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Mitel Purchases Toshiba

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Transition from Toshiba to Mitel with Ease

Continue on your path towards future growth with your current communication system.

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Connect with a Toshiba transition expert today.
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Mitel-Purchases-Toshiba

Transition to Mitel Seamlessly

Change can be challenging for businesses. This is why Mitel is committed to ensuring our customers get the support and service they need during this period of transition. Our customers are our number one priority and we want to help you connect with a Toshiba transition expert anytime, anywhere. To help, we’ve created an FAQ to answer any questions you might have.

Choose a Better Path Forward

When you take your next steps, you need to be sure it is the right path so you don’t end up back where you started. That means working with a vendor that has a reputation for high performance and stability to ensure your business is supported today and in the future, no matter how your needs change and grow. With feature-rich and mobile-first solutions to support your communications from end to end, Mitel is the only brand in five Gartner Magic Quadrant reports for business communications.

Find your best path with Mitel

Find a business communications system that fits your unique needs whenever, wherever. When Michael Johnson Performance’s Nortel system was left unsupported, the team quickly realized that, in order to stay competitive, they had to re-evaluate their needs and choose a system they could depend on.

“As we began looking for a partner to support our business needs, we didn’t really know what was out there. When we actually began to research the capabilities that Mitel could provide us, we were blown away.” – Michael Johnson Performance

Common Customer Questions

  • How will Mitel’s purchase of Toshiba impact me and the company I serve?
    This purchase may provide continuity with added product and service offerings that will go beyond the publicly stated May 22 ‘last order’ date.
  • Are my current contracts with Toshiba still valid?
    Yes, contracts will remain valid. Mitel will be responsible for fulfilling all contracts immediately following the closing of the deal.
  • Will my warranties still be in effect?
    Yes. Mitel will be prepared to accept extended warranties.
  • Will any service quality/policies change?
    No. Mitel is as committed as Toshiba in delivering quality products and services to our partners and customers.
  • Will Toshiba inventory levels remain the same?
    Inventory levels fluctuate with all businesses; however, we are confident we can ensure continuity of supply.
  • Will quotes I received on Toshiba solutions still be honored?
    Yes, if they are backed by Toshiba or an accredited partner.
  • Will there be any staffing changes or facilities closures that might affect me?
    The Toshiba US business was planning to downsize & move from the existing Irvine facility. A plan to find an appropriate local office for the Mitel & former Toshiba teams is in process.
  • What new services, products or features will I be able to get through Mitel that I could not get through Toshiba?
    We will provide a detailed list to all customers, Partners, National Accounts with our Cloud, hybrid, and premise offerings in our roadmap update.

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Improve Unified Collaboration Etiquette

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Unified Collaboration Etiquette and How to Improve It

In this audio interview, Daryl Reva speaks with ITinCanadaOnline’s Nestor Arellana about unified collaboration etiquette and the rules employees should follow to respect a coworker’s presence.

Audio Transcript

Nestor Arellana / IT in Canada Online: Over the last few years, enterprise collaboration apps and video conferencing apps have been skyrocketing in use in almost any sector. However, there still remain a few challenges for the people who use them, especially in the area of etiquette rules and best practices about how to use these tools. Today we have Daryl Reva, who is Vice President of Cloud Services for Mitel, and with his long experience in the use of collaboration and conferencing tools, he’s here to provide us with some tips and tricks on how to better use the tools we have in our offices these days.

Arellana: Hello Daryl.

Daryl Reva / Mitel: Hi, it’s good to be here. Looking forward to the conversation.

Arellana: Well, right now, we’re both on audio conferencing tool that we’re using and perhaps it’s very apt that we should discuss what are the best ways to use this. Sometimes there’s some etiquette that needs to be applied to these modern technologies.

Reva: Yeah, absolutely. I think if you take a step back and maybe take a macro view, there’s really a couple of pressing larger pillars that are helping to drive this. Number one is 2017: welcome to the year of instant gratification, and really this is driven by everything from access to technology to the use of the smartphone in our hands. It’s quite an interesting time where our consumer technology is helping to drive new business technology, which is quite the role reversal from the previous 10-20 years in the communications space.

Arellana: Mhm, Mitel is right in the middle of this. Care to talk about Mitel first before we launch into the tips and tricks?

Daryl Reva/Mitel: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been with Mitel for a little over 15 months now and it is absolutely known as the powerhouse in the telephony marketplace. We’ve taken that heritage and lineage of technology and investment in R&D and have been able to move it into the cloud space in the early 2000s, and we like the self-proclaimed of ‘Godfather of the Cloud’.

So as you take a look at what we are able to do with our customers, what’s most important is that not only can we provide multiple deployment models that meet their needs, we can also ensure and future-proof their technology investment as they continue their own migration from premise to cloud at their own pace, something that not only works for their own organization but also works for their budget.

Arellana: Yes. So now that we have these terrific cloud-enabled applications that allow us to work together as a theme, true to cloud, video conferencing, teleconferencing tools that allow people from halfway across world to, to almost be together in the same room talking about their plans. There are still some challenges. Would you care to tell us some of the issues that people run into when using these, as you said, instant gratification tools?

Daryl Reva/Mitel: Yeah, absolutely. So I manage a team that is located all around the globe, everywhere from Sweden to Eastern and Western Europe as well. And the most important aspect of the communications that we have today is ensuring that we can not only increase employee productivity, but also challenge how quickly we can take product solutions ideas to market.

And the best way to really, to approach this always comes back to, ‘Well, how can we communicate? How can we as a team ensure that we have the right information in order to make the right decision?’

