In this episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast, Interview Series, I’m joined by Martin Bitzinger, Senior Vice President, Product Management for Mitel, who oversees Mitel’s product portfolio and product marketing, including UC platforms, applications, and devices for a conversation about trends in Unified Communications (UC), the many challenges customers face in leveling up their business comms, and a look at what’s ahead for Mitel.
Mitel is an industry stalwart, with a long history, a reputation for a laser focus on innovation, and its deep penetration in enterprise telephony. Our conversation today covered the following:
- Industry trends that we’ve seen emerging over the course of the last couple of years, and specifically some of the trends that Martin and his team at Mitel are leaning into.
- We explored business problems and communication challenges that customers face today in a world of hybrid work and what is often a distributed workforce, and some of the business problems Mitel helps customers solve.
- What the ‘different flavors’ of Unified Communications are and what businesses should be thinking about when they are trying to level up their business comms capabilities.
- Mitel is a well-established company, having been in the market for almost 50 years, serving many customers. We chatted a little about that big customer base and some of the innovative things that Mitel is doing to serve them.
- We also explored verticals and some of the focus that Mitel is doing in the vertical markets and why that’s significant.
- We also discussed the fact that the majority of Mitel’s sales comes through its partner ecosystem and the role that customer lifecycle management plays here, as well as how partners benefit from that partner value prop.
Lastly, I asked Martin to walk me through what’s ahead for 2023 and beyond, and what the roadmap for Mitel’s current and future customers looks like, and why that’s something for our listeners, customers, partners, and the industry as whole to be excited about.
Watch the full conversation here:
Or you can grab the audio here:
If you’ve not yet subscribed to the Futurum Tech Webcast, hit the ‘subscribe’ button while you’re there and you won’t miss an episode.
Disclaimer: The Futurum Tech Webcast is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this webcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors and we do not ask that you treat us as such.
Transcript:
Shelly Kramer: Hello, and welcome to the Futurum Tech Webcast. I’m Shelly Kramer, principal analyst and founding partner here at Futurum Research. And today, I’m excited to have Martin Bitzinger, who is the senior vice president, product management for Mitel. Join me and Martin is responsible for Mitel’s product portfolio and product marketing, including UC platforms, applications and devices. No small job. Mitel, of course, is known for its long history, strong innovation and penetration in enterprise telephony. With that, Martin, welcome. It’s so good to have you.
Martin Bitzinger: Thanks, Shelly. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Shelly Kramer: Absolutely, absolutely. How are things in Germany today?
Martin Bitzinger: Good, but today is actually a really rainy day, but so far, we really can’t complain. We have very nice temperatures all months long and for November, that’s not usual.
Shelly Kramer: Well, we have also had some very nice temperatures, so I’m grateful for every sunny day that we have. Tell me a little bit about where Mitel does its business.
Martin Bitzinger: Yeah. Mitel does its business in what we call unified communications industry. For many of you that may not be so familiar with the exact term, that’s everything that has to do with telephony. That’s kind of the traditional thing where things come from, but then it spills over into all things collaboration, that’s chat. There’s an aspect of video that’s become pervasive, of course, but then there is a lot of stuff that you actually don’t see going on in the background. For example, call centers or contact centers that our customers use. Anytime you phone into a company, there’s lots of technology, software, other things going on, and we basically play in all of that, including manufacturing of devices, desktop phone, cordless phones, et cetera. Whether it’s for general business use or specific verticals like hotels or hospitals, et cetera.
Shelly Kramer: I always think about unified communications as a little bit like your car. You don’t think about your car, generally speaking, other than I want to get in, I want to turn it on, and I want it to work perfectly, right? Unified communications is such an important part of our everyday existence, whether we’re working in an office setting, whether we’re working at a call center, whether we’re working at home, whether we’re calling and needing customer assistance or whatever it is we’re trying to accomplish in our lives from a personal standpoint, consumer standpoint, business standpoint, we’re immersed in the world of unified communications, whether we know it or not and we really just want it to work and be great.
