in the acquisition from mitre.

Evan Kirstel: 6:16

I love the Compaq reference, Dave still uses a 3d six daily driver

David Petts: 6:22

at Tokyo smile. So I don't know whether you ever saw these. But John Cleese and the adverts for Compaq they were one among the funniest adverts.

Evan Kirstel: 6:31

I do remember. Please tell me you you got to meet John Cleves as part of that advertising campaign.

David Petts: 6:37

Oh, gosh, I wish I was not in acting. But that would have been good.

Evan Kirstel: 6:40

So you grew revenue 250 million in four years and software sales to 400 million at two different companies. So you reduce sales expense as a percentage of revenue, you have very creative go to market. So where does this innovation and thinking come from? Tell us about your trajectory over the last decade or so?

David Petts: 7:01

Yeah, sure. Well, so the things you're referring to there a couple a couple of areas where I spent many years at a combination of Compaq and HP and my role. This is more than you ask. But originally, it was very operational. I was in the supply chain and operations side, but I moved over to sales fairly quickly. I've been through I've had the benefit and opportunity to go through a lot of guises of Compaq as they grew from a PC company to a broad server company to then acquiring dec, adding services, then being acquired by HP. So those experiences all helped for me as to seeing opportunities, both in companies coming together. But even in organic evolution of companies. I've always enjoyed problem solving and business problems. In particular, those growth things, you know, where are you short, I was the example. One of the charters that I was tasked with during the company by the board was to improve the efficiency of the sales team, you know, the productivity, and you know, sales expenses, a percent of revenue, and so forth. That was a unique challenge that formed both partner strategies, as well as our own sales, Team design and approach. So different things in different places. But I enjoy a business solving business problems. That's what leads to a lot of these outcomes. I guess,

Dave Michels: 8:16

I got a business problem here, I got a problem, I want you to see if you can solve for me, because, you know, HP was obviously a box company you sold boxes. Hopefully it's fair not to insult in short tail is clearly a Box Company, although the transformation you were talking about earlier undergone was trying to become a cloud company, which is part of why have Mitel acquired it. Michael, of course, has a legacy as a cloud company. And then last year, you've already mentioned this RingCentral thing became, you know, remains a cloud company. So my problem, the question for you to solve is how do you get to be the Cloud to Cloud Guy with all this box background?

David Petts: 8:53

Well, I haven't already mentioned so I'll correct you a one thing HP is a box company is somewhat of a mischaracterization. For example, I ran the software business in the Americas at HP and globally. That was a very significant business. So I've got a lot of experience in software both from that as well as UCaaS with with short vowel and SAS more generally, we are between the two. In terms of my history shorter was predominantly around that how do we transform from a UC pure as a pure with a more on premise orientation to a UCaaS piece. So a lot of our learnings from that are very applicable to what we're doing now. The ring partnership RingCentral partnership we have, then the role that I've been doing for the last 14 months or so specifically, is about how do we transition our current UCaaS customers our UC as a service customers from several different platforms that we have at Mitel over to the RingCentral solution. And so, frankly, you know, that's not got a lot to do with why UCaaS it's got a lot to do with why migrate get from one place to another and how do we make that an attractive proposition to customers? But a lot shorter answers your question, I've got a lot of software experience from running the software sales team, the UCaaS transformation in short out over many years. And that's part of what led me to where I am interesting.

Dave Michels: 10:16

I appreciate you correcting me because when I say Box Company, it was meant to be a little bit of antagonistic. But the problem is, we don't know what to call this stuff anymore, right? Because you just said, you know, it's software. So when Mitel said that, when they announced the agreement with RingCentral, which of course, you're in the right in the middle of the conclusion a lot from a lot of people was that Mitel was going to be a premises based company only, and they're gonna die. And neither one of those statements are true or correct. And and so what how do you describe Mitel? Is a premises is a private cloud, what do you say about Mitel? And then, of course, you're in the middle of that RingCentral part. And so you're kind of what is the cloud to cloud part of your title?

