Mitel reports that they have won the top spot globally for cloud communications. The press release noted that Mitel has 850,000 seats worldwide, about 20% of the world total. Barely weeks later, Mitel blew through that barrier and announced its millionth seat in its press release from February 26.

I would add that Mitel, alone with Zultys, offers purely VMware hosted systems for the data center, just running circles around other competing solutions when it comes to deployment flexibility. We don’t have any hardware we require you to buy at all with Mitel, and we can utilize nearly all of the VMware tools your IT staff is using already on other applications, from vMotion to High Availability.

With Mitel we can provide a hosted, subscription based service that includes warranty, support, a phone number and phone service. We can host your system for you in our data center. We can work on your system in your data center. We can work on your system in your office in a traditional branded Mitel box. And, we can work on a hybrid of any or all of these options.

NEC SL1100 Desktop Suite

Unified Communications

If you are looking for an affordable, small business unified communications product on a premise-based system, We really like the NEC SL1100’s Desktop Suite. At a bare minimum, the Desktop Suite provides an excellent alternative to a plastic reception console next to the phone. This video from NEC provides an excellent primer on the software and its capabilities.

The Zultys system is second to none when it comes to the auto industry. As this post points out, the Zultys feature set really addresses some key concerns of this vital sector of the Southern California economy.

Why auto dealers choose Zultys

Call Recording

The system has a built-in call recorder. This is ideal for documenting service requests and work approvals. It allows users to engage in conversations instead of passively transcribing notes. This also lets you cancel 3rd party call recording services that can cost thousands of dollars each month, and store all the recordings securely on site.

Call Reporting

Built in to the system, you have a full historical call detail program. This invaluable business intelligence can help auto dealerships gauge the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, audit their at times considerable phone bills, and monitor call traffic as well as employee productivity.

Auto Dialer & IVR

The Zultys has a built in automated dialing and playback system for confirming service appointments, confirming sales appointments, conducting customer service and satisfaction surveys, sending appointment reminders, and more – you can even customize the IVR to handle payments, provide status updates and handle any number of automated transactions.

Unified Communications for Auto

Real-time presence, status and messaging. The three hallmarks of Unified Communications (UC) are vital to auto dealerships and actually can help explain these features to people new to this technology.

Presence

Presence means seeing if coworkers are available for a call, email, meeting or otherwise around.

Being able to see presence on a computer means I can get answers quicker without paging overhead, wandering the halls, or sending emails and leaving voicemails hoping for a callback.

For dealerships, being able to track down salespeople, sales managers, mechanics, finance personnel and even janitorial staff is critical. The purchase and repair processes are fraught with mistrust, risk and negativity. Quickly processing transactions can increase success rates and finding the right people and getting answers fast is a key to success.

Status

Status may seem similar to presence, but it dovetails in nicely with the Find Me / Follow Me features of the Zultys system so deserves a separate entry. Whereas Presence is about finding other people, Status is where I tell my team what I am up to.

The simple form of this is by simply picking a status and typing notes on this status. So, I am ‘Out of the Office’ and my note is ‘Back by 3pm’ which can be relayed to people trying to reach me or serve to let my colleagues know they can reach me via IM on the MXIE, text message or to talk to an alternative coworker.

Find Me / Follow Me in Zultys is triggered off rules I set for the status. I can decide that, based on my status, calls travel a certain way. So for example, if I am in the office but on the phone, my calls should go to voicemail. But if I am out of the office, my calls should go to my cell phone. The intuitive, flexible Find Me / Follow Me rules in the Zultys make cell phone integration very easy to implement. They also remove an expensive bone of contention with IT, who no longer has to micromanage call forwarding for each user, keep cell phone lists up to date, and learn the intricacies of a system forward.

For auto dealerships, Status can help managers locate their human resources and make sure staff is on task. But the real power of the Status comes from sales personnel and repair staff to be able to shift calls around and take customer requests while they are in transit, between tasks, or in an area where they only have a cell phone available. It increases responsiveness and allows for a more productive use of time.

Messaging

Unified Communications (UC) messaging includes a few critical components.

Instant Messaging allows users to type in real time with each other, in case you had no idea. With Zultys MXMobile, this includes chat on mobile devices such as iPhones, Android phones and tablets, and iPads.

