With a new Canadian and North American channel leadership, Ottawa’s Mitel Networks Corp.. says it has reoriented itself as a channel-first company and is ready to make waves with small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). It just needs to get the word out.
A company that has gone through a few transitions over the years, Mitel is a provider of unified communications and collaboration software, and has recently made heavy bets to architect its offerings to utilize virtualization technology. Since Richard McBee took over in 2011 the company has been working on shedding its direct sales-focused ways, and it aims to continue that process with two recent executive appointments.
An 18-year Mitel veteran, Canadian Jeff Nolan was recently appointed to the newly created position of vice-president of North American channel development. Along with Phil Keenan, Mitel’s executive vice-president of Americas sales, service and field marketing, he’s helping drive Mitel’s overall channel strategy. And in Canada, Tom Lang joined Mitel six weeks ago as vice-president of Canadian sales. Lang comes to Mitel from one of their major partners, Bell Canada.
Under Mitel’s 3+1 strategy, Nolan said the company is aiming to become easier to do business with and use, to be focused on the converged unified communications space, and segment its market into sub-100 and plus-100 seats with a channel-led go-to-market in both.
The “plus” of 3+1, said Nolan is virtualization. Mitel is focused on making sure its unified communications software is able to be delivered virtually and has partnered with VMware to build out its virtualization expertise.
“In Canada we already had a head-start but in North America, two years ago we were competing with our partners,” said Nolan. “We took a radical move one year ago. We got out of selling direct against our channel, we reduced our direct sales force to focus on demand generation and we built resources to help our partners grow. We absolutely moved our focus overnight.”
New customer acquisition is now through the channel, and even in the enterprise market Nolan said Mitel is fulfilling through the channel, with the exception of a small group of core VIP customers that are supported directly. In Canada today, 75 per cent of Mitel’s total business is through the indirect channel.
“We’ve been aggressively transitioning thousands of customers over to the channel that were once direct,” said Nolan. “That’s almost unheard of.”
Moving forward from here, with his newly created position Nolan said his mandate includes onboarding quality partners in an effective way, particularly select Shortel and Avaya partners, as well as VMware partners with virtualization skills. The lower end of the SMB market is also a particular focus, and Mitel has a new suite of SMB-focused products to address the market. Distributor Tech Data has come onboard to help Mitel penetrate the SMB space in the U.S., but Nolan said they don’t have a timeline for going into distribution in Canada. Rather, they want to make sure they get the model right in the U.S. first.
In Canada, Mitel has about 60 partners focused across the market, from the larger players such as Bell Canada and Allstream to the smaller VARs. While he’s still new to the job, having worked with Mitel while at Bell, Lang said he sees a strong opportunity for Mitel with a product portfolio that beats its competitors on a dollar for value basis. The challenge is getting Mitel into those comparative conversations.
“We need to get the word out and make sure people consider Mitel,” said Lang. “Once we’re considered and people are doing evidence-based evaluations, the SMB market stands to gain tremendously.”