Mitel unveils software goal

Vendor looks to voice and virtualisation partners to help drive plans to become a "software-centric" company

On the up: Mitel claims its plans will come to fruition within five years

Comms vendor Mitel wants to bring both voice and virtualisation resellers along for the ride in its plan to become a “software-centric” business inside five years.

The Canadian vendor’s EMEA managing director Graham Bevington predicts the transformation will take “two to five years”, depending on external market factors.

He added that Mitel’s traditional PBX resellers have proved open-minded so far.

“I never ceased to be amazed by how resilient the traditional voice channel is,” he said.

Last summer Mitel inked a partnership with virtualisation titan VMware to deliver joint product offerings. Bevington believes the two channels could become more converged.

“[The VMware partnership] gives us an opportunity to look at a different channel, a different route to market and to explore markets that we have not [explored] before,” he said.

“Some of our channel partners are already VMware partners and some VMware partners will be interested in voice.”