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?
Hybrid Communications is Reshaping How Enterprises Connect Worldwide
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What happens when one of the longest-standing leaders in enterprise communications acquires another major player in the industry? Eric Hanson, CMO at Mitel, reveals the transformative journey following their acquisition of Unify, which has created what may be the largest install base in the unified communications industry—over 70 million users across more than 100 countries.
Hanson pulls back the curtain on Mitel's brand new website launch, describing how it reflects a fundamental shift in strategy. The redesigned digital experience serves both direct enterprise customers and Mitel's robust partner ecosystem, telling a more compelling story about how unified communications extends far beyond video conferencing. From telehealth applications to critical military communications to traditional desk phones, Mitel's solutions support the full spectrum of enterprise communication needs.
Most fascinating is Hansen's observation about what enterprise customers are actually prioritizing. Despite the industry's focus on pure cloud solutions, Mitel's vast customer base reveals a different reality: large organizations are increasingly adopting hybrid communications strategies that blend different deployment models. Even more surprising, there's growing demand for dedicated cloud instances rather than just multi-tenant configurations—a trend that aligns with findings from analyst firms like Frost & Sullivan. This perspective challenges the conventional narrative and explains Mitel's approach to product development.
With their financial restructuring proceeding ahead of schedule, successful launches of their Mitel CX product and Zoom joint venture, and a thoughtful approach to global localization, Mitel is positioning itself at the forefront of the unified communications evolution. Want to see how they're reimagining enterprise communications? Visit their new website to experience their customer-focused approach firsthand.
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Hey, everyone Super excited for an update on the market and business from Eric Hansen, CMO at Mitel. Eric, how are you?
Speaker 2:I'm doing great, Evan. Great to see you.
Speaker 1:Well, great to see you. You've been on quite a journey with the Mitel team this year and I'm excited for an update. First of all, for those who may not be familiar with Mitel in my audience I'm not sure how that is, but maybe introduce the company, the brand, the history and yourself.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure. So. Mitel is a leader in unified communications, been around for close to or just over 50 years now, really driving, I think, innovation specific to unified communications, customer experience and critical communications. And we really live at that intersection of hardware and software and really driving enterprise, helping to drive the business for enterprise organizations around the world.
Speaker 1:Fantastic and your team has been hard at work with many things. We're going to walk through those, but first of all I noticed you have a new website.
Speaker 2:We do. It's been a big week for us. What's the?
Speaker 1:big idea behind the new site. What's the story you're looking to tell and what's the experience you're sharing on the new site?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, so yeah, no, really really big week for the team. We launched the new website just yesterday officially, and what this really represents. A little over a year ago, we acquired a company called Unify, so a much bigger company. Now, together, our two heritage companies coming together, we represent probably the largest install base in the industry, with over 70 million users worldwide and over 100 countries, and one of the things when you do something like that is you have to bring together these two brands. So over the course of the last year, we've been doing some experimentation, really thinking about our key audiences, bringing these two brands together, some of which we need to address the needs of our partner community, which was really where the Heritage Mitel website was focused previously, but we also have a lot of direct customers that we wanted to interface with, and the old website didn't really address those needs.
Speaker 2:So what this really represents is a couple of things. It represents, number one, being much more customer focused, where a customer needs to understand especially somebody who's just entering their journey of discovery around solving some specific problems, but also really making it easier for customers that are looking for a partner how to get quickly to the partner that's relevant and or in their location, or for partners to be able to direct their customers or existing customers, you know specifically to a part of our portfolio. And so with this new website experience, we really tried to address both of those needs for those key audiences again, which was a big journey for us over the last year, you know. The other component to this is is it's a much more interactive and rich experience that I think really represents where we're taking the brand in terms of reflecting what's happening in the market. Right with this hero image, which you can see, we're telling the story that every enterprise organization is a little bit different of solutions, some of which are developed by us, some of through some of our partners, and bringing that right combination of services and solutions to address the needs of the modern enterprise around the world. And you can see visually, our CIO is the hero here, because they have to support the needs of so many different constituents from what we all.
