What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Mitel's Vision for 2025 in a Changing Communication Landscape
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What happens when a leading name in communication solutions joins forces with an industry giant? Join us as we sit down with Martin Bitzinger Mitel's Senior Vice President of Product Management to explore the transformative journey following Mitel's acquisition of Unify and their strategic partnership with Zoom. Martin unveils Mitel's Common Communications Framework, a revolutionary approach that blends traditional UC solutions with modern UCAS and hybrid models, all while addressing the critical roles of AI and cybersecurity in today's communication workflows.
Mitel also introduced Mitel CX, an AI-powered customer experience management platform designed to enhance customer engagement and boost employee efficiency. This all-in-one solution supports omnichannel interactions—including voice, video, chat, and social media—enabling businesses to meet customers on their preferred channels.
But that's just the beginning. We also navigate the complex terrains of the healthcare and finance sectors, where Martin shares insights into Mitel's VCCS product for remote healthcare consultations and the hurdles of new data sovereignty regulations in Europe. As the conversation shifts towards the future, we highlight Mitel's plans for 2025, including exciting product launches and AI advancements tailored to meet evolving regulations. This episode promises you a front-row seat to the innovations reshaping the communication landscape, underscoring the need for agility in a rapidly changing world.
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Hey everyone. An ever exciting and intriguing guest today from Mitel Martin Bitzkinger from the product management team. Martin, how are you?
Speaker 2:Good, good. Great Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Thanks for being here. It's been almost a year since we last spoke about Mitel's portfolio, integration with Unify and a lot of amazing work in the meantime. Let's catch people up, both on the current point of view for Mitel, the integration efforts and for those few people who haven't heard the Mitel story. How do you describe it these days?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's been truly a busy year. I think we spoke last year just after the Unify acquisition, so we've been really busy on integrating the portfolios and this year we've seen a number of announcements. I mean, most recently, we've closed a partnership with Zoom. We've announced our common communication framework, which is the foundation for the integrated portfolio vision and how we talk about it, because, of course, we have a very broad portfolio. We brought all sorts of innovation to the market with really some you know very purposeful AI innovations, with really some very purposeful AI innovations.
Speaker 2:There's been a lot of press coverage. We've rolled out our new vision for hybrid communication and now we started also with some announcement around CX and what we're doing on that front and really innovating and reasserting our leadership position there, which you know we've known as a CX or contact center player in the past, and we've been a bit quiet and with the combined portfolio, we're trying to focus back on that. So, really busy you know, really busy year of a lot of things still in motion, but we've basically been very busy on delivering on some of the strategic promises we've made through the acquisition.
Speaker 1:Well, that's phenomenal Busy indeed and there's so much to unpack there. Let's start with one highlight the new Common Communications Framework between Mitel and Zoom. The new common communications framework between Mitel and Zoom, you know a big partnership, a big deal for the industry and some major milestones this year.
Speaker 2:Maybe talk about all of that and how it fits in your overall vision for Mitel. Yeah, absolutely so what the story we've been telling from the, you know very get-go or very beginning of the year is really we're the one-stop shop, we're the company you can go to for all your communication needs. We're flexible in the type of solution we have. We can help you if you need a traditional UC solution. We can help you if you need a UC solution, but we also can help you in all sorts of combinations. If you want UCAS, if you want a combination of the two, we can help you with that as well.
Speaker 2:And this is really where the Zoom piece comes in, because the one area that people kept asking us on is, of course, well, what's your video story, what's your collaboration story?
Speaker 2:You know, how are you differentiated on that end?
Speaker 2:And our answer was we're, of course, open and we continue to be open.
Speaker 2:You know we can integrate with any collaboration solution a video solution that you may be using out there. But now we have a very unique story with Zoom that goes significantly above and beyond what you can do with other solutions, with a truly integrated hybrid communication solution where you can keep your existing communication environment, where you can keep. Even if you have on-prem stuff, you can keep all that but still fully integrate with a collaboration front end with Zoom Workplace to get to a single front end for your knowledge worker or PC or mobile-based work base, integrate all the devices the same way you could always integrate them. And it's not two solutions, it's going to feel like truly one in a communication solution, both from a user experience perspective so the user front end, all that will be fully integrated but also from a management perspective in the back office. You're going to configure and maintain one solution, not two different ones that are kept side-by-side. That is a truly differentiated and truly unique in terms of what we're working on there with Zoom Wow.
Speaker 1:What a huge opportunity for your customers as well. There have been a lot of wake up calls this year, particularly around hybrid cloud adoption and private cloud, and a big shift in sentiment, I think, around this topic. What are some of the benefits opportunities you're seeing with your customers around hybrid communications solutions?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's been indeed a shift of sentiment. I think there is more awareness also, and it's driven from a number of angles. So the one angle is definitely the whole AI story and the sensitivity around data, but also the sensitivity around okay. So what's the cost of that? Is it all going to be centrally delivered? Do I need some edge aspect in that that's really changing the mindset of people and how they think about some of the big picture infrastructure and that, of course, affects communication as well, but then also much more tactical stuff. I mean, we've had, you know, a few highly publicized outages where you know people all of a sudden realized is oh, you know what my communication is affected as well now. So that's not good. So what am I going to do about that?