Martin Bitzinger: Yeah, I absolutely agree and it’s something that has really evolved over the past years where traditionally you would’ve thought about telephony as being something very specific, very separate. It’s a thing on your desk and that’s what you use. But that has evolved from there where it’s more software-based today, it’s integrated sometimes. Even when you go on a webpage and they have a chat button or something like that, that is all unified communications, so it comes in many different forms, shapes, flavors. As you say, it’s become pervasive and it’s very, very broad and it’s just evolved from that day. I think that’s also something we’re challenged with is there’s so many players and then there’s of course, the headline players in some of these industry when it comes to video, et cetera, because it’s become a household name, like the Zoom and et cetera. It even became a verb for many people, for many customers, but it’s a lot more and it’s a lot broader and people sometimes don’t appreciate how broad it’s become.
Shelly Kramer: Yeah, it is a huge ecosystem. I’d love to talk a little bit about trends. Obviously given your role within the industry and within the company in general, I would guess you have your finger on the pulse of those trends. What are you seeing emerging this year and what are you leaning into with your team at Mitel?
Martin Bitzinger: Yeah. There’s, of course, a lot of change going on with companies coming out of pandemic mode, getting back to the offices business, returning more to normal. A lot of things have changed and in many ways, we’re back to, in a lot of cases, more looking at what people looked at pre-pandemic. In the pandemic, nobody could leave the house. It’s all about home office, it’s just we’re on a screen and do a video call and that’s all you do. That wasn’t even true back then because contact centers, et cetera, of course, were still around and now, it’s reshaping again.
Martin Bitzinger: What we’re seeing is definitely that the companies, whether it’s a smaller company, their requirements are very, very different from the larger one. For our business, we’re traditionally serving more some of the larger companies and they have very, very different needs so there’s a very big vertical specialization. Then, there’s this whole aspect of how do you want to consume something with the tough economy and people not necessarily wanting to make a big investment upfront. With your car analogy, it’s basically around this, do I want to own something? Do I want to lease a car or do I want to rent a car? There’s different aspects with that and different companies you deal with.
Martin Bitzinger: If you want to rent a car, you basically deal with a rental company, not so much with the car manufacturer and not so much with the people that will be serving or servicing a car. Then, there’s very little you have to do, but the price is higher if you look at it over the lifetime, but you don’t have any strings attached and you can give it back tomorrow if that’s what you choose to do. Leasing contract is different and buying and owning it is yet again different. We see some of that happening when people talk about cloud and cloud providers, everybody thinks about technology first, but in reality, when you scratch the surface a little, cloud as the term, the way it’s being used has gone way beyond that technology piece and really has a lot to do with how people have chosen or are choosing to consume certain services.
Shelly Kramer: Right. I’m thinking through my question. Are you seeing an increased trend toward interest in leasing systems in spite of the fact that it might cost more? Is that 50:50? Where do you fall in terms of your customer base on that front?
Martin Bitzinger: I would say, during COVID, we’ve seen a huge spike in renting something, especially among smaller businesses because they quickly needed something and they had a requirement for getting a video solution, for example, into their business. Renting I would correlate to what we call UCaaS in our industry, US as a Service, where you go with somebody that gives you the end-to-end service, there’s nobody else involved and just go to that company, deal directly with them and they do everything.
Martin Bitzinger: That is something that we’ve seen a huge spike in. We are not doing that per se because we’re a product manufacturer. We have a partnership with a UCaaS player, so with Central, and so we can help our customers if that’s what they choose to do. But to stay with the analogy, we are more in the owning and rent and leasing business and we’ve seen a huge shift towards flexibility there as well, where leasing is becoming a lot more normal and natural, whereas a few years ago, you bought it and you ran it for a number of years.
Shelly Kramer: You owned it forever. Yeah. No, I could see the attractiveness, really, whether it’s at the enterprise level or the mid-size market for a leasing option, because I think consumers today, a variety of factors are at play. One is a pandemic that might affect your choices. I think one of the things that leasing, and that doesn’t mean that buying is not attractive because in many instances, buying is. But I think leasing is kind of a big fat easy button. Maybe I think this is going to be great, but I’m not 100% sure or I just see that that could be incredibly attractive, just like leasing a car is attractive for many reasons. I’m not surprised to see that interest increasing on the part of the customer.
