Two months ago Mitel's Managing Director for EMEA, Graham Bevington, oversaw a management restructure that saw long-time channel player Enda Kenneally leave the firm. With a tighter hands-on grip of Mitel's channel strategy, Bevington revealed to Adam Oxford his plans for future growth and development.

Following a summer of slow sales and market consolidation, the UK telecommunications channel is rapidly changing and will continue to do so, and the challenge now, believes Bevington, is for vendors to keep pace and develop models to suit the channel's emerging requirements. Bevington is also keen to press home the message that despite the internal restructure, there's no shift in direction from Mitel. "The channel is changing very quickly and we are responding to those changes, but the basic strategy is unchanged," he confirmed. "We still have a channel-centric route to market. Our focus is on transitioning products from hardware to software solutions that run on industry standard platforms, providing customers with flexibility and choice to meet the needs of the converged infrastructure."

Mitel's latest channel initiative, Series X, is an incentive package around Unified Communicator Advanced, rewarding partners with cashback for sales of the Mitel Series X Unified Communicator suite, and includes a 60 per cent discount promotion for a basic server and five licence package. "One the advantages of our current line-up is that the SME and enterprise offerings are the same in terms of what they offer," commented Bevington. "There's no difference from a channel perspective, so its easy for resellers to move between the two. It's an opportunity all the way."

One area that Mitel is keen to push, says Bevington, is the benefits of server virtualisation. Regarded by many vendors as difficult to achieve without compromising call quality, he believes that Mitel's partnerships with top IT firms like Sun have helped it to tackle the inherent problems of virtualising communications systems.

The Sun Ray, for example, is an ultra-thin client system which delivers converged voice and data to a virtualised desktop using the Mitel 3300 backend. "Our relationship with Sun has opened our eyes to a different world, a different way of doing things," explains Bevington. "Mitel has virtualised voice with VMWare. At November's Comms Solutions event in Gleneagles we'll be talking about our upcoming partnership and developments with VMWare and the move to virtualisation for our server products and what that means from a channel perspective. We're living in a virtualised world, and the IT director now needs to have a virtualisation strategy to deal with that, one that includes voice as an application on the network. I've been surprised at how quickly the market for virtualised telecoms has taken off. It's lucky for us, because we've had applications ready for some time now."
With the overall comms market down around 25 per cent year-on-year, Bevington is happy with Mitel's performance to date. "Flat is the new growth," he jokes. "Although we are seeing some big projects starting up again and the SME side of things is growing."

Although businesses are still cautious about spending, cost efficiencies aren't the only consideration IT directors are basing purchasing decisions on. Green technologies are very much back on the table, Bevington believes, as companies realise that the two goals are complimentary. "Green is back on the agenda for most customers and end users, but enterprises really aren't prepared for the changes in the law that are coming through regarding carbon auditing, and there's an opportunity there for resellers to demonstrate the benefits of unified communications."

One area that he's keen to focus debate is on low cost, low bandwidth, high definition videoconferencing, as addressed by the Mitel Telecollaboration solution. "We can deliver HD quality video at a fifth of the bandwidth of our competitors," says Bevington. "And I think that's going to be very important in the future."

With the internal restructure complete, a new product range launched, and questions still to be answered about the future of competition from Nortel, it would be fair to expect Bevington to be looking at the current Mitel structure as a fait accompli, but as long as the channel keeps evolving, he'll continue to evaluate the best strategy to suit it. "There's more change coming to the channel environment, and that does mean we'll be looking at new ways to respond to its needs. But at the moment it's very much business as usual," concluded Bevington.