David Petts: 10:55

Sure. Yeah. No, great question. And actually, to your point, even my tiles, solutions or any solution, and you see, there's a huge component with software, that a lot of that there's a physical box that is enabling the solution to work, but the software is a key. But nevertheless, you know, to answer your question, the way in which companies customers access all of their great view deliverables of a unified communication solution has evolved over time. Traditionally, you would argue it was pure on premise where customers bought the solution, put it into their premise and operated and managed it right. But then, you know, over time, there was virtualization, how did you then abstract some of the software from the physical appliances and separate the two? That in turn, wouldn't say specifically evolved? But there was also then how do I deliver that from an external infrastructure rather than my own datacenter, if you want to call it that, whether that's a set of appliances in a cupboard, or a true sort of data center for a company? So there's depends how you want to call that is that cloud is that hosted solution? Is it just an outsourced data center management. So the ability of abstracting the software and changing the solution over time as an enable different ways of consuming the solution all the way through, including UCaaS, you know, as a service, and of course, you see as a service is multi tenant in nature, all customers have essentially the same solution. And it's evolved at the pace, the vendor decides to evolve it, you would argue that a dedicated cloud solution or single instance, that controls are much more with the customer in terms of things like maintenance, Windows and upgrades and changes. So there's a potpourri of different ways you can consume the solution. And we through the partnership. And of course, through all of the offerings we have, generically, we want to enable all of the different solution types for our customers to choose from in your customer lifecycle management kind of play.

Evan Kirstel: 12:57

Absolutely. And so how is the partnership with RingCentral? Going? Can you characterize the status on that go to market?

David Petts: 13:03

Yeah, absolutely. There's two different components to this, which aren't necessarily obvious. Or maybe they are, there's a cloud to cloud piece which I mentioned, you know, that's been my primary focus until for the last 1214 months or so. And then there's the premise to cloud and that distinction between those two is really customers making their decision to move from an on premise environment to UCaaS for the first time, versus those that are have already made that decision. But because of the partnership and making a decision to move from our solution to the MVP solution with RingCentral, our partner, I would say the short answer question is it's going well, that's the first characterization. I would also be the first to admit that, you know, in any new partnership, we've learned a lot in the last, you know, 1214 months, how to work together, how to work with our partners, how to improve, you know, efficiency of process and proposition, what it is customers are looking for, and how to join the pitch, who's doing what, where, to whom, and how you know, so there's been a lot and a lot of learnings from my perspective, you know, very successful first 1214

Dave Michels: 14:12

RingCentral partnership with Mitel is unique. There's nothing like that. I think you're the fourth one with Avaya being the first one, but the other ones were all modeled kind of on the Avaya model where they Avaya basically became master agent. That's a word I learned from short tail actually got its channel and its direct teams to sell RingCentral or by a cloud officer should be more accurate. In the Mitel. case, it's different, right? In the Mitel case, it's not Mitel cloud office, it's RingCentral. And this was the first time RingCentral have done this where the RingCentral is kind of RingCentral team is more or less responsible for the sale. I'm guessing your role when you talk about how you've learned the mistakes and whatever in the early part of this transfer. I'm assuming I'm guessing your role wasn't there in the beginning. I'm guessing that if there without you needing some sort of Ambassador to help these customers move over to RingCentral. Is that accurate?