Speaker 2:There is a heightened sense of security in many countries, with cybersecurity et cetera, becoming more front of mindset. And then there is a growing realization, with some of the shifts and in workforce et cetera, specific verticals, that there are some complexities, some underlying complexity, when you really want to do, you know, communication and that the one size fits all approach that you know maybe work when everybody was stuck in the home office and you may do with what you had. You know, maybe that was okay, but now there's a growing realization that you know, if you really want to optimize workflows, etc, it's, it's, it's much broader, the whole communication story. And then you know, and then inevitably, sooner or later, you're going to find yourself in some sort of a hybrid scenario, whether it's through devices, whether it's through integrations that you have in the various locations, and that then is a natural point where we come into play as a holistic provider of communication solution and where we are trying to help our customers.
Speaker 1:A wonderful mission indeed and I'm really excited, intrigued by your renewed focus on customer experience innovations with your NextGen Contact Center. Really exciting stuff. Share more about some of the advancements, the philosophy behind it and why this is really critical right now.
Speaker 2:So customer experience we're in an age of a lot of transformation. A lot of our customers, whether they're in the retail industry, where there's a fundamental shift going on for many years, but it continues to go on, and there it's more the how do we merge the different channels, like the traditional brick and mortar and the online, and there is a lot of talk about that. There's the hospitality industry strong vertical for us, where you have to be close to your customers. There is, you know, traditional finance, et cetera. They've been, you know, big on customer experience or contact center solutions all along. And there is also government-type customers that are trying to digitize their interactions with their citizens, et cetera.
Speaker 2:So there's all angles, irrespective of what big vertical you look at, it's becoming more and more important to provide those, you know, digital ways of communicating. And then the whole AI motion has been a real. The whole AI motion has been a real driver of that because it fundamentally provides new ways of improving the experience. I mean contact center for many years was associated by most people as well. You call and you're never going to get an agent, you're just stuck in a waiting loop. And that's fundamentally changing with new technologies and there you can provide a truly differentiated experience and, as such, it's a really critical part of anybody that wants to implement communication.
Speaker 2:You need to talk to your customer, you need to talk to your citizens, you need to talk to your guests, you need to talk to your patients, you know, whatever it is in your respective industry and to really enable that with all the different modalities and the new technologies that make that available, whether it's voice, whether it's video, whether it's, you know, message-based communication, chat, web-based communication all of that comes together in contact center technology, and the background is we had some, you know, really good products in the backend and with different strengths in the coming together of Unify and Mitel, where we had some pieces on the one side and then some other technology on the other side, and what we immediately started is, you know, blending that together to provide a new integrated CX solution, which we're launching now with our new Mitel CX offering.
Speaker 2:That is, an omni-channel contact center or CX experience with a built-in AI functionality from the ground up, and the unique thing there is we'll again true to our hybrid is we want to do everything hybrid or enable it to be hybrid. We provide that flexibility on how you want to deploy that, whether you want to deploy that on-prem in a private cloud and a public cloud or a combination of all of that, and that opens unique opportunities for the various customers in terms of what they need unique indeed, and of course, you're known for your uc portfolio, and so how do you see contact center fitting within the portfolio and even complementing the portfolio in this new environment you're describing?
Speaker 2:yeah, that's that. That's another strength, of course. I mean, from our perspective, we'll position our CX solution independently of our UC portfolio. It can integrate with Microsoft Teams, it can integrate with other platforms and there is, of course, levels of integrations and gradations and levels of certification that need to be acknowledged. But in essence it's standalone, like other CCaaS solutions out there. It could operate standalone, but it's especially valuable if it integrates with our UC solution, because then you can benefit from additional things like a truly integrated workflows with the back office type employees, you know, truly integrated reporting and truly integrated provisioning of all the users and functionality. And then for the agents, they will then get a truly integrated experience in their, in terms of their agent experience between UC and CC. So it's not two applications, not two solutions. It's truly fully integrated and that's, of course, then very attractive from a solution packaging and solution offering. But it doesn't have to be that way and we understand that. But that's just, of course, the icing on the cake for anybody that's a Mitel UC customer.
Speaker 1:Wow, what a great proposition. Of course, we in the industry generally, I think all agree. Now. Ai has huge potential to transform customer service, customer experience. It's the immediate opportunity everyone's looking at. Are there any particular scenarios or use cases on leveraging AI to elevate customer experiences? What sort of scenarios are you working through right now?
