Mitel honoured with Frost & Sullivan 2010 global new product innovation award

Mitel (NASDAQ:MITL) has announced that Virtual Mitel Communications Director (Virtual MCD) has been recognised by Frost & Sullivan as the recipient of the 2010 Global New Product Innovation of the Year Award in the World Enterprise Telephony Platform and Endpoints Market.

Mitel received the award in recognition of its performance against key competitors in terms of product innovation, use of leading-edge technologies, delivery of value-added benefits and features, ability to deliver superior customer ROI, and customer penetration potential.

Virtual MCD, the core call control of Mitel's Virtual Solutions software portfolio, is a software package download that leverages VMware vSphere4. The solution enables customers to consolidate Mitel's real-time voice applications alongside non-voice business applications in the data centre.

Virtual MCD customers can benefit from: capital savings through reduction of server hardware and real estate; operations savings with the decrease in power and server costs; productivity improvements and resource efficiencies in data centre management; and simplified business continuity and disaster recovery plans.

"As organisations work towards streamlining business processes through their IT and communications infrastructure, virtualisation of both real-time and non-real-time applications is promising to drastically change the way communications networks will operate in the future," said Elka Popova, program director, Frost & Sullivan.

"While other telephony vendors are making attempts to virtualise call control and applications, Mitel has leapfrogged the competition by becoming the first voice vendor to enable its call process server to run on an industry-standard virtualisation platform. This addresses a major pain point of businesses - delivering communications solutions irrespective of location, device, and time," said Popova.

"We have worked in tandem with Mitel for more than two years to be able to run real-time voice applications in a virtualised environment," said Parag Patel, vice-president, Global Strategic Alliances Organisation, VMware.

"Because of this combined effort, Mitel is a leader in the global market of virtual voice solutions and we will continue to work together to create innovative joint solutions," he said.

The report further states that by providing the ability to run real-time and non-real-time communications applications, Virtual MCD will address the need to deliver communications solutions irrespective of location, device, and time. Virtual MCD can also provide the ability for organisations to scale application deployment without incurring large-scale investments. Frost & Sullivan expects that these factors will drive accelerated adoption in the next few years. Furthermore, although traditionally considered as a solution for enterprise businesses, SMEs that have a growing need for affordable IP telephony and unified communications suites, may find communications virtualisation a very attractive alternative to accelerate deployment without having to make excessive investments.

"Our work with VMware has enabled voice solutions to run as another application in the data centre. IT managers already running VMware technology can easily deploy Virtual MCD with little to no training," said Andy Bull, managing director for Mitel South Africa.

"Mitel Virtual Solutions can also relieve some major challenges for businesses by streamlining business continuity strategies, reducing hardware costs, and freeing up resources to focus on other strategic IT projects. This has been demonstrated through a number of virtualised solutions that Mitel customers have deployed globally," said Bull.

Click here for the full Frost & Sullivan report.