So long Mitel, and thanks for all the golf
As Mitel finally appears to be reaching their chapter 11 destiny (according to recent reports in Bloomberg and Techzine), my mind goes back to 10–15 years ago.
Back then, my roles were usually leading Products and Propositions for different service providers. I was hired by leaders who could see what needed to change in their organisations and needed someone with the technical background, product knowledge and market awareness to help guide UC&C strategy.
I lost count how many times I argued that both Avaya and Mitel were poor long-term choices during that time. Now, it makes me mad all over again to think of the time and money wasted by those executives siding with their golf buddies, but more on that later.
The truth about Mitel is that there was at least a fleeting desire to evolve at one point.
Back in 2014, a series of deals resulted in Mitel acquiring Aastra, who had just acquired Telepo — you can read more about this in Dave Michel’s Talking Pointz article. This meant Mitel also bought Telepo.
Telepo was a breath of fresh air – much needed at the time, as Mitel appeared to be struggling to make sense of what “cloud” actually was and how the market increasingly wanted to consume services like UC&C from Service Providers.
Incidentally, Telepo then found a much better home in Dstny in a subsequent acquisition, but I won’t get into all that here as it was well-covered at the time in Cavell’s 2021 article. In my opinion, Mitel’s sale of Telepo felt like the release of an animal that was intelligent, agile and growing, but would struggle to survive if it was kept within a stagnant environment any longer.
Undeterred, Mitel continued to pursue their interpretation of “cloud”, which was compelling for many legacy IT directors and CIOs who have probably all retired or moved into consulting by now. Arguments like “big enterprises and public sector don’t want public cloud or even multi-tenant” were common back then in meetings. Even at that time, many better options existed, even for quasi-hybrid-wannabe-cloud solutions that were essentially on-premise platforms running on tightly prescribed virtualisation environments. A PBX on a VM, mostly.
This statement in Mitel’s blog was something at the time that particularly infuriated me. In my view, Mitel was never a true “cloud solution” in the sense that many of us think were the reasons for moving to “the cloud”.
I protested repeatedly that Mitel’s “UCaaS” offerings were closed, inflexible, expensive and over-complicated systems. This is not how most people would describe cloud and certainly not where many in the industry were heading.
However, Mitel continued to invest heavily in developing and maintaining relationships with execs and the industry media while, in my experience, sweeping aside real concerns from experts that were trying to create customer-first propositions. That kind of “emperor’s new clothes” strategy that the industry media and management golfing fraternity were complicit in appeared to me to use their political power to beat down (and even gaslight) those who knew better. This can only ever be a short-term victory, and now we see what years of blinkered strategy has become.
Back to golf. I rarely played – probably fewer than ten times in my life, and I was terrible at it.
However, I like to think that in our digital age, the golf course is probably not the best place to make strategic business decisions. In fact, I cannot think of a less inclusive place to gain perspectives that can potentially transform your market proposition and business model for a modern audience.
I even wrote about this problem back in 2016 in relation to “Partner Alliance” strategies overriding smart product decisions.
To be clear, I’m not anti-golf. It looks like great fun for those with better hand-eye coordination than me to spend time outside on a weekend, but let’s keep business out of it.
I’m not immune to this tragedy, of course. People will sadly now suffer and, of course, my heart goes out to all those who will be affected by this news.
If I can help anyone, please let me know on LinkedIn.
Tim Meredith
Hi! I'm Tim Meredith, CEO at Fractional Teams. I write about the latest industry insights and give advice on Unified Comms development and growth.