And so that comes back to ensuring that from a communications perspective, we are all very closely tied together—but more so in a fashion that is right for that user. And what I mean by that, you know, if you take a look at, you know going back to the etiquette. Some people on my team just prefer to transact via email. Others like to use our unified communications application, our team collaboration application called MiTeam. And what we have been able to do in an environment is actually reduce the amount of emails. Up to 44 percent of emails for a specific project can go by the wayside now because we have certain team collaboration applications that allow us to communicate much more effectively.

Arellana: Yes, very interesting point. And what does it mean to an organization, to a team, when you can cut down the amount of emails that are shuttling back and forth?

Daryl Reva/Mitel: Absolutely, I’ll give you a quick use case. We have a platform, an event called Mitel Next. And this event was happening earlier in the year in San Diego. And we were looking, we were on the verge of launching some new products and at the last minute we had an idea of bringing together a customer use case and showing demo examples of it, which drove our ability to set up an extension of our communications and our team really are the agencies and vendors that we work with.

So not only is it important to drive the communications within the organization, but we are also able to extend that productivity enhancement tool outside of the organization to our vendors, which allowed us to complete our task of delivering new videos and demos of these products just in time for our platform launch called Mitel Next.

Any other day, that project would have taken two to three times longer just due to the fact that you’re typically playing email tag or you’re playing voicemail tag. The opportunity to embed presence into a unified communications application, whether it’s your desktop or on your mobile device, it’s truly a game changer in employee and vendor productivity.

Arellana: Terrific point there. And when we’re using these technologies, it’s still communications, person-to-person communications, that has their sort-of basic principles that we have to follow. But then sometimes the communications gets bogged down, confusion arises, or even sometimes people get angry a lot of times when, when they’re emailing because it’s very hard to transmit the true feelings of a person when they’re using email or these tools because we’re not able to see the visual cues that we usually see when we’re talking to a person right in front of us. Would you care to share with us some of your seven tips and tricks for the average office worker and how to use these collaboration tools?

Daryl Reva/Mitel: Sure. Let me start by talking through kinda ‘chaos breeds opportunity.’ The fact that through text messaging we’re not able to really denote sarcasm built into the messaging. So an entire new form of communication was created called emojis. Texting paired with emojis, some of which are quite interesting, and maybe not reflective of productive communications, but nonetheless an entirely new language was created to assist in ways that both consumers and businesses alike may choose to interact.

And so some of those things that I want to talk through today really are based on the pillar and the platform of chaos breeds opportunity and which is why we have seen such a thrive of this unified communications applications in the work space.

So, you know, one of the things I would like to kind of start off with, is, if you think through an employee going on vacation, and you know, again, depending on the culture and maybe depending on the employee’s boss, there’s rules and regulations for respecting that employee’s space. And when it comes to communicating through applications – presence – and that’s the ability to detect whether or not somebody is available for either chat or conference or video conference, that, respecting someone’s presence is going to be of vital importance.

Because, like I said, if your, an employee is out on vacation, how many times would you try to connect with them and which means would you try to connect with them, or would you try to do it at all? And the same thing goes for your ability to track an employee down or a project down via the status or the presence of that employee.

So, for example, there is a lot of intuition that’s built into the Mitel applications, whether or not you’ve had a keystroke in a certain amount of time, whether or not your calendar integration shows that you’re currently in a meeting, whether or not you are currently on the phone. These are just a small example of a few types of integration that would set your presence to which we would, we would ask, or the general etiquette would ask, to respect their presence capabilities.

Arellana: I see. So, sort of the machine has a, the system has a way of, of judging whether you might be indisposed at the moment, you’re, you’re not in your in front of your desk, or not online—you’re probably on a vacation or probably you know you’re probably not working today so you know it would be up to the person who wants to contact you. You know, gives them a heads up, right?

Daryl Reva/Mitel: Yeah exactly. So if your application says that you are currently unavailable, what are the different means of communications that other people would go to? What’s the extent that they would go to try and reach you? Now that could be via email, that could be via phone call, and that phone call could then be, you know forwarded along to your mobile device, it could be a text message.

But at, at the heart of it, I think if people really begin to leverage and utilize the presence capabilities of these applications, more people would learn to respect them. So I think, out of the gate, that’s a really important foundation to build upon. If somebody has a ‘Do Not Disturb’ message in, as their presence, you know, respect that. Learn to understand that your emergency might not be somebody else’s emergency.

Arellana: I see. So respect each other’s presence or ability to be able to respond to your message at that instance that you’re thinking of sending it out.

Daryl Reva/Mitel: Yeah, absolutely. And I think if we kind of move on to the second phase of that it, it’s really understanding the culture. In a small business, if it’s all centrally located in an office, standing up and yelling over a cube might be a pretty disrespectful way to communicate with an employee. The same thing goes with immediately starting a video collab session, right?

It’s very intrusive, and so the ability to escalate communications, starting with the chat and moving through a phone call to a whiteboard session, to a collaboration session, to a video conference session— you know there’s certain steps that are more polite than sending over a video conference invite immediately to where the person might not be in the best disposition to accept that video call.

Arellana: Alright.

Daryl Reva/Mitel: And we’ve all heard stories, right? We’ve all heard stories of that one person that may be working from home that day and is not dressed suitable for the current presentation that they are giving.

Arellana: Yeah, we’ve seen the TV commercial of that. It’s an interesting point that you put forward, the use not only, of not only one communications tool, but several tools, and you’re introducing sort of a hierarchy of usage of these tools. Thanks a lot for joining our show today!