Speaker 2:What so many think of is what unified communications has become, which is really doing what we're doing right now, having a video conference, but it's really so much more than that. As you know, evan, it's those that still rely on a desk phone, those that are performing telehealth with so many patients in a given day, critical communications in critical scenarios, and transportation and logistics, or even in the military. We support all of those different scenarios and that really is the definition of what unified communications is. It's much broader than I think some people think about and when we think about where Mitel is going, it's so much more than your grandfather's PBX, right, but it's also a lot more than legacy UCAS or CCAS, and I think that's really the point that we're trying to illustrate with the new kind of this new re-imagined version of our brand and where we're taking the website.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic and I can't wait to dive in. I had my first look just now, actually, so I look forward to diving into all the great content there. Talk about your future ambitions at Mitel, how it's about to go with the new site, and about your market leadership, which has kind of been a bit overlooked with all the noise out there overlooked with all the noise out there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, so I think one of the things of having such a large install base the way that we do, you think about the coverage by a lot of influencers and analyst firms that are out there, and a lot of the reports are based on somewhat limited sample size, and that's not to discount the work and the research that they do, because I really rely on them as one of the inputs that I think about in terms of what's happening in the market.
Speaker 2:But we have this unique opportunity at Mitel, drawing upon those more than 70 million seats in over 100 countries and dealing in some of the most demanding industries and geographies around the world, to reflect sort of what the market is saying, and it actually aligns quite nicely with what a lot of the analyst firms like Frost, sullivan or TechAisle are finding, which is that companies, especially large companies, are really prioritizing hybrid communications as their strategy in terms of supporting the full workforce, right.
Speaker 2:So when you think about our story over the last year, the bets that we've been making in terms of the portfolio, how we're realizing that through the website, it's really to help reflect what we're seeing in the market and, in addition to that what we're finding with those customers that we speak to, and some of the information that comes out of that great research from the analyst firms as well, is that it's not just about hybrid communications where you're interfacing, you know sort of different blends and combinations of deployment models and technologies, but it's also, even when you're thinking about cloud, that it's not just one flavor of cloud, it's not just multi-tenant cloud.
Speaker 2:The way that we think about SaaS so often it's actually dedicated instances becoming and there's increasing demand around that too. So within that hybrid strategy, a multi-cloud approach is the other component that we're really seeing. And again, we're really trying to reflect that story so that when somebody comes to our website or talks to one of our salespeople or one of our solution architects, they feel like we're reflecting what they feel in terms of the problems they're trying to solve. Right, they're not being limited by a one-size-fits-all approach. They can get a little bit more creative with what their options might be and where they need to go to solve the key problems, both for their business overall or for a specific line of business or geography, if that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Interesting and I love the perspective there. How do you think the site serves new customers or existing customers better compared to the old one? I mean, customers these days are looking to do a lot of their own research, look for insights and inputs on their own. What sort of content are you making available to them?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, it's a great question. Are you making available to them? Yeah, no, it's a great question. So what we tried to do specific for customer audiences, where it's either somebody that's new to the Mitel brand they might have heard of Mitel because obviously the brand's been around for a long time, or that might be an existing customer that thinks of us the way we were 10, 15 years ago, not where we are today.
Speaker 2:What we really tried to do is to incorporate some of the overall narrative and again reflect what's happening in the market so that, as they're thinking about gee, what are those problems that I'm trying to solve, and is Mitel a company that can really help me address that? We want to try and give them more of a use case, more of an understanding of the business outcomes, more of an understanding of, hey, these are the potential negative consequences of your current state and, you know, here are some possibilities in terms of where you may be able to take that right. And I think that that's really what we tried to achieve with the website is to create that type of journey so that a customer could really understand, in plain English, use cases and problem statements and take more of that style of approach versus too much speed and feed Right.
Speaker 1:And.
Speaker 2:I think the old website was really architected around being more partner centric and so for a partner of ours, it was very much oriented around.
Speaker 2:Well, I know I need this specific product from Mitel, so I just want that presented front and center.