The advantage of moving to MXIE and Zultys for chat instead of using email, texting (SMS), or third party add-ins like Lync is that integrating chat into the phone system allows you to see all of your real-time communications in one place. Users can initiate a call, video session or chat, right from the desktop. You can also have voice messages and voicemail automatically initiate an email that can serve as a notification or as the actual message.

Mitel had a pretty good quarter.

Mitel is giving every indication that this is a company on the move, taking full advantage of its competitive strengths:

• very strong cloud story, with a single software stream no matter how you deploy the system
• a lot of options for direct manufacturer support for deployment, including vertically integrated, top-to-bottom provisioning of internet service, telephone carrier service, data center hosting, software development and manufacturing of internet phone systems
• handsome looking telephones with more in the pipeline
• great out of the box integration with popular applications such as SalesForce and Lync

From the highlight real of results, we are looking at Mitel:

• Doubling their cloud seats to over a million
• Posting $1.1 Billion in revenue for the year
• Posting $57.9M in EBITDA for Q4
• Posted $10M of honest-to-God GAAP profit. Pretty sure the competition did a double take at that.
• And earning a 55.1% gross margin, a result many in any industry would envy. I know I do.

Overall, a pretty great result, even with top line revenues slipping 5% year-over-year. Mitel says currency effects are to blame. I think with the rest of the results looking this strong, they get a pass on that, though top line growth in a challenging market is, er, a challenge.

We will see if the economy picks up steam and Mitel translates that macro momentum into renewed top line growth, or if it is possible that – directly or indirectly – cloud seats are cannibalizing traditional PBX sales. My hunch is that they are, slightly, only because Mitel has refocused their attention on cloud. So yes and Mitel does not care, because the future of the company is in cloud. As soon as the phone industry turned into a software product, the pricing model needs to resemble that of software, which in 2015 means a SaaS model.

Unified Communications for hotels, motels, resorts and country clubs

For a lot of our customers, Unified Communications sells itself. When we show sales managers that they can instant message their sales reps from any device, or show customer service teams that they can see presence and status for coworkers scattered across different locations, they instantly see how it solves problems they have wrestled with for years. Whether the Unified Communications software is a Zultys MXIE, Mitel MiCollab or Phone Manager, or NEC Desktop Suite, the desktop solutions are as important – if not more so – than the phone systems they integrate with for many of our customers.

Some industries have been slower to see the benefits of a UC-enabled PBX or hosted telephony platform. Customer-facing verticals like medical, retail and restaurants feature employees that are not in front of a computer enough to take full advantage, though smartphone integration and electronic medical records are changing that perception.

Hospitality is another vertical where many key employees are not in front of a PC for much of their workday. However, with smartphones proliferating and healthy WiFi networks a requirement for most hotels and motels, things are changing rapidly.

VoIP Hospitality Solutions

The various phenomena of convergence and Bring Your Own Device architectures have suddenly made Unified Communications a productivity booster for hotels, motels, resorts and country clubs. SIP trunking especially with its unmetered (no charge) long distance and ability to scale up or down with a phone call can be a huge cost savings as hotels wrestle with declining use of the room telephones and seasonal swings in usage.

Motel solutions

Desktop software for front desk positions used to cost thousands of dollars. Nowadays, at least a basic version of UC software is practically thrown in with every system installed. Many motels only have a couple of system desk phones, which we can largely do away with now with smartphone apps that double as smartphones. This kills two birds with one stone – we can retire both the clunky analog cordless phones and extra deskphones and data cables scattered about.

Find Me/Follow Me features providing tight cell phone integration with the telephone system allow owners and security to maintain a connection to the front desk and provide for backup to reception if there is a guest emergency, a critical function for small motels with limited staff, especially at night.

Hotel solutions

Larger properties will offer guests additional amenities that benefit from UC. Mitel MiVoice Business systems will have built-in Property Management System (PMS) integration links and a host of hospitality features, from wake up calls to room status codes. Unified Communications software can enhance these further, providing guest services personnel (concierge, security, and valet, for example) with check in and out functionality so they can be located faster without a separate, disconnected walkie talkie system. Cleaning and groundskeeper personnel can similar be connected to the phone system and located instead of relying on a separate, parallel network of expensive, annoying high powered cordless phones or walkie talkies.