This article originally appeared on the IT in Canada Online podcast. You can listen to it here.

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Understanding the Digital Imperative

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In this post, we’ll take a high‐level look at different factors driving the digital imperative in modern business and how it’s changing the nature of competition and market dynamics.

Recognizing digital business drivers

Digital business is the application of technology to build new operating models, processes, software and systems by leveraging the convergence of people, business and things.

These advances are creating new product and service opportunities as well as transforming business operations, helping companies generate more revenue, gaining greater competitive advantage and achieving higher efficiency.

Competitive advantage in this era of business is based on capturing new opportunities by rapidly adapting to changes in an organization’s market or industry. Those that can achieve this level of agility will leap-frog the competition, while those that can’t will struggle to survive. Thus, digitization – the process of becoming a digital business – needs to be at the top of every business and IT leader’s priority list.

Companies can no longer simply differentiate their products and services along a single dimension such as price, features, quality or support.

Maintaining and increasing competitive advantage in today’s dynamic, global economy is a major challenge for businesses in every industry. Companies can no longer simply differentiate their products and services along a single dimension such as price, features, quality, or support. Except for commodity goods and services, the lowest price doesn’t guarantee a sale, poor quality is never acceptable, and customer service requires far more than a friendly smile.

Instead, perceived value, functional match to requirements, exceptional quality, and total customer experience across all touch points are all important aspects of the new competitive norm.

Additionally, businesses must find innovative and creative new ways to engage, attract and retain their customers.

While it’s well understood that attracting a new customer costs dramatically more than keeping an existing one – as much as ten times more – it’s never been easier for customers to find, research, and move their business to your competitors.

And customers want to deal with businesses that not only provide the highest quality goods and services they need, when they need it, and at a price they’re willing to pay, but also that are socially responsible—with their employees, their partners and suppliers, their communities, and their environment.

In a time when costs are constantly being
evaluated, inefficiency equals waste.

Inefficient business processes and toxic corporate cultures inevitably affect the bottom line (profits), but increasingly impact the top line (sales) as well. In a time when costs are constantly being evaluated, inefficiency equals waste—which no one wants to see or hear about. Everything you do as a business must stand up to public scrutiny. Customers don’t necessarily want to know how the sausage is made, but they also can’t look away from a train wreck.

Today, digitization has three primary drivers (sources from ZK Research).

 

Go digital or go home

Market leadership is no longer about having the best product, the lowest price, or even the best people. Becoming a market leader in any industry is now based on being able to capture new opportunities in a rapidly changing market.

This has always been true, but changes in market leadership used to take decades to occur. For example, in the 1980s, big box retailers completely redefined how retail organizations managed inventory. However, it took nearly two decades for their impact ­– not only to the retail industry but also the entire value chain – to be fully realized.

Becoming a market leader in any industry is now based on being able to capture new opportunities in a rapidly changing market.

Today, natively digital organizations are having a similar impact in fewer than five years. Figure 1‐2 shows that in 1960, businesses remained on the S&P 500 Index, on average, for 50 to 60 years; by the early 1980s, the average was less than 30 years. As this trend is likely to continue, by 2025, businesses can expect to remain on the index for an average of only 15 years, as new market leaders continually emerge.

 

 

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Overcome Remote Worker FOMO

How to Overcome Remote Worker FOMO and Get the Most Out of Remote Employees

The ability to connect in real time across the globe has become so easy that we often work with, and manage, teams of people that are separated by distance, time zones and even oceans. The work force is starting to revolve around the remote worker!

Sometimes entire teams work remotely (i.e. virtual teams), but usually there’s a core team in a primary location and a few remote workers.

Collaborating with a distributed workforce has become easier with the help of online collaboration tools and applications like MiCollab and MiTeam. But tools can only do so much.

Although these tools have made it easier to work together, there’s a very human element to effectively working together but separately. It’s critical to maintain discipline and good practices around the human side of communications and collaboration when you have remote workers to avoid fear of missing out (FOMO) problems, which can kill morale and devastate productivity.

Ready to get the most out of remote employees? Read on.

What is FOMO and what does it have to do with remote employees?

FOMO is an acronym for the fear of missing out. It refers to the discomfort and anxiety people can feel when they believe that they’re being left out of important social interactions.

In your personal life, examples of FOMO could include being upset your friends went to see a movie without you or feeling trapped sick at home while your friends take a road trip. Ever known someone who didn’t get included in the bridal party or someone who didn’t make the cut to be a groomsman? The results of their FOMO can be felt far and wide.

This same drive not to miss anything extends to our work lives as well.

Considering many people spend as much or more time with their coworkers as they do their personal friends, social relationships and status at work affect us deeply, even we don’t think about them as consciously.

It’s the reason that people feel compelled to check their work email from the beach while they’re on vacation. They don’t want to miss a thing an they’re subconsciously (or consciously) worried about what will happen if they do.

At work, something as simple as not getting invited to lunch or happy hour can activate FOMO—even if it was an unintentional oversight. So imagine how left out employees can feel if they’re working from home while the main office team goes out for a team building activity or if they’re asleep across the ocean while most of the rest of the team is collaborating and making decisions on a project that affect them.

Remote employees are at much higher risk of FOMO. But there’s plenty you can do about it, and there are plenty of benefits from keeping FOMO at bay for remote workers.

Benefits of reducing remote worker FOMO

Reducing remote worker FOMO isn’t just a touchy-feely exercise. There are genuine benefits for the business:

The in-person advantage

A lot of the psychological needs of work are taken for granted when it comes to people that work together in an office day in and day out. Relationships are significantly easier to build in person. We talk about our families, the local weather, how good or bad our local sports team did this weekend, we eat together—the list goes on. These activities are key to building strong interpersonal relationships and highly functional teams.