Martin Bitzinger: Yeah, but it’s still very different from renting because-
Shelly Kramer: Oh yeah.
Martin Bitzinger: … of a thing what we would call subscription in our business, where you basically subscribe to a software, but you still have the partner of your choice implementing it, servicing it, dealing in your day-to-day dealing. That’s where the analogy somehow breaks because a UC solution, especially in a larger company, is not as simple as a car. There is a lot more servicing aspect, there is an implementation aspect and our go-to market and going through partners that are local, that know the vertical, in many cases, that our customers are in that are experts. That’s where that place where they can still continue to use and rely on those partners and still get the solution they want in the way they want to consume it and pay for it.
Shelly Kramer: We kind of have started talking about this, but I’d like to dive a little bit deeper into the business problems that your customers have that Mitel works with them to solve.
Martin Bitzinger: The business problems vary of course by industry, by vertical. But generally speaking, what our customers are typically looking for is a communication solution. They have very high demands typically for reliability and control. Some of our customers are, for example, hospitals, police, et cetera so being reachable and being able to communicate is just essential for keeping their business running.
Martin Bitzinger: Then, it’s broader than just telephony. Historically, people would’ve thought about, well, communication is just telephony. At the end of the day, that’s still a very big part because there’s nothing as natural between humans than just to talk to each other because that’s what we do every day and that’s why we think this is probably never going to go away. But there is other forms of communication as well, and that comes through in interactions between customers and companies so the contact center, and that can start with a chat, but can also end up with a phone call for that.
Martin Bitzinger: But then, also what’s more and more important is communication is an inherent part of a workflow. How you organize your work and how you organize what you do on a day-to-day basis. That can come into play in education, in hospitality, for example, in hotel rooms where the communication sometimes is used to coordinate the various different workflows, whether it’s cleaning up a room, vacating a room, making it ready, taking a reservation, et cetera. In the hospital where it’s a lot about nurse called, things alarming, et cetera, that goes way beyond just the voice, but the voice tool or the communication tool becomes the underlying tool that’s used to coordinate the people working in that company.
Shelly Kramer: Right. There are many choices in this market. Why do customers choose Mitel?
Martin Bitzinger: Customers choose Mitel because we are a very well-known brand or player in the industry. We’ve been there for a number of years, really. But it goes beyond that. We have very, very specific solutions for a number of our customers in our key verticals. It’s not just the Mitel solution itself. It’s also the flexibility we enable by combining our solution with some of the other software and environments and the integrations that are there with other pieces of companies, portfolios and our partner landscape that is the expert at implementing that and rolling that out with our customer. But at the end of the day, they have a need for a solution like that. We’re a big player in what we do in that specific part of the UC market and with a track record for reliable communication products.
Shelly Kramer: When you say we have a track record, I think that’s a little bit of an understatement. If memory serves, Mitel is close to 50 years old. That’s a pretty significant track record.
Martin Bitzinger: Yeah. We’re very, very close to our 50th birthday now.
Shelly Kramer: Yeah.
Martin Bitzinger: The company has morphed many times and stayed current with their products, with their technology, and yet we have a significant customer base out there. It’s around 35 million end users out there that are using our products.
Shelly Kramer: No small number.
Martin Bitzinger: Really it’s not a small number and there’s a lot of critical infrastructure and critical customers that rely on our products every day.
Shelly Kramer: Right. We talked a little bit about verticals here in the last few minutes, and I know that Mitel is focusing on certain verticals. Let’s talk a little bit, you talked about hotels and hospitality, you talked about hospitals. Share with us, if you would, some of the vertical focus and how it is that you excel in the vertical game.
Martin Bitzinger: Some of our key verticals, in no particular order, is government, education. Education could be schools, but also universities.
Shelly Kramer: Sure.
Martin Bitzinger: Healthcare, hospitality, financial services and to name a sixth one, it would probably be a retail, especially big-box sale stores. That’s where we typically play. To give a few examples that people can easily relate to. On education, for example, in a school, a lot of it is around emergency calling and emergency notification-type requirements. If something’s going on, there is even laws in place in many countries, specifically also in the US that you have to have a phone in every classroom for obvious reasons. But there’s also things like emergency paging to let everybody know that something’s happening in the school. All of that is connected to the infrastructure there. Plus, of course, being able to make normal phone calls and have normal interactions.