Another UC advantage for hotels is in offering collaboration, video and teleconferencing features for business centers to attract tech-savvy business travelers. We can provide cutting edge collaboration tools from Mitel and Zultys.

Resorts and Country Club Solutions

These large campus environments actually stand to benefit the most from UC. In addition to all of the benefits listed above, we can set up virtual tenants on the Mitel system to provide as much or as little visibility between different individual groups and departments within the property as it makes sense for the business while saving on the initial expense of installing the system by avoiding duplication. Campus wide WiFi deployments from Extenda can be used to extend user presence throughout the property. Voice messaging integration with email can help increase the speed and ease with which messages are returned to better serve guests and members.

More commonly, multiple receptionists and operator positions alongside informal, small contact centers exist in parallel. Our Mitel UC solutions can cost effectively give these users the tools they need to get the job done. We can also layer in contact center features including social media outreach and web chat to provide additional features and functionality for providing a superior guest experience and keep up those Yelp, twitter, TripAdvisor and other online reviews.

Our favorite wireless access point (WAP) manufacturer Aruba announced this morning that they are going to be purchased by HP.

In the $2.7B transaction, HP bolsters their position in networking with one of our favorite product lineups. Aruba’s wireless products are very easy to configure and use. The Aruba controllers offer great BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) capabilities for dealing with the dozens of devices users are bringing into and connecting to corporate WiFi networks.

You can view the press release here.

This is a pretty expansive topic so I am going to stick to the basics. What you need to know is that a decent wired headset will run about $100, and a decent cordless headset will run $300-400. Those numbers include the various accouterments that make the headset work, be it a cord converter piece or a lifter or electronic hookswitch (EHS).

Why are office phone headsets so expensive?

I can only guess, but I think we are looking at a market with just a handful of competitors (Plantronics, Sennheiser, Jabra/GN Netcom, mainly, with a host of small Chinese manufacturers competing too) and production runs that are not as big as you would think. I would imagine that only a fraction of today’s workforce has a headset. In addition, call centers – traditionally the heaviest headset users – are moving to softphones on the computer and USB headsets, making office phone headsets even less popular.

Bluetooth or DECT?

I tend to prefer DECT because of battery life and range. DECT headsets can go as far as 400′ from their base, seem to hold power all day in busy use, and don’t make your computer speakers go nuts. Every office is different and will product different results, but in our office, I can’t go more than 15′ away from my base station with a Bluetooth headset. If you are mostly stationary, or if you want a single headset to sync with a mobile phone as well, though, Bluetooth is a good bet.

Mitel

The Mitel DECT cordless headset is pretty great. It works with the 5330, 5340, 5330e, 5340e, and 5360 telephones. It has about a 300′ range, works all day, and integrates with your telephone so you don’t have a weird robot lifter arm. Similarly, you can get the cordless handset with all the same features, and can even combine the two, to show the world that you will not be tied to your desk and be strangled by the cords of your phone.

The new Mitel Aastra phones (6863, 6865, 6867, and 6869 models) support electronic hook switches from Plantronics (model APS-11). This gives you a little more choice as far as headsets go, and eliminates that robot lifter arm you otherwise need to pick up and hang up on calls.

Zultys

The 35i and 37g Zultys phones support electronic hookswitches too. For Sennheiser integration you would use the DHSG Adapter kit with the 35i, 37G and the discontinued 53, 55, and 57 model phones. The Plantronics APS-1 works with the Zultys 35i and 37g telephones as well for lifter-free operation.

Wireless Headsets

• For the best audio quality, it is hard to beat the Sennheiser OfficeRunner. It also happens to have the best range we have seen.
• For a lightweight, low range Bluetooth headset, look at the Plantronics Voyager Legend CS. It is comfortable on the ear and has a variety of ear buds you can swap out for a decent fit.
• Plantronics Savi 700 is a neat attempt at an all-in-one headset, so you can combine an office phone, softphone and mobile in one. I managed to snap the flimsy band off the $400 headset immediately, ruining the headset, so perhaps this is not a great headset for clumsy or ham handed users. It supports DECT and Bluetooth which is a novelty.
• The VXi V150 is our vote for best off-brand wireless headset. We proudly sell the VXi lineup if you are looking for a ‘good enough’ headset and don’t need the cutting edge acoustics and noise cancelling of the industry leaders.