Enter the office worker and remote worker dynamic.

If our need to connect on a human level is so strong, how do you do that with someone that works remotely 90-100 percent of the time? You guessed it— collaboration software. But software is only so helpful if you don’t use it to its full potential.

Here is how you can reduce FOMO for remote workers.

Make sure everything is covered in the tool

This is simple in concept, but hard to execute. One of the many benefits of a team collaboration tool is to provide transparency to those on the team. If you are working with someone who physically sits next to you in the office, your initial thought may be to just pop over to their desk, get work done and then communicate out to the team what you completed.

But what if the work you are doing or discussing happens to affect people not sitting in your office? Maybe they could benefit from seeing the process and thought process it took to get to a decision. When you communicate out what you have done and the remote person hears about it later—you just activated their FOMO.

Even if you don’t have every conversation in the tool, at least having key points and decisions detailed in your tool is helpful so people who are effected can speak up—especially if they information or suggestions that could be helpful.

Having everything covered in your tool is also helpful for new employees or employees who go on vacation or leave. If you’ve done a good job here, everyone in your team has access to the full context of projects and conversations. You can skip lengthy debriefings or interrupting someone on vacation or asking around for information because that information is all sitting in your collaboration tool.

Remember the people not in the room

Be contentious o f the conversations you are having in the office, or even after a meeting ends as you walk back to your desk. The remote worker isn’t there to listen in or participate. If those conversations feel like they should be to the larger group, drop them into the collaboration tool and discuss them there. That way remote workers aren’t left out of important context and decisions that could confuse or hamper them later.

Thinking of the people not in the room goes double for group collaboration sessions and conference calls. Ever dialed in to a conference bridge and realize someone’s pointing to something they’ve drawn on a whiteboard that you can’t see? Or heard someone refer to a slide in a presentation you can’t see?

That worker’s effectiveness and ability to contribute is drastically reduced. And you’re simultaneously sending the message that their contributions aren’t as valuable as the people in the room. So if you’re going to share, make sure you have video collaboration or screen sharing set up so everyone who’s participating can follow along and contribute.

Share your surroundings

Most people like to see with their own eyes what you are talking about. When working remotely I’ve often found myself wondering where someone is sitting and what it looks like there.

Everyone has a great camera on their cell phones these days. Don’t be afraid to snap a picture of your desk, the view out the window from your workspace, the people in the office, etc.

Be available and responsive

One of the perks of working in an office is that you can typically turn around or walk down a hall to chat with someone. It’s especially convenient if you have to pin down someone down who doesn’t typically respond to email or phone calls. But remote workers don’t have this option.

If you don’t answer a remote worker on the channels often ignored by in-office workers (email, phone, chat), that employee is flying blind. They don’t have the information they need to do their job. Their productivity comes to a halt. And on top of that they probably feel undervalued and ignored. None of those things are pluses for company productivity.

So if you have remote employees, make it a point to respond to them, even if you normally ignore certain communications channels for in-office people. Because the electronic lifeline of communications and collaboration technology is the only line remote workers have to you.

Pro Tip: Don’t rely on email as your primary means of communications and collaboration. Emails are notorious for getting lots and ignored. Online collaboration tools like MiCollab and MiTeam are typically much more effective than email and tend to elicit greater collaboration and faster responses.

Use video

Humans are programmed to cue on faces from the time we’re babies. It’s the reason some people see faces in clouds or leaves (a phenomenon called pareidolia). And most experts agree a huge amount of communication is non-verbal.

That’s why it’s crucial to use video regularly to communicate and collaborate with remote employees.

Since remote workers don’t have access to the rich in-person interactions of employees at your offices, video is their only chance to get back much of the context others get by seeing the person they’re talking to.

Employees who work together for a while get to know each other’s mannerisms. Skilled employees and managers can even judge expressions and body language of people they don’t know well. A shrug can change the direction of a conversation. A grimace can stop a conversation altogether. But without these visual cues, a great employee can see misaligned or tone deaf.

An empty pause on the phone could mean one of a hundred things. But with visual context, the meaning may be immediately clear.

So make sure to use video for both one-on-one and group communications regularly. It humanizes everyone and fosters greater alignment and productivity because a voice on the other end of a phone doesn’t always tell the whole story.

Give the humans a place to be humans

“Work” isn’t always about work. Social interactions are an important part of business and how employees work together. An easy way to account for this aspect of work life for remote workers is to create channels or streams in your team collaboration tools for non-work related conversations—places for people to talk about shared group interests. My team has found a few that work great for us:

Good Finds – Drop links and information in here that are directly related to the type of work we do and to the industry we are in. Make sure to add a sentence on two on your takeaway or why you found it to be interesting.

Random Stuff – The name speaks for itself. Sometimes it’s funny cat videos and sometimes it’s long read editorials on state of affairs in our country. Again, it’s things we think are interesting but really have nothing to do with the work we do. PRO TIP: Most companies will want to avoid taboo office topics, like politics and religion.

Music – Through our interpersonal interactions, we discovered that we all have a shared interest in music. When we listen to something we think is good, we post it here. It’s amazing what you can learn about someone from the type of music they like to listen to.

Invent your own – Every team is different. Figure out what kind of streams help your team feel more like a team.

Making sure remote workers are full team members

Remote work isn’t just about providing someone with a phone and a laptop. It’s about providing them with a way to connect with the team in a way that makes them feel and produce like full team members.