Martin Bitzinger: In healthcare, it goes anywhere from small doctor’s offices where you may want to have a solution to call in and get an announcement and say, “You know what? I will be with you in a second.” Setting up appointments, all the way to large hospitals where everything is integrated with the communication system. The button you press at the side of your bed in case of an emergency then triggers an alarm on a cordless device that a nurse is carrying, for example, that then provides a location where she needs to move to. All of that integrated solution we do in those scenarios.
Martin Bitzinger: Then, hospitality maybe, it’s easy. Everybody sees it, there’s a phone in everybody’s room, but then there’s little things. If you call the front desk and maybe if you’ve stayed at a better hotel, they address you by name. It’s not that they still remember you from check-in.
Shelly Kramer: Absolutely.
Martin Bitzinger: There is a solution behind that that makes all that happen. Also, typically being used for once the house cleaning went through the room, they just press a button on that phone and that marks the room as clean. Things like that. All of that is part of the solution, including my favorite example is always the cruise ship industry because our equipment is on more than two thirds of the entire global cruise ship fleet.
Shelly Kramer: This I did not know. That’s impressive.
Martin Bitzinger: It’s being used there in a very similar way to a hotel, of course.
Shelly Kramer: Oh wow. That’s awesome. Confession. I’ve never been on a cruise. That’s not really my jam. Okay. It is mid-November. 2023 is around the corner, believe it or not. I would love to know what you have on the roadmap for Mitel’s current and future customers that I hope will excite them. I know it’ll excite them. Let us in on the secrets.
Martin Bitzinger: Just to really briefly to highlight a few things. We’ve been working on making our products easier and more cost effective in terms of deployment. Traditionally, you needed a lot of hardware. That’s very traditional. That’s probably evolved over the past decade already to virtualization and these days, we’re really strongly working on making all of that easily deployable in public cloud environments such as AWS, Microsoft Azure. Really provide flexibility any way you want to deploy and bring the cost down for our customers to run all these different solutions.
Shelly Kramer: That’s awesome. Today, of course, incredibly attractive as everybody’s looking to, in a challenging economy, regardless of where you are in the world, I think that’s a good part of the value proposition, attractive part of the value prop.
Martin Bitzinger: Yeah, it’s very attractive for them, and what makes it specifically attractive is that we don’t force them down any particular path. It’s up to them because there’s still customers that want to have all the equipment in their basement because they need to be self-sufficient. Typical example, we talked about hospitals before. Large hospitals need to have that all in their basement with their own generator so that even if everything else fails, they’re still operational.
Martin Bitzinger: The other one I want to highlight would be vertical programs around some of our main verticals. We’re doing a lot to go deeper in terms of application integration. In our key verticals, we specifically focus on some of the ones I’ve already mentioned. We’re also building out smart applications that enhance our position and leverage the data we’re collecting and making that more easier for our customers to access and use that data with some of our vital insights, [inaudible 00:21:54] programs that we’ve talked about and continued collaboration enhancements, so the application angle is really, really big for us, but it’s not so much just the front end that the normal end user is using. It’s more providing and enhancing the applications to provide more overall business value for our customers as a whole.
Martin Bitzinger: Then, the fourth one is really modernizing the tools and capabilities that our customers have had and making it easier to configure, maintain, and also change certain things. That goes into the same direction as the first one I highlighted, this flexibility and ease of change, move that changes, et cetera, just to be more adaptive and make it easier for our customers to be agile.
Shelly Kramer: I think those are incredibly important across every business landscape today. I mean, ease of use, flexibility, adaptability, interoperability. All of those things are what customers are looking for, I think, and the vendor partners that they choose to work with and the technology solutions they opt to integrate into their businesses, I think, those are really important things to highlight, so good work.
Martin Bitzinger: Yeah, absolutely.
Shelly Kramer: Now I’d like to talk a little bit about your partner ecosystem. I know that the majority of Mitel sales comes through partners. Walk me through, if you would, why customers should get excited about CLM? Does this make it easier for them to sell Mitel? Do they make more money? Describe for me what that’s all about.
