Welcome to the tech in 20 minutes podcast where you will meet new tech vendors and learn how they can help your business. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better. Searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven't heard of before. Hi. I'm Max Clark, and I'm with David Silk who is the CMO at Mitel.

David, thank you so much for joining.

Thank you, Max. Delighted to be here.

So, David, what does Mitel do?

Mitel is a communications and collaboration company. We've been in existence for, you know, over 45 years just helping companies all over the around the world to communicate and collaborate with each other. As I said, it's you know, there's probably a 100 different countries that we operate and serve, but our mantra in life is to make that communications and collaboration experience as as seamless and easy as possible.

So, I mean, you say, you know, global company all around the world. I mean, you have a a very distinct accent. I I mean, that probably is the best way to highlight, you know, just the focus of Mitel and and how broad you actually are.

Yeah. My my accent some people describe my accent as having gotten lost somewhere over the mid Atlantic. But I I'm actually based in Galway in Ireland on the West Coast. Mitel is officially headquartered in Canada, even though we have a very significant presence in in the US and and all through Europe and Asia, and all around the world. But due to a combination of a 1000000 different factors, I ended up in in Galway on the West Coast, joined Mitel a little over 2 years ago.

And the first role that I had was to lead the international marketing team for the company based in Galway. We're spending a lot of time either in the UK or in Germany or France, which is be the the bigger countries that we'd have in the European region. And only on the 1st April, I took over the job as the chief marketing officer. So you could say that the timing was interesting given the many challenges that we've all faced over the last, I suppose, 2 months now.

So beyond just being a a a global company, global employees, global customers, Mitel has a there's a lot of lineage of, you know, history in the phone and the PBX space and a lot of other brands that have come together. Can you give a quick rundown on that?

Yeah. I mean, over 45, maybe even 47 years, company was was founded in Canada. The Mitel name came from Mike and Terry's Lawnmowers. Then it was a couple of entrepreneurs who decided that that's what they wanted to do. And little did they know that, you know, nearly 50 years later, there'd be 4,000 people in a $1,100,000,000 company that was really, you know, focused on communications and collaborations.

And throughout its, its period, Mitel has had a strong history of of buying and integrating companies. It was a company not so long ago called Shoretel, which did a lot of voice over IP type work, but the company bought that, integrated it in. There was companies in Europe called Astra. There there is a huge long list. It's probably 20 plus of how Mitel assimilated various different companies in.

And I I I think the the whole philosophy was there's companies that do really, really good things. It could be voice over IP. It could be PBX. It could be video. It could be just in collaboration.

The company was always looking for what companies could we work with, how could we expand the number of customers that we have. It's probably 70,000,000 customers now that operate on some form of Mitel technology globally. But, yeah, there's there's definitely been a a long history of bringing companies together, over a period of time.

When you say communications and collaboration, right, you know, traditionally, people think about a PBX and a phone on a desk, and that was communications. And, you know, now cell phones are really prevalent and and companies are moving into, you know, new forms of communications. And so, I mean, that's a collaboration piece. So how does how does Mitel view this world and how does this fit for you when we talk about enterprises looking at, do we want phones on desks? Do we not want phones?

Do we quote not care about our phones? How do we actually interact with people in the same office and different offices are now, you know, working from home? How does Mitel, you know, fit and solve those those problems for companies?

Great question. I think the the the word I'd use that comes to mind immediately is the is the choice that we would provide. So Mitel would, in in the past, has, you know, long hardware history of, you know, building PBXs and and and phones and the accessories that go along with that was the first company that had virtualized the the PBX and and began to, you know, really get ahead of that cloud journey. I I I think was one of the first in the industry to do that. If you fast forward to, you know, I I I'm gonna say the the middle of February or even the 1st March this year, what our customers were asking us really demonstrated the the power of what we can do, as a company.

