Telstra offer Mitel unified comms under VMware

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 26 October 2010 09:53

Business IT - Networking

Telstra has expanded its portfolio of unified communications software from Mitel to include Mitel Virtual Solutions, which enable Mitel's UC products to run in a virtualised environment under VMware.

According to Mitel, this will enable businesses to leverage their investment in virtualisation to help reduce maintenance costs, reduce power consumption, and decrease provisioning, installation, and application management overhead.

Mitel's Virtual Solutions use VMware vSphere 4 to enable businesses to consolidate Mitel voice and unified communications applications alongside non-voice business applications on servers running VMware virtualisation.

According to Mitel Telstra can offer customers a range of deployment options depending on the needs of the business. "Customers can choose to purchase and deploy as an on-site premise solution, in the customer's data centre, or another outsourced data centre.

Telstra's director of unified communications, Boris Corluka, said: "Our customers are constantly looking for ways to consolidate their data centres. With the Mitel Virtual Solutions our customers are able to utilise the latest unified communications applications through a virtualised service that is driving ICT cost savings for their organisations."

In July Mitel announced an expansion to its longstanding relationship with Telstra, appointing Telstra as its first premiere solution provider in Australia. This enabled Telstra to bundle Mitel's unified communications offerings to customers via both direct and indirect channel options. Mitel's previous relationship with Telstra was established in 2006 and under it Telstra offered Mitel's voice products including the Mitel 3300 IP Communications Platform (ICP) IP PBX and its complementary suite of applications.

Mitel and Telstra have named IMB Building Society as a customer that has deployed Virtual Mitel Communications Director (Virtual MCD) and Virtual Mitel Applications Suite (Virtual MAS) and they quote IMB's IT infrastructure services manager, Alby Salido, saying: "We have made a significant investment in VMware, and the more applications we can run on this infrastructure, the better the result for our business. Mitel Virtual Solutions help us take our infrastructure strategy to the next level and with support of VMware data centre management tools, allow us to increase the resiliency of our business-critical communications solutions.

"The solution provided by Mitel and Telstra works in conjunction with our existing business continuity plan with the aim to reduce costs, consolidate maintenance, and minimise complexity for all applications in our data centre."