Successfully running a team of remote workers takes commitment, patience and – most importantly – trust. The fear of missing out is a very strong force that can directly impact employee satisfaction and performance.

Pay close attention to it and work to ease that fear. Remember that the way you interact is just as important as the technology you use to do it. Do all this and you’ll be rewarded.

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Digital Transformation and High-Performance Companies

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How High-Performance Companies Tackle Digital Transformation

High-Performance-Companies

At Enterprise Connect, we learned some of the ways digital transformation has completely changed the way businesses should operate. But some businesses have adopted digital transformation far better than others. High-performance companies – that is, companies that have approached digital transformation as a tool to revolutionize their processes and grow market share – employ a few key strategies that any company can implement. No matter the size of your business, these four key strategies can mean the difference between becoming an industry leader and falling behind.

So what do high-performance companies have in common?

Embrace mobile excellence

Companies with a well-designed and -executed mobility strategy stay agile and responsive to how their work gets done, which means they stay efficient and productive in ways other companies can’t replicate. The news gets worse for businesses failing to adopt mobility as the new norm: the average cost of a bad or non-existent mobility strategy is $186,000 per week, putting them even further behind the companies getting it right. In short, high-performing companies know that work isn’t a destination: it’s an activity. Designing a workplace that moves with your employees ensures your company is equipped to go where business takes you and isn’t chained down by outdated infrastructure.

Foster team environments

There’s a reason 80% of executives say collaboration is crucial to growth. Better teamwork can result in better financial results, higher employee performance and, most importantly, higher levels of innovation. How do high-performance companies do it? A critical element of fostering a team environment involves providing the right tools to remove collaboration roadblocks and pave the way to higher productivity. In fact, more than 60% of firms using team collaboration tools report saving three hours a week per mobile worker – that amounts to 12 extra hours of productivity per month. By empowering employees with the right tools for team collaboration, high-performance companies keep their employees focused on the work that will disrupt industries, not sifting through scheduling emails and wasting time traveling to meetings.

Prioritize customer experience

Putting the customer experience above everything gives your customers a commitment to a lasting relationship they will rely on indefinitely. High-performing companies know that putting a name and a face where other companies put a number can mean the difference between a one-time transaction and a fruitful, long-term relationship. Research shows that 79% of customers will commit to a deeper product or service relationship with a brand after a satisfying experience. And, on the flip side, bad impressions have never been so impactful: it takes 12 positive experiences for a brand to make up for one unresolved negative experience – and that’s if the customer even gives you a second chance. Focusing on improving your customer experience in the ways that matter most: providing full context and information to every customer interaction, and even proactively reaching out before a customer knows they have a need, boosts trust in your company and turns customers into brand evangelists.

Drive analytics-based decisions

Using data to make decisions means you’re building a plan around reality instead of subjective conjecture. High-performing companies operate like finely tuned machines specifically because they look at hard data when they are faced with strategic business decisions. Linking data gathered through various business applications with analytics within your business is the best way to make strategic decisions about timing, resource allocation, and research and development. How can you know where you should go next if you don’t know where you’ve been?

What does it look like when a company harnesses these four strategies to become high-performance? Take a look at Michael Johnson Performance (MJP), who recently revolutionized their business through a strategic communications system.

High-Performance in Action: Michael Johnson Performance

Founded by four-time Olympic gold medalist Michael Johnson, MJP is known for its athletic excellence and high-performance training techniques. With coaches and athletes across the globe, communications are a key strategic activity for MJP. MJP recognized that with the mobile nature of its sales and coaching teams, they needed to find a communications system that met them where they traveled: on their mobile devices, with an easy-to-use collaboration approach that would give their customers a superior training experience. By implementing a solution that provided integrated messaging, collaboration and video conferencing software across devices and locations, MJP was able to radically improve the way their coaches communicate with athletes around the world.

Ready to learn more about how you can become a high-performance company? Download a free copy of Digital Transformation for Dummies, or contact us today to learn why high-performance companies are choosing high-performance communications.

A version of this post originally appeared on NoJitter >

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Captive Touch Screens & Productivity?

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What Do Captive Touch Screens Have to do with Desk Phones & Productivity?

mivoice-6900

When we picture the business desk phone, there’s a good chance a fairly traditional image comes to mind—a handset, to be sure, probably plenty of buttons and maybe even a paper sheet of quick-reference contact numbers behind a clear plastic protector. But the latest desk phones for business couldn’t be further from this with sleek Captive Touch Screens.

Today, you can get features like mobile integration, the latest Bluetooth and USB connectivity and HD audio sound quality, to name a few.

Consumer expectations are leaking into the business world

In addition to this, the design and ergonomics of the desk phone has changed for the better. This is partly due to the ‘consumerization of IT,’ where the devices and technologies people use in their homes start becoming forming their expectations of business devices and software as well.

Take the rapid adoption of the tablet in the home. Many households now reach for a tablet for basic computing needs rather than a PC or laptop. While the ‘instant-on,’ long battery life and attractive form factor play a part in the acceptance of tablets, the maturity of the touch screen is what really brings them to life.

Think back to when the first touch devices came out. Early smart phones, tablets and even PCs were hard to use. The software wasn’t intuitive to touch input and the sensitivity and calibration left most users frustrated at best. Fast forward to today, and we just expect all touch devices to work perfectly, to respond to the lightest of swipes and to be completely natural to use.

