In March, Mitel announced that it would be launching subscription-based offers across all flagship platforms in its global portfolio.
According to Daren Finney, SVP Global Channels, this move doubles down on the UC vendor’s commitment to provide maximum choice and flexibility to its partner base.
Finney joined Mitel in late 2021 to oversee the overall vision of partner programmes and improve customer lifecycle management. He told Comms Dealer: “We always look at how we can best support our customers and the way that we could do that most effectively.
“Subscription models give customers the flexibility to access the latest cloud technologies and respond rapidly to changing market demands.”
The subscription model is part of a new sales and innovation strategy designed to help partners modernise, expand and transition their communications environment.
Mitel’s new innovation focus is set on five principles: become the UC experts in hybrid & edge technology, become more aggressive with its roadmap, leveraging CloudLink, expand vertical solutions through technology partners and prioritize customer-centric platform & feature enhancements.
According to Finney, Mitel’s product innovation strategy is tuned to partner’s needs by ensuring the following five demands are met.
- Relevance of products to the partner’s existing and target clients in the markets they serve
- A path to evolve their offerings to serve clients’ changing needs, like cloud deployments
- Products that can be deployed alongside their own portfolio of IT products and services
- Ability to meet customers in market with sales and support services.
- Deliver product innovations that help drive business growth.
This new roadmap was presented to partners and investors who were given an in-depth view into Mitel’s strategy for the first time since the company forged a UCaaS partnership with RingCentral that saw its 35 million global customers given a migration path to RingCentral’s Message Video Phone platform.
Finney said: “Our core competency is in UC, so we are confident we can offer a best in breed product to our customers. While we have our own UCaaS solution, we looked up at the top right of the Gartner Magic Quadrant and saw our friends at RingCentral.
“These last two weeks have been so useful for me and for our leadership team to get an opportunity to stand on stage and talk to our partners about this is our vision. What we're doing now over the next couple of weeks is following up with our partners to make sure that we've addressed any outstanding concerns.”