David Petts: 15:04

Yes, on both fronts. And in as you mentioned, that uniqueness of the Mitel RingCentral partnership, it is a moving of the customers to the core RingCentral MVP solution, managed and sold by RingCentral. In the case of the other partnerships you mentioned, I think of it almost as a wholesale or white label solution, and you know, the selling and so forth is done by Avaya, and so forth. Just for clarity, we've actually, again, we've just made some changes in this, but I'm gonna give a little bit of context and history. So over the last 12 to 14 months, we've sort of had a divergent path in the context of the premise to Cloud has been working the mitosis role has been principally working with our partners, and through our partners to the customers, where those customers are seeking a UCaaS solution as as their journey and evolution of their own decision making and solution set, how to guide them over to RingCentral as our as our partner, and how to position that as the our recommended and supported choice, then RingCentral does the natural selling of that to the customer just as they would any other customer. In the cloud or cloud side, it's actually been a little bit different. We worked with RingCentral, to enable a team that I've managed to sell the migration. So we've been doing the selling the positioning of MVP, but because of our we have customer success managers and so forth, we have a very intimate relationship, we have a direct contract that in a UCaaS world, that contract is directly with the end customer. And obviously the partners are agents and master agents, as you described earlier, we had a much stronger involvement in defining the propositions understanding from customers firsthand what their challenges were in considering this, and a lot of it, I would say is less about selecting MVP as a viable solution. I mean, at the end of the day, they're highly regarded well recommended by companies like the people like yourselves as as a leading solution. It was more about I've got to go through a change and who's going to manage that change? How do I move from platform a Platform B, what does that mean for my employees, my administration team? How do I get from A to B? And how do I get there? And the least painful way?

Dave Michels: 17:29

Is this transition you're describing as a possible? Yes,

David Petts: 17:33

yeah, we've we've successfully done it with many, many customers already in the first year. Plus, we've put in, I'll give you an example, we worked with both ourselves. And with RingCentral. This is just one example to create what we call migration assistance package or program. And that map, you're one example that is we're able to export the customer's current configuration, call routing, call flows, your users locations, etc, etc, from our cloud solution, and in a format that's importable by RingCentral, into their configuration system. So we lower the overhead of any customer having to do all that work. So that's just one example of how we can lower their we can't make it zero. But we can take away a lot of the pain that you would associate with moving from one platform a to Platform B. And by the way, we can apply that not just to cloud to cloud migrations from Mitel to RingCentral. But in a broader customer lifecycle management world, we can apply that we've got customers that might want to move to our one of our subscription offerings, how do they move from an existing premise platform to a subscription package? Their learnings have been very helpful, but hopefully they've that that clarifies what I mean, in some of the learnings we've had.

Dave Michels: 18:49

I want to back up a little bit to the premises concept of what my till is perceived, as explained a little more what that means. I mean, as my team is still making hardware, so making physical appliances, or is it strictly software? Are most of these implementations literally on prem? Are they in a private data center or private cloud? Or are they in AWS? Tell me about the core? My tell Prem solution, and what do you call it?

David Petts: 19:14

Yeah, I think Well, I think the short answer your question is all of the above. You know, as I was saying a little earlier, there are multiple different ways you can consume a solution from my hotel. And yes, there's an element of even down to the physical device, you know, handsets are still a thing. Some more customers, or some customers are going to soft phone environments, but physical phones are clearly on premise, if you want to call it that. Yes, there are abilities for companies to still buy on premise traditional, if you want to call it that on premise solutions, where they have whatever hardware is required, and of course, the software in their own servers and infrastructure on their premise. But there are also abstracted the software can be housed in an ad AWS or similar kind of environment, either managed by the customer or managed by a third party. And so that could be a hosted solution managed by a, through a managed service for the customer do it themselves. But instead of it being on their premise, it's in a shared infrastructure or you know, an AWS kind of environment. All of those options are available, as I said, with Ring, ring is our now partner for a multi tenant UCaaS environment.

Dave Michels: 20:26

I'm still trying to figure out though, is, is Mitel still making physical boxes or appliances? Or is it only software these days?

David Petts: 20:34

Yeah, that there are some appliances, but predominantly, it's software, a bit of both, I would say more, the hardware is more of an enabler where where needed and or where that option is preferred. Excellent.

Evan Kirstel: 20:48

So Dave, you haven't talked about the big eight US announcement yet? Is that still under wraps? Or can we dive into that big news?