Speaker 2:customer experiences. What sort of scenarios are you working through right now? Yeah, so we've had two significant launches, like in this year or in the past few months actually, and we're trying to do it really purposefully. It's not just you know AI for doing the AI sake and then you have you know anything you do as huge professional services. We really try to productize some of that and package it so that it becomes consumable also for some of our mid-market type customers, without huge professional service budgets or data scientists or other things.
Speaker 2:And the two things is our AI insights, which is an analytics solution, so we can transcribe all the calls. That's pretty standard. We could record them before, but now we can transcribe them. You can do sentiment analysis, you can do certain statistics proactively, so really cool solution from that perspective. It really integrates well and easy with our entire solution. So I think that's the strength of that, that it's really easy to deploy and it encompasses everything that happens in our solution landscape, whether it's contact center or internal calls. Everything gets recorded or transcribed if you want that. And the other one is on the CX front, also with a partnership with a company called Talkative that have some really cool technology underlying technology. We integrate that into our contact center offerings for agent assist type capabilities and also virtual agent type capabilities specifically for the contact center, and that's of course an integral part as well of our Mitel CX offering going forward, but it's also available for our existing contact center offers.
Speaker 1:Oh, well, done. So. We've seen this tremendous shift to remote work, which is here to stay, but also hybrid work, settling on some kind of normal. But almost every company you talk to has a slightly different policy or practice for that. So how do you think about within contact center optimizing for seamless connectivity and operations when the teams are partially distributed, partially on site, work from anywhere, while still going back to the office a lot of the time? It's quite a complex thing to work towards these days.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is, and the I mean one of the principles that we have is we want to provide, you know, freedom of endpoints, whatever you want to use, and it should work with all our solutions, then, of course, including the contact center.
Speaker 2:So that's a very obvious one. But there's also a lot of related aspects where you really need to tackle it by vertical, because it's different. It just fundamentally differs. If you look at things like healthcare or things like you know, healthcare, other things, they have different needs, they have different requirements. They have, you know, there is even there, there's a shift going on, and we've, for example, launched our VCCS product, which is our virtual care and collaboration service product to enable remote patient consultations where traditionally you had to go to the doctor or go to the hospital in person. So things are evolving. But I think the key is to provide the flexibility in terms of providing all these different modalities and then having the customer decide, because every country, every customer is different to a certain extent, and the broad portfolio that we have and the flexibility we offer is a strength from that perspective, at least from our vantage point.
Speaker 1:Interesting. So you mentioned health care and, of course, health care finance big segments for you where security compliance are paramount. I've just spent a couple of weeks in Europe learning about all the new emerging data sovereignty requirements in different countries, even in different regions within Europe, and, of course, all that is going global because the regulators love to talk to each other and compare notes. How do you see yourself navigating this landscape, which is getting quite complicated for customers?
Speaker 2:It's been a big year in Europe DORA regulation, the Resiliency Act, basically that mandate IT systems to be resilient, which is providing new challenges, because just relying on a public cloud solution for many of those customers is simply not an option anymore because that does not comply with what they need to offer there.
Speaker 2:And there's good reasons for that right. We've had a lot of macro events, whether that's, you know, cybersecurity or you know, war or other things that are going on that are challenging the traditional notions of everything is always available, right and it just magically works. And that's you. And that drives complexity, that drives different requirements. That typically requires you to think about it from a customer perspective and not just a one-size-fits-all. This is the solution and it's a fix-all, end-all for everybody. And that's our business right. That's been our core business all, along with our solutions, with our products, with our service offerings and also with our broad channel landscape. That's why you know many of those customer you know understanding all that local regulation in their respective countries and then taking the technology from not just us but from various vendors, putting it into those customers as an integrated solution that then complies with what the customer needs.
Speaker 1:Wow, such an important topic. I can't believe we're already talking about 2025. Where does the time go? But we are. It sounds like 2025 will be a year of execution, but I imagine you have a lot more up your sleeve in terms of new products and innovations. What can give us a peek into the new year? What are you excited about next?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there's still I mean, we've announced a whole bunch, so there's definitely an element of it's. Not all that's said is already done, so there's definitely, especially in the first half, there is a lot of work launching and bringing to market all these things that we've announced. So in Q1, we're going to launch the first version of the Zoom integrated solution. We're going to launch our MCX solution, or it's going to be like truly available at that point, and then there is a very busy roadmap, of course, evolving that, but there is more to come. Busy roadmap from an integration perspective. There is a number of vertical products that we're pushing into the market and making available more broadly. There is a number of fronts we're doing on the or a number of things we're doing on the AI front as well, sometimes, you know, mostly integrated into a contact center or integrated into some of these vertical solutions. So it's going to be. It's going to be a busy year for sure Executing, delivering and also, you know, keep pushing things forward for us.
Speaker 1:Well, we're going to need to speak more frequently then, because once a year now is not going to cut it for updates. But thanks so much for joining the show. I appreciate you sharing an update really a blockbuster set of announcements and thanks everyone for listening and watching and sharing the episode. Take care, Take care now. Thank you.