Mitel Offers Hosted UC With AnyWare IaaS

Mitel is unveiling an offering that will enable businesses to deploy a virtualised unified communications service in a private or hybrid cloud setting that is hosted by Mitel’s service provider division, Mitel NetSolutions.

Mitel’s AnyWare IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) will let IT departments host Mitel’s virtualised unified communications and collaboration (UCC) software in a virtual private data centre that offers a secure setting but doesn’t force the customer to use up its own limited data centre space or resources, or have to pay capital or operating expenses for equipment or power.

Freedom Architecture

The cornerstone of the AnyWare IaaS offering is Mitel’s Freedom Architecture, a software-based UC solution introduced in 2010 that offers an array of communications options via the cloud to businesses who want an integrated UC solution that includes voice and video. Also two years ago, Mitel introduced AnyWare, a public cloud-based UC service.

AnyWare IaaS now gives businesses the option of deploying Mitel’s UC solution in a private cloud environment that doesn’t sap their own resources.

“A lot of enterprises are in interested in the cloud, but are not ready for it or a public cloud, or doesn’t want to use a public cloud yet,” Jon Brinton, president of Mitel NetSolutions, told eWEEK in an interview.

With AnyWare IaaS, businesses now have a VMware-ready private cloud solution that is hosted by Mitel NetSolutions, Brinton said.

Mitel officials demonstrated the cloud unified communications (UC) solution at the Interop 2012 show in Las Vegas this week.

UC vendors big and small are aggressively pursuing strategies for getting their solutions into public, private and hybrid clouds. For example, in late March, Avaya officials unveiled their Avaya Collaborative Cloud Framework, an initiative to let enterprises, service providers and others build and use Avaya-based collaboration solutions in public, private and hybrid clouds.

Streamlining operations

For Mitel, AnyWare IaaS is a way to enable businesses to deploy virtualised voice, UC and collaboration solutions in a cloud-based way that lets them streamline operations and reduce infrastructure costs. By letting Mitel NetSolutions host the virtualised environment, IT departments can focus on their core competencies rather than having to worry about their UC deployments and Quality of Service requirements, Brinton said.

In addition, companies can run AnyWare IaaS in a hybrid cloud fashion, with an on-premise deployment at the main office and UC capabilities at remote offices in a private cloud hosted by Mitel NetSolutions, with both the on-premise and private cloud solutions working together, he said.

The SAS70-certified solution is available to businesses immediately through Mitel resellers, who will sell subscriptions to AnyWare IaaS along with the various UC licences and hardware available from the vendor.

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