Martin Bitzinger: Yeah. The whole partner ecosystem in the UC industry in general is something that has grown over many, many years and a lot of those partners are not just helping our customers with their UC-specific solutions. Basically they’re trusted partner for many, many IT requirements, whether that’s working or other things, specific applications. UC is a strong part of that.
Martin Bitzinger: Now, the IT industry as a whole has really involved and that partner landscape for us is a real asset because they have those valuable customer relationships and the customers trust the respective partners and our partners, hopefully, trust us and that makes this a very, very fruitful long-term relationship. This is where this whole CLM or customer lifecycle management aspect comes in because historically, while we’ve taken good care of our partners, we’ve not been very good at having discussions that go all the way down to specific customers. With the evolution of systems and data, how you can track all that, how you can capture all that, cloud systems where you get more insights about the end customer itself, who the end customer is, how much they’re using certain things, we can have much better, much deeper discussions together with our partners, how we can jointly better serve those end customers. Very, very specific discussions that was not possible to the same extent even a few years ago.
Martin Bitzinger: This is why this is very, very relevant, because it’s very relevant in terms of keeping the customer relationship alive and making sure we’re all still relevant and see value from that relationship, but also having a discussion is how can we do even more and how can we help those customers even more? That’s a bit of a new angle. It’s much, much more difficult to do that through this end customer partner vendor-type relationship. It would be a lot easier. In consumer-type companies, that’s been a lot more normal to have that CLM, and we’re trying to operationalize that through our go-to market as well and we see a huge potential in that.
Shelly Kramer: There are a lot of opportunities for partners. Yeah.
Martin Bitzinger: There’s a lot of opportunities for partners, there’s a lot of opportunity for us definitely in the market. There’s a lot of things that customers need that they’re not necessarily getting today.
Shelly Kramer: Well, there’s lots to do then. That’s exciting. As we wrap this conversation, what can our listeners, our customers, our partners, industry influencers, what can we look forward to from Mitel?
Martin Bitzinger: That’s a good question. We are really very focused on growth. When I talk about growth, I’m specifically talking about growing our customer base. We want to do that with our compelling ecosystem of solutions with our partners, extensive network of channel partners. We have just a relentless focus on executing that strategy.
Martin Bitzinger: There’s a lot more to come from us. We really want to drive that organic growth, which hasn’t necessarily been there in some of the segments of the UC industry just because there’s so many different ways of doing certain things that things moved around a lot in the UC industry. But we believe that we can accomplish that with a laser focus on those specific verticals and really focusing on that part of a huge market and just executing well in that part of the market instead of trying to spread ourselves too thin in a very broad market. I think that’s something probably a little different from what we’ve tried previously, but that’s what we want to do and I really encourage the listeners to watch the Mitel 2023 announcements that we have coming around those areas because that’s where we’re going to explain how exactly we’re going to go about doing this.
Shelly Kramer: Well, that’s very exciting. I will be watching, for sure. It sounds like there are great things ahead. Martin, thank you so much for spending time with me today and sharing more about the Mitel story and what we can look forward to in the coming year, and lots of exciting stuff.
Martin Bitzinger: Thanks so much, Shelly.
Shelly Kramer: All right. Well, we’ll talk again soon, I’m sure. Thank you very much.
Author Information
Shelly Kramer is a Principal Analyst and Founding Partner at Futurum Research. A serial entrepreneur with a technology centric focus, she has worked alongside some of the world’s largest brands to embrace disruption and spur innovation, understand and address the realities of the connected customer, and help navigate the process of digital transformation. She brings 20 years' experience as a brand strategist to her work at Futurum, and has deep experience helping global companies with marketing challenges, GTM strategies, messaging development, and driving strategy and digital transformation for B2B brands across multiple verticals. Shelly's coverage areas include Collaboration/CX/SaaS, platforms, ESG, and Cybersecurity, as well as topics and trends related to the Future of Work, the transformation of the workplace and how people and technology are driving that transformation. A transplanted New Yorker, she has learned to love life in the Midwest, and has firsthand experience that some of the most innovative minds and most successful companies in the world also happen to live in “flyover country.”