Read about how advances in Bluetooth are taking desk phones to new levels >

Resistive vs capacitive touch screens

Why wouldn’t we want the same for business desk phones? Early desk phones with touch screens used something called a ‘resistive touch screen,’ which relies on the mechanical pressure of a finger or stylus—you have to physically press the touch screen for it to respond.

By contrast, a ‘capacitive touch screen’ uses the electrical properties of the human body to change the properties of the screen’s electrical field. This allows for far more accurate responses to even the lightest touch, and can also support multi-touch gesturing.

Reduce training and improve productivity

It is the capacitive touch screen that is being built into most modern devices today and the latest desk phones are no exception. This means you can swipe through a list of contacts, press and hold to make an edit, make a light touch to signal an action.

As a result, you dramatically reduce training needs, since everything is as intuitive as using a modern smartphone or tablet. Productivity also improves as the touches are far more accurate and navigating menus can be done with confidence and greater speed. If avatars are also included in the design, then usability improves even further, as just tapping on a familiar image is easier than having to search through long lists of contacts.

This is another example of how the consumerization of IT is arriving in the workplace. And we’re harnessing this phenomenon for our latest desk phone series.

Get the full scoop on the new MiVoice 6900 IP Series desk phones >

Check out MiVoice Business, the call control platform best optimized to take full advantage of the MiVoice 6900 series phones’ capabilities >

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Emerging Cloud Communications Technologies

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A Look at Emerging Cloud Communications Technologies

A-Look-at-Emerging-Cloud-Communications-Technologies

Communications is more than just connecting people. The right communications technology helps businesses connect the dots between where they are today and where they want to be tomorrow. In this chapter, you explore the future of emerging cloud communications technologies and how they can help your business today and into the future.

Tighter mobile integration

Predicting the need for tighter integration between business communications systems, core business applications, and users’ mobile devices doesn’t take a crystal ball. The mobile workforce of today and the future expects its mobile phones to work everywhere, so productivity can happen anywhere.

Emerging technologies for tighter mobile integration include the following:

  • Voice over long term evolution (VoLTE) networks: This is a specification that enables more efficient use of available bandwidth and tighter integration with apps over an LTE network.
  • All IP‐based communications: Carriers move voice services from 2G/3G circuit‐switched (CS) networks to LTE, enabling redeployment and reuse of limited spectrum, and develop apps that are natively voice‐enabled. Today, voice and data are separate, and not all voice is IP‐based — even on LTE networks. In the near future, all LTE connections, both voice and data, will be IP‐based.
  • Convergence of mobile and enterprise communications (no more “apps”): Today, most unified communications (UC) vendors provide an app for smartphones that enables enterprise communications. Users will soon be able to make and receive corporate calls on their smartphones—not from a separate app, but from a native dialer.
  • Intelligent reachability: Intelligent reachability allows users to be reached on any of their devices through a single phone number with intelligent call routing capabilities, using location data, Bluetooth, and Wi‐Fi, among others, to route the call to the most appropriate device (rather than simply ringing every device).
  • New use cases: These enable mobile apps to leverage real‐time communications. Today, an app can trigger the dialer to make a call, but the call happens outside the app. In the future, mobile apps will be natively communications‐enabled via seamless integration to network‐based communications capabilities.
  • Enterprise routing capabilities: These use location and contextual awareness through more intelligent and capable mobile networks as UC vendors and cellular carriers develop new technologies together.

Software‐defined networking over Internet

Today, cloud communications customers generally connect to their service providers over either a multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) wide-area network or an over the top (OTT) Internet connection. At least some OTT is typically used in almost all environments. For example, it’s common to find MPLS at office locations, while employees use OTT at home or on the road.

MPLS offers the best quality, but it’s more expensive than other options. Many service providers include MPLS services and guarantee the quality of service for their customers.

OTT is less expensive, but it’s basically just an Internet connection. There’s no quality of service guarantee, and voice quality can degrade and even become unacceptable at times. For example, if a neighbor on the same network streams a video during a call, the download could interfere with your call.

A new innovation, known as software‐defined wide area networking (SD‐WAN) is emerging, offering businesses the best of both the MPLS and OTT worlds— better quality at a lower cost. SD‐WAN delivers these benefits by using multiple network connections, including a mixture of OTT and/or OTT with MPLS services.

SD‐WAN provides enterprise‐grade performance, visibility, and control over Internet broadband and private links. WAN traffic is automatically steered across the best links and most‐optimal paths. Dynamic multipath packets are steered to the optimal link based on performance metrics, application requirements, business priority of the application, and link cost. This technology can create a virtual, high‐bandwidth pipe from multiple, inexpensive broadband links and leased lines, providing businesses with improved WAN economics and quality.

Workstream messaging / Team collaboration

Unified communications technology generally includes instant messaging (IM). However, IM generally only supports internal users and is designed primarily for one‐to‐one communications. But a new category of communications is emerging: workstream messaging, sometimes called team collaboration. These messaging services are specifically designed for business collaboration.

Workstream messaging provides the same familiar experience of consumer‐based messaging applications, but offers enterprise‐oriented capabilities, like:

  • Persistence
  • Directory integration
  • Search
  • Single sign‐on (SSO) support
  • Integration with other enterprise applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM)

Workstream messaging tools started with basic messaging services but has been expanding into real‐time communications. A cloud communications provider can offer workstream messaging software with extensive real-time capabilities, including support for desk phones and public switched telephone networks (PSTNs).

Because workstream messaging also organizes and shares content (like files and photos), it provides contacts, content, and communications—all in one place. Workstream messaging will combine the benefits of asynchronous communications (like messages and files) with real‐time communications (like voice and video), and become central to business workflows.