David Petts: 20:57

What is big news, that's for sure, there's an element of under wraps in the context of with any transaction of this size, there is a period of time between the announcement which we made yesterday through to the actual close of the transaction, there are some regulatory and other procedural pieces that need to go through. But for sure, it's not a secret at this point. You know, and I think it's a tremendous opportunity for Mitel. And the two companies coming together, very complimentary, you know, we have, you know, I would position Mitel, as historically or traditionally, SMB through to sort of mid market, perhaps touching into the enterprise space, one would argue that unify is more of that mid market and all the way through to large enterprise. So there's a very complimentary expansion of our technologies and through it, your addressable market, from a customer size standpoint, geographically, there's a great fit, unify have a very strong geographic presence in Western Europe, South America, many parts, somewhere, they have a much stronger footprint than than my dad has. Conversely, we have a stronger US footprint than unified. So geographically, it's very complimentary as well. If you think about some of the things that this brings to the party, which as you'd imagine, aligns to that sort of enterprise Centricity that unify has managed service, we have a relatively small managed service or professional services structure, unify has a very large managed service. So lots of very complimentary things, both geographically addressable market and skills and capabilities, there, and then you've got the channel. And there are different channel types associated with those different businesses. So a complementary coming together of channels to so I'm very excited about it. Coincidentally, I guess we've sort of touched on this earlier, but both companies already have a partnership with RingCentral, slightly different natures. But again, the strategy that each company has chosen is very aligned. I'm very excited about what this opportunity brings together.

Evan Kirstel: 22:57

Let's talk about the mobile collaboration suite, you know, obviously, voice messaging video, where are we with your portfolio? What are you seeing getting most traction? What applications and services are getting most of usage and engagement by employees like what's hot these days, and Mito

David Petts: 23:13

video and messaging, it's not that new, but it still feels new in terms of the adoption rate and use case. But yeah, certainly, video collaboration, desktop sharing, and collaboration is a still hot, we're still seeing and take up of my team meetings and the MiCollab. And all of the elements that enable that, above and beyond, you know, the classic voice call control aspects of a UC solution. So I'd argue that's still there, integration of those applications. Again, not hugely my domain of expertise, but our cloud link, and enabling simplified integration of applications. With that you're abstracting that from a physical deployment is exciting. We're seeing more, I didn't without describe this as desires, if you like, from customers around understanding sort of analytics and information about how their solutions are being used, and how to optimize the use of I think there's some opportunities in that direction as well.

Evan Kirstel: 24:14

Let's talk branding. You know, my tell is very story brand, pretty well known, particularly internationally, in so many industries, very happy with a motel brand that's going to be around, I imagine

Dave Michels: 24:25

is going to be around as the question. Ah, good one.

David Petts: 24:29

Well, so what I can say at this point, I don't know about the overall branding, but certainly as the company's coming together will be that the headquarters will be out of arc and otter HQ for Mitel in Canada, and I think we've already shared that our CEO will be the CEO of the combined companies, but in terms of the branding down to individual platforms and solutions, work to be done on that and that'll be part of what happens when we go through the integration.

Dave Michels: 24:56

That's a tough one I have to say because I said HLS earlier, but actually If the unify brand, and at first they tell us was going to get rid of the unify brand, they worked really hard when the acquisition first happened to get rid of it. And then they realized maybe they want to sell this division. So they brought it back and brought the brand back. But it's a great brand. I really liked the unified brand.

Evan Kirstel: 25:14

And it was a great product. As you may remember, we were on a jaunt to Bermuda for a briefing where we talked to all of the eight people at the time that the unify people. And this is a few years ago, and I was so impressed with the application, it was way ahead of its time even then. So really interesting to see that out there in the wider world.

David Petts: 25:36

I mean, one of the things I've This is a funny for you, I guess. But when Mitel acquired short arm, we were wrestling with branding, we suggested that why don't we just take a bit of our name and a bit of your name, we could use sure from us and tell from you and we could just get caught it showed. Clearly, clearly it went down the other way. And they said, well, let's use let's take that strategy. But when you use my from us and tell from Yeah. We'll see how it goes on this one.

Dave Michels: 26:01

Yeah, no. Mitel has been around for a long time. It's a good brand. And of course, they did the relaunch of the brand with the new logo, and I must have been 2018 2020 around there. And then the unified brand had a big launch probably just a few years before that around there like that. Two great brands, I think the unified brand is better known in Europe. Yeah, that's gonna be a tough question. If you if you keep them both, or get rid of one. I'm also curious what you're going to do with the handsets. I think I have a feeling I know how that's gonna play out. I think the motels.