And it there was no one single request that was coming in. So you may have had a company that was on an on-site telephony collaboration system that needed immediately to move teachers or health care workers remotely. We were able to provide them licenses that they could use softphones on cloud based collaboration devices, including your your telephony. And the the the the request that came in were really around you know, Mitel, can you provide us with a a hybrid solution? Because very, very quickly, what we experienced was that the former fixed worker, the former fixed workspace became hybrid overnight.

Literally overnight, it became a number of questions we got asked about how do you how do you help me move from a space that is existing into a place that can be moving, it can be remote. It addresses the hybrid worker and the hybrid workspace. And it really lended itself to, the the sweet spot that I believe that we have. Mitel as a as a company will offer an SMB portfolio in the UCaaS space. We have a product called My Cloud Connect.

We would look at the mid market space as a, a flexible cloud based solution. We have incredible applications when it comes to video. One of the things that we did during the COVID response was that we launched our video collaboration solution, which is called My Team Meetings, and we made it available free on any platform because we were very, very conscious of the fact that we needed to help companies and and people in need. And the other piece of work that we do is is in the contact center, what we would describe as as the the customer experience space. Mitel has a significant number of solutions in in contact center which are integrated into the call control platform.

We offer a omnichannel experience to to customers that were looking for it. So what we found, Max, was it really, really brought it home to us the last 2 months on how can we, as a company, make an immediate transition from what would have been a fixed place and fixed space and a fixed person into this hybrid workplace and space that was it wasn't just remote. It was moving remote. And you you've gotta be in a position by which you've got the solutions to either give that to your existing customers in a very short period of time and just as importantly, offer it out to other customers that are in in a very significant need in a very, very quick period of time.

So you mentioned, a flex and or sorry, connect and flex, which are the cloud delivered products. And Mitel has a significant amount of, let's call it, legacy on premise hardware deployed. So I'd imagine companies that were already on a cloud delivered product, right, that's a relatively, let's call it easy transition. I mean, easiest relative, right, to a remote or distributed workforce. You know, for your legacy customers, your on premise customers that were now all of a sudden in this position of, okay, we have this equipment at an office and we need to go remote.

I mean, what is what does that look I mean, how is Mitel respond to that and and what does that, you know, what does it mean for these organizations?

Yeah. There were so many examples. There was a public school in Michigan that was on a my, was on Connect fixed, as a platform, and approached us and said, look. We need to get our teachers when there's 800 people that are working in this organization. We need to get them off-site.

How do we do that? And the solution for us was, was My Cloud Connect, which was the Cloud Connect offering. And they are gonna continue to work that in in a hybrid environment so that in the that they do go back into a fixed working place, they will be able to operate that. To your comment around the, I wouldn't call them the the legacy products. The the on premise solutions that Mitel offer, are amazingly flexible.

We have an architecture called CloudLink, which allows our existing customers to have a, a pathway to the cloud applications. It enables, you know, collaboration. You can access in a public or private environment in terms of if you need access to, any of the applications that will work on an on premise, environment. And you may be aware, but recently, we've done an awful lot of work with probably an expanding ecosystem of partners. Two examples of those would be Google Cloud Platform, which is how we host our Cloud Connect and also our Flex into the mid market, and AWS.

And the AWS example is a is a really good example of how we hosted my team meetings video on AWS. So what we found is architect the it's not just the customers. The response that you have to provide to the customers to make sure that you are flexible and agile and quick. You also have to have a ecosystem that allows you to have an architecture that's flexible and agile and quick because you just don't know what kind of response you're going to, to need to make. And I think we're all well, certainly in Mitel, we're we're moving into a place where we like to work with best in breed partners that could be in the the public or the private, you know, the the Googles or the AWSes of the world, but also some of the smaller technology ecosystem players where you've got codevelopment of applications.

So that that whole sphere and world in terms of the ecosystem has dramatically changed. And it the transition and pace of change on that has only just increased, recently.

You mentioned, you know, connect with, you know, the SMB space and flex with larger. How does this actually break down in terms of of customer sizes? I mean, for a company, you know, how low how small do you go? What's your sweet spot? How big do you go on on your on your platform?

I mean, what's that what's that range in in extension or seat count?