Workstream messaging isn’t just another feature of unified communications—it often becomes the preferred means for real‐time communications in an organization.

Workstream messaging is self-organizing, which offers many benefits for users compared to an unwieldy “catch‐all” email inbox. Also, messages are more collaborative because they tend to drive more frequent, less formal, and concise interactions between communicating parties.

Workstream messaging is also superior to IM because, like actual workgroups and teams, it extends beyond organizational boundaries. In the consumer world, messaging‐based apps now dominate communications, but those services do not suitably address enterprise requirements, like security and integration.

Workstream messaging has the potential to change the nature of communications applications, like email, in the future. Organizations using workstream messaging solutions today have benefitted from a significant reduction in internal email volume because these solutions offer many advantages over traditional email systems, like self-organizing message streams.

Some might argue that reduced email isn’t much of a business benefit because messages are effectively moved from one application to another. However, the storage footprint for workstream messaging is generally smaller than for email, and there are numerous other advantages, including:

  • Organization. Email tends to follow a last‐in‐first‐out model, but organizing content chronologically is not always ideal. Workstream messaging tools organize messages by logically defined containers that group people or topics together. A new message arrives in that space, and the space itself is promoted to the top.
  • Search. Rather than store conversation history in individual email folders, workstream messaging tools share a single copy of the history among the participants. Everything is in one tool, along with content such as documents or photos.
  • History. Group history can be easily shared with new members to quickly bring others “up to speed” on a conversation topic.
  • Shared knowledge. Some workstream messaging tools allow containers to be searched by non‐participants. If someone in the company is looking for someone with knowledge of widgets, for example, then conversations about widgets can be identified to reveal potential experts.

Many cloud communications providers are moving to continuous upgrades rather than scheduled upgrade cycles. Thus, another advantage of cloud communications software is that it’s not only the most current, but also that it’s more secure than premises‐based solutions, in which continuous upgrades aren’t practical.

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2017 I.T. Salaries! GET PAID

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Everything You Need to Know about 2017 IT Salaries

2017 IT Salaries

It’s that time of year. Budgets. Planning. Expanding. Hiring. Whether you’re looking to hire some new IT professionals or looking for a new IT job yourself, these resources from many of the authorities on IT salaries will give you a great foundation to start.

2017 Technology & I.T. Salary Guide from Robert Half

It covers

  • Salary data for more than 75 IT jobs
  • Current hiring trends
  • The hottest technology jobs and specialty areas
  • The skills now in demand

Get the IT salary guide >

Robert Half tells us which IT jobs are the ones to watch in 2017.

Which technology specialties will see the highest salary growth in 2017?

In the last piece from Robert Half, they cover major trends affecting IT hiring and pay.

IT Salaries: Eight Cold Hard Facts by InformationWeek

InformationWeek has broken down eight key trends from their 2017 compensation survey. Great for people who want some quick, broad insights.

Read the article >

The 10 U.S. Cities with the Highest IT Salaries by InfoWorld

Thinking about a move to a whole new city to bolster that salary? Infoworld’s article dives into where IT salaries are highest and where they’re trending up.

Read the article >

IT Salaries Increase Across 12 Tech Job Categories

What categories of IT jobs are seeing the biggest bump in the wallet? CIO’s report has not only the “which ones” but a little on the “why” behind each.

Check out the post >

Average Salary for the Information Technology (IT) Services Industry by Payscale

Payscale lets you slice and dice IT salary information in a dynamic digital format by a host of factors, including:

  • Job title
  • Years of experience
  • Employer
  • Location
  • Company size
  • And more

View the research >

IT Salary Watch by Computerworld

Looking for historical info to help inform your salary ranges? This set of reports by Computer world gives you a historical view by year going back to 2012, so you can see trends over time as well as the latest data.

See the reports >

Average Salary Ranges for IT by Salary.com

Have an incredibly specific job title and experience level you want to see I.T. salaries for? The folks at salary.com list salaries by job title—and they have what might be the most exhaustive and granular list of titles out there.

Visit the site >

The 10 Best Networking Tips for People Who Hate Networking by The Week

Now that you’ve got an idea of how to find an IT job with the salary you’re looking for, here’s a little extra info to help you land that job.

Get the tips >

Careers at Towner Communications

Of course, if you’re interested in a career at Towner, you can check out our careers page, which includes a lot more than IT jobs.

Visit our careers page >

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Options for Avaya Customers

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Options for Avaya Customers: Do Nothing. Change Everything. Or Evolve. Confused? Read On…

Avaya

Over a month has passed since Avaya filed for Chapter 11 protection on January 19 in the US bankruptcy courts.

This petition marked the next step in a long journey of uncertainty for Avaya that started in 2009 when it acquired Nortel. Burdened by a large debt ever since – one that ultimately reached nearly $6 billion – Avaya seemed destined to struggle financially as it battled the triple challenge of debt payments, legacy pension obligations and declining revenues.

Despite this, Avaya continued to innovate and compete with a well-regarded portfolio. Mitel respected Avaya as a strong rival; the two companies contended regularly, with both claiming their fair share of wins across the small business and enterprise segments, and the private and public sectors.

So, what’s next for Avaya? More to the point, what’s next for its customers and those who were considering Avaya?

Since January 19, Avaya customers have been targeted from all angles by other vendors keen to lay out their credentials. From long-established competitors like Mitel to relatively new market entrants like Ring Central, Avaya customers have been presented with a myriad of options, including staying put.

Here’s a look at the three primary options that competing vendors have been promoting to Avaya customers over the last few weeks:

The Avaya option: inertia

For many Avaya customers, uncertainty will result in inertia. Sit and wait. Wait and see.