Evan Kirstel: 26:30

You know, I think we should talk about talking heads talking points branding day, it's very confusing. Is it talking heads? Is it talking points? Is it buffalo communications, you know, you need to get your branding? Yes, I

Dave Michels: 26:41

have too many brands. If you don't have enough, Evan, that's another episode.

Evan Kirstel: 26:45

Well, let's get back to the show. So let's talk about the wider landscape for a moment before we kind of conclude, obviously, Mitel saw a huge uptick during the pandemic and remote work and telecommuting and remote agents. What are you seeing now? Is there some degree of retrenchment is it isn't moving into hybrid? What are your customers and partners telling you it might tell?

David Petts: 27:06

Ya, I would say as you said, Evan, there's clearly the pandemic drove very definitive behavior, as that has, I wouldn't say completely past that. We've seen many, many companies, not necessarily returning to office space working and retaining the remote not because of the pandemic, but because they found it beneficial to both their employees and them as a business effect. My tell is very much in that model here. So there's still a demand for that distributed and remote working. But there's equally your ongoing demand for Office oriented or more traditional office based working, I wouldn't say it's a retrenchment necessarily, it's just more of a rebalance. As far as return to work. Even those that are returned to offices, in many, many cases, they're having more of a flexible work style. Were making this up, but three days in the office two days at home. So that ability to work from anywhere, which is inherent in our solution is still in high demand. And that's I don't see that going away anytime soon.

Dave Michels: 28:07

I will say that that Mitel teleworker solution was one of the very first remote work solutions, and it was it's rock solid. That was that was a great solution. And that was that was years ahead of the industry, actually. All right, David. Well, I think we're just about out of time here. But I can't thank you enough for joining us on this conversation. And I think your move with details is very exciting. I want to know how this RingCentral partnerships going to play out. But you've got a great Option A or Option B so

David Petts: 28:32

well. And I think that's well said, David, we've got good options, and not just we as mitre over, you know, our partners and our customers are going to be the beneficiaries of those great choices we've got to make, we've got two very strong brands, as we talked about, let's get the best that are intended, of course will be Get, get the best of both companies and continue to get the best out of our partnership with RingCentral and offer our customers the choice broadly across the different solution types that we've been talking about. Exciting times ahead, I'd say

Evan Kirstel: 29:00

indeed. Well, thanks so much. And look forward to seeing you at Enterprise Connect and beyond. Thanks, David.

David Petts: 29:05

All right. Cheers, guys.

Evan Kirstel: 29:07

Bye bye. Well, David has been around the block, he's seen a thing or two, it's great to get an update from my tell, you never quite know what's going on from the outside looking in. No, it

Dave Michels: 29:17

is interesting. And I hope you didn't take offense with the OG stuff, whatever. But he has been around a while and I forgot about that whole HP stuff. And that was, you know, an amazing part of our history. So

Evan Kirstel: 29:28

yeah, and he had broken to HP which is printers and boxes and HP Enterprise. So these companies evolve and reinvent themselves all the time. And that's clearly what Mitel was trying to do is reinvent themselves continually. So I'm good. I think

Dave Michels: 29:43

grabbing ATS is a brilliant move. I think it's gonna give them a lot more scale and we didn't really get into the interview is unfortunate, but he has a fairly large professional services division. And I think David talked a little bit about how a lot of customers need professional services with their systems. And I think we can see Mitel really expand in that business

Evan Kirstel: 30:00

and you're right, they're huge in Germany Deutschland and they have a very loyal customer base I mean Siemens and all these companies they don't change they don't disappear they don't go away so probably a good fit

Dave Michels: 30:10

well Evan has always enjoyed the conversation thank you so much we'll be back soon with a yet another episode of talking heads. I folks you ever made a conversation with a man you gotta get out of here. The phone don't bomb down your phone. No, man. No, it's me.