IHS: Mitel A North American UCaaS Leader
In May 2017, we published our North American UCaaS Scorecard, where we evaluated the top ten UC as a service (UCaaS) providers. The purpose of the Scorecard is to determine which service providers currently lead the market for UCaaS and are best positioned to succeed in the long term based on a set of criteria.
The UCaaS market in North America is marked by a large and dynamic provider landscape. Mergers and acquisitions continue as providers look to gain scale, new capabilities, and long-term survivability. Despite the consolidation, there is still a large number of VoIP service providers in the region, including traditional premises-based PBX and UC vendors, pure-plays, incumbent operators, cable MSOs, CLECs, ISPs and system integrators.
Mitel, one of the top ten providers highlighted in the 2017 report, is the one traditional enterprise telephony and UC vendor that also shows up as a leading provider of UCaaS services. The company has steadily grown its installed base of users over the past two years. Mitel has a multi-pronged approach to the cloud UC market including offering a platform to service providers and operating and managing UCaaS services directly. The company’s hosted offerings have been standardized globally based on its own work and through acquisitions.
For this report we only focus on the services Mitel runs and manages directly as a provider, and there are 3 primary offerings, which include 3 main bundles—Essentials, Premier, and Elite within each offering. The Essentials bundle is perfect for common areas with common call control features. Premier is the best option for most users and includes mobile capabilities, internal collaboration, presence, and desktop client. The Elite bundle is for highly mobile employees with increased technical needs and includes unified messaging box, internal and external collaboration, and business application integration. Compared to most other UCaaS providers, Mitel has a more complex set of options for companies to choose from with 10 overall package options.
Learn more about Mitel’s unified communications as a service. >
One of Mitel’s important service developments has been its team collaboration solution, MiTeam. The service has the capabilities we have come to expect around team collaboration solutions in the market, providing collaborative workspaces for team meetings, conversations and multimedia content sharing. MiTeam is integrated with MiCloud services and provides free guest access for users to be invited into a collaboration stream or conferences.
Mitel’s direct cloud services are offered in North America, the UK, France, Germany and Australia. One important advantage Mitel has over the other providers in our Scorecard is a base of existing enterprise communications customers and channels that have been with Mitel for many years. This gives them a strong brand presence to capture cloud opportunities. Additionally, MiCloud is the same code base as Mitel’s premises-based PBX solutions, so it can address businesses that require hybrid—on-premises and cloud—deployments.