Their Avaya equipment works fine at the moment, so why not pause and see what happens post Chapter 11? Avaya itself would endorse this approach; its recent communication to customers has, understandably, been to reassure, to dampen down concerns and to paint a positive picture that Chapter 11 will help it restructure and emerge leaner and fitter.

The reality is that no one knows what will happen. It may be fine. It may not be. It’s all speculation.

Avaya’s future lies in the hands of the bankruptcy court and a complex multi-party negotiation that will include first lien debt holders, second lien debt holders, the pension fund, the management team and of course the bankruptcy court. No one can confidently predict the outcome.

It’s this uncertainty that brings risk to Avaya customers.

In what form or structure will Avaya emerge from Chapter 11? Which products will be supported going forward? By whom? For how long will products be protected from the ongoing cyber-security threat? What future investment will be applied to the product roadmap? Will commercial terms remain the same?

So many questions. So few answers.

Is inertia a prudent strategy in the face of Chapter 11? Our message to Avaya customers—review your business communications strategy and ensure that you have a clear view of the potential paths forward.  Either make a move now or at minimum review the viable alternatives, shortlist them and be ready to implement.

For those that were considering buying an Avaya solution, Mitel’s view is simple. Don’t do it. In the face of an uncertain outcome, like the Chapter 11 process, why take an unnecessary risk when there are better paths forward?

The “pure cloud” provider option: On-premises is dead

One of the more zealous viewpoints put into the market lately is from “pure cloud” providers. Several, including Ring Central, have declared that “premises-based communications is dead, cloud has won.” This position should be no surprise, coming as it does from companies that offer only pure cloud solutions, are relatively recent market entrants and have no on-premises communications experience.

It’s a message that aims to frighten organizations into action and it’s disrespectful to the Avaya customers they are targeting—organizations that have made significant investment in on-premises communications based on reliability, scalability, performance and integration with other business applications.

Is there merit to a 100 percent cloud strategy? Yes, for those customers that are happy to move all of their communications to a cloud-based subscription model (Mitel can help with that; in fact, we are the #1 global provider of cloud communications*. Just saying.).

But for most mid-sized and large enterprise organizations, the reality is that on-premises systems are alive and kicking as part of an integrated hybrid unified communications and collaboration (UCC) strategy that blends the best of both on-premises and cloud, allowing organizations to leverage existing investments while adding cloud applications for particular users, departments or locations at the time and pace of their choosing.

Should Avaya customers be wary about provocative claims from smaller vendors?  Should they consider a more rational approach with vendors that can support both on-premises and cloud requirements? We think so.

The Mitel option: Choice

It’s critical that organizations insist on choice, flexibility and agility to successfully negotiate their way through a period of unprecedented industry and technology disruption. While several companies try to lock Avaya customers into a single path forward, we pledge maximum choice and flexibility.

Whether organizations need to reduce costs, increase team productivity, improve customer satisfaction, transition to the cloud or fully embrace the collision of voice and the Internet of Things (IoT), we can help them evolve, efficiently and pragmatically.

How? Via a balanced approach that combines both premises and cloud-based communications.

We call this hybrid unified communications & collaboration (hybrid UCC). And it’s the model we would strongly view as the best path forward for most organizations, especially mid-sized and large enterprises. Mitel’s approach to hybrid UCC is also recognised by Gartner, achieving its highest score in 2016 for satisfying hybrid UC requirements in a use case study**. (Mitel is also the only vendor in all five Gartner Magic Quadrants covering business communications.)

See how we rank in Gartner Magic Quadrants for business communications >

We live in interesting times in the business communications industry

For Avaya customers right now, interesting also means uncertainty and turbulence, neither of which are good stablemates for business-critical communications. To help cut through the noise and boisterous marketing from vendors seeking to step in, consider this simple three-step approach:

  1. Be proactive. Plan an alternative strategy now. Inertia is not a risk worth taking for your business-critical communications.
  2. View overly provocative or aggressive marketing from newer entrants with healthy skepticism. Avaya’s unfortunate situation does not justify dismissing an entire category of communications technology used by millions of businesses worldwide.
  3. Insist on choice. Don’t be forced down a single-track road. Consider hybrid UCC as a better, evolutionary path forward that uses the best of both premises and cloud communications.

Mitel can, of course, help Avaya customers with all of this. We also have exclusive time-limited offers for both premises and cloud communications for Avaya customers and organizations considering Avaya. Take a look. We’d be delighted to hear from you.

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Michael Johnson Performance Case Study

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Michael Johnson Performance Case Study

High-performance companies deserve high-performance solutions

Michael Johnson Performance (MJP) is an athletic training center founded by four-time Olympic gold medalist Michael Johnson. Working with athletes and coaches around the world, MJP prides itself on leveraging the science behind training and the best technology to optimize athlete performance. As a high-performance company, MJP recognized the need for high performance communications solutions to meet its gold medal standards.

michael johnson performance

Customer Goals

Connect a global team of coaches, employees and athletes to deliver the most effective training experience
Replace an unsupported Nortel system with a high-performance communications platform that reflects MJP’s gold standard for technology
Improve overall communications to athletes, parents and potential new clients

 

Solutions

MiCloud Office
Mitel 6800 SIP series phones
MiTeam

 

Benefits

More personal connections and higher quality collaboration between MJP employees around the world
Improved customer experience thanks to productivity-enhancing applications and CRM integrations that put customer information right at staff’s fingertips
Confidence in a future-ready, reliable system that can grow with the business

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