Yeah. The the SMB, I mean, it's for for Connect, it it could be 20. It's probably not gonna go much more. It can go higher, but 20 to a 100, a 150. We would look at mid market, the flex offering, as 250 above.

A 250 could go to 2,500. I think the opportunity that we really see is to provide that choice in in both SMB but also in in mid market because there's there's there's different things that people are looking for in that mid market enterprise space. Companies are probably likely more to pay a premium for a a flexible product, which is cloud based, so it gives them applications. Most importantly, it gives them integration opportunities. So they may be working in a Salesforce type environment that they want to make sure that they have a consistent experience across all of their IT infrastructure and will be likely to, you know, more interested in in in looking at a premium communications and collaboration, solution from from Mitel and probably would be an SMB UCaaS customer, which may be interested in voice with basic collaboration.

But this specific your answer to your question is anywhere from 20 to a 150 on the SMB side. Sweet spot for us in mid market would go from 250 the whole way up to maybe 2 and a half 1000.

Okay. Awesome. You might tell, okay, you said 47 year history making phone systems now. When we look at the UCaaS space, there's a lot of logos in there. There's a lot of competition.

I mean, this is a growing, booming industry. If we were going to say, you know, why Mitel versus somebody else? How would you answer that question and and what what should people thinking be thinking about as it relates to Mitel and and what you offer that somebody else can't?

Yeah. You can. It's it's the full solution. So, you know, not only you're getting are you getting the voice, we also will create the, the the handsets. We'll make sure that that's part of any package.

We also will make sure that we have a rich partner ecosystem both on the agent side and on the VAR side to make sure that you know, some companies may start small and be looking at that UCaaS immediate need. But, hopefully, over a period of time, their needs are going to get nothing but greater. And we'd like to make sure that we're the type of company that's with that customer for a longer period of time. So they may end up having different needs. It may end up being contact center.

We provide that. They may decide that they've got applications integration that they need. Again, that's part of Mitel. It's part of the ecosystem that we work with. So, Max, when we use the word choice and flexibility, it's really around making sure that any customer or any partner who's working with Mitel feels comfortable that we can provide that UCaaS solution.

In the SMB, we can also provide it the whole way up to I mean, to your point, we've got some on-site PBXs that there's a 100,000 plus customers that will be operating on that, and they too are looking for their path, to the cloud. So one of the greatest things that we bring is that flexibility of choice, the flexibility of solution, and we are really focused on making sure that we would address the customer needs over a period of time.

So manufacturing your own devices, I mean, you're talking about the actual phones that go onto desks or on hang on walls or or considered in conference rooms, that is a unique thing for Mitel. And I'd imagine it gives you a whole slew of advantages over somebody who's using a third party phone and what you can, you know, control and and how you provide support.

Yeah. And, you know, your your operating system is is 1. Your ability to get somebody up and running immediately is quite unique where you're dealing with one source, one provider. So, Mags, if you came to us and say, listen. We wanna get up and running, and we got 25 users.

You can do that on an integrated system, including your handset including your softphone, which is far more likely these days, or the device that I have on mine, which, on my desk, which is a little Wi Fi enabled speaker, which is made by Mitel that integrates into the solution as well. So, yeah, the the ability for us to be able to, get you up and running with the full suite of products is a differentiator versus you having to go out and source your phones or your service or other contracts, from multiple people. That's not something that we're in. We provide it end to end.

You touched on this a little bit earlier, but, like, just to circle back, when we look at, you know, now post COVID and the demands of companies and how they're looking at communications, you know, we we touched on it about existing customers migrating and figuring out how to go remote or, you know, are they going to be hybrid or are they going to be completely remote or not? And then the other side of it is we have companies that were not already Mitel customers that need solutions. And so in in that space, what are you seeing and how are you helping companies address communications needs in the new world?

So I I'm gonna answer it by taking a step back, and then I'll step forward if that's okay. The response that we we we have we had a very specific response in general to COVID, and it was kinda built on 4 tenants. The first was the immediate response. So what is the response that Mitel has primarily to our existing customers, and partners? And that was really built on, if you need to get remote and continue to work, what do we need to do to make that happen?