Speaker 2:But for a customer that's new to the brand maybe somebody that's transitioning from another technology we really wanted to be able to tell more of a full story that allowed them to explore and identify oh, this is really interesting. I want to know more about that Now. At the same time, we didn't want to lose that simplicity for a partner. So when you go to the nav and under products and services, you can see that there's quick access. For a partner that already knows exactly what they're looking for, like Mitel CX, they can very quickly go straight there right. Or for a partner that's new to Mitel, if they want to go straight to understand how do I get authorized for Mitel, you can see in the upper right there's a quick access to the partner program. For a customer that wants to get in touch with a sales rep or find a partner in their location, they can click the contact sales button and it immediately gives them the ability to engage with a salesperson or find a partner that's relevant for them.
Speaker 2:So we really tried to think about this in terms of what's the audience that we really want to engage with and how do we best support them in terms of the process that they're going through.
Speaker 1:Does that make sense? No, it totally does. And you're also a global organization as active and engaged outside of North America as in North America. Maybe speak to that global audience as well with the new messaging strategy and new site 100%.
Speaker 2:You know, one of the things that we did is we really rethought what it means to have a global website. That we did is we really rethought what it means to have a global website. And so, rather than make it feel like we're a US or North American based company that's just doing a couple of key pages that are translated, we try to create more of a rich experience for some of our larger geographies in language and so for you know, the site is available in German and French. And then, you know, for some of the countries where we have maybe a slightly smaller presence in terms of headcount or a number of customers, we still created a very rich experience in a broader set of languages, you know, with fewer pages. So it's still a rich experience and more than just a homepage.
Speaker 2:But obviously, you know, you can very quickly create a death matrix of content if you try to boil the ocean there. So we've tried to be very thoughtful in terms of where our concentrations of customers and where our concentrations of opportunities and really tried to optimize for that in terms of how we localize the site, but really trying to be thoughtful about what it means to localize and look, we're just getting started. So you know, one of the goals is to further personalize, if you will, by region, so that some of the imagery that we ultimately will use as we continue to evolve the site will feel more and more localized to the key regions around the world that we do business in.
Speaker 1:Well, it's a great step forward and there's been a lot of other momentum at Mitel. Maybe you can update us on the financial restructuring that's proceeding as planned. Some of the other launches that have gone GA. What else is top of mind? You're wearing many hats, as they say.
Speaker 2:Indeed, and I just got back home from the East Coast, so I've been on the road a lot as well. Yeah, so you know, obviously we've continued the drumbeat in terms of product momentum over the last year and right up until just a few weeks ago. You know, obviously we've been, you know, focused on getting through the financial restructuring process, which is, you know, I would say, ahead of schedule, which is, you know, I would say, ahead of schedule. A couple of our friends in the industry have highlighted that. You know, not only did we say what we were going to do, but we did what we said in terms of it being a fast process. And we just got the court confirmation, which is, you know, really that precursor to emergence from the process, which is really exciting for us. And look, I think, as evidenced by youced, by the website and the portfolio news and some other news we'll be sharing in probably the next month as we get closer and closer to emergence, I think that just really shows the momentum of the business, that this was a healthy business, that this was the right thing to restructure the capital and accelerate our ability really to execute the business strategy we started a little over a year ago. So you know that piece has been great.
Speaker 2:We went, we announced general availability of our Mitel CX product, you know, which was very exciting.
Speaker 2:You know we had announced that was coming in the fall and we got it to market and the feedback at Enterprise Connect in the US, but as well as CCW in Berlin, was really really great around the product and what a modern experience it is.
Speaker 2:In fact, some of the analysts that we demonstrated it for thought it was because you know, ccas and UCAS have been this proxy for modern for so long. They looked at it and thought it was a CCaaS or UCaaS product and then they said you know, it'd be really great, it'd be really great if you could deploy this in a dedicated instance, given all of the concerns geopolitically right now around data privacy, and it's like gosh, what a great idea. We can do that, by the way. So you know that dynamic modern experience with AI and everything else is being incredibly well received and we're seeing some really great results from a sales perspective. On the heels of that as well, we announced the general availability of our Zoom joint venture around a hybrid client, which has also been very well received in the marketplace. So it's been a very exciting time for us, this first half of 2025, and really looking forward to the back half as well.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, congratulations on all the momentum and initiative and staying ahead of the curve, and I appreciate the update, eric, thanks.
Speaker 2:Evan, always great to see you.
Speaker 1:Always great to see you and dive into Mitelcom, check out the new experience and all the great content that lives there. Thanks for joining everyone.