That could have been activation of licenses. It could have been the activation of softphones. It could have been moving you from a a fixed solution into some form of cloud solution. But it was really focused on making sure that we proactively provided a response to keep customers working. The second was mitigation, was okay.

Well, we can get you through this initial period of time. Are there mitigating factors that we can assist you with? And a lot of those were financial. So there were specific offers that existing customers were looking for. The the one example I I gave was we launched my team meetings as a video in collaboration, and we provided that free for 6 months.

We also found that there was new customers that were looking either for a UCaaS type solution or some hybrid, and we made our signature My Cloud Connect free for 6 months. We provided that as an offer. We had never done that before, and we we made sure that the financial issues that we're forcing or that the people we're dealing with immediately could be taken off the table. And and the 3rd piece for us was was really around reassurance. And the reassurance what we what we what I found humbling was we reached out to the customers that we have around the world, and we just asked them the questions.

Are you willing to share the story? Are you willing to not represent what Mitel has done, but represent the steps that you've taken to get through this in an initial period of time and share that story? And we just had countless offers from companies to say if there's anything that we can do to articulate what we've gone through to describe the challenges that we faced on moving people from physical to remote, the license issues, the financial issues, you name it, we want to make sure that we can do that. So that was very important for us as a company that we could provide that reassurance back. And then the the the the 4th piece, and, look, it's not like the 5th March you go from 1 to phase 2, and the 1st April you go to phase 3.

The 4th phase was really around recovery. We've noticed that the conversation, over the last probably 2 or 3 weeks has shifted to how do we move forward? How are we what is the world that you will predict, you know, with with the Mitel crystal ball? Because we know all the answers. Right?

What world do we are we emerging into? And, again, I I think one of the benefits of working with a company like Mitel is that we've been through a lot of challenges before. We've seen a lot of changes. I don't think anybody has seen what's happened globally like this before, but we're very, very we're sure as we can be that you you you've already stepped into that hybrid workspace, and you need to have an adaptable, flexible solution. You need to make sure that you're working with a vendor that can address all of those needs that has a and this is so important, has a really strong partner ecosystem that can provide that support because not in all cases, you know, the physical support that the partner can provide may not be available today.

That's something that they're going to need to do remotely. But that was really important was to be able to start talking about the recovery and what it is that we could do as a company. I I think moving forward, we'll we'll break it down into primarily 3 areas. The first will be, you know, making sure that customers and and and, hopefully, prospects are aware of the cloud solution that Mitel can provide, you know, whether that's on call control, whether that's on collaboration, whether it's into contact center. The second is making absolutely sure that the on prem need is addressed, and not just in terms of on prem, making sure that you've got the ability to continue to work remotely, that you've got the ability to work in that hybrid space, but you also have a very, very clear path to the cloud.

An example of that would be probably the largest, Mitel installed base is on My Voice Business. There's an absolutely clear progression to Flex as a cloud offering and then mid market space for that, for those customers. And, again, making sure that we articulate that clearly is very important. And then the third is is all around the application spaces. You know, how do we develop and continue to ensure that not just contact center, but video and collaboration, is an integrated piece, into everything that we do?

And now that you you've prompted me a number of times, and it is a really, really important part is, you know, that end to end piece. If if a customer is looking for that handset, if it is looking for the softphone, if it is making sure that they can work with one seamless vendor to provide all of those things, again, we'll make sure that we we've got that in place for them.

David, thank you so much for your time. It was a pleasure.

Max, thank you. It was, really nice to be able to talk to you from the West Coast of Ireland, have a conversation about all the challenges that we're facing in the world, but, I do appreciate your time. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Thanks for joining the tech in 20 minutes podcast. At Clark Sys, we believe tech should make your life better. Searching Google is a waste of time, and the right vendor is often one you haven't heard of before. We can help you buy the right tech for your business.

Visit us at clarksys.com to schedule an intro call.