Sprint and Mitel Agreement Broadens Cloud Wholesale Services
Sprint and Mitel Agreement Broadens Cloud Wholesale Services by UCStrategies Staff
Both Sprint and Mitel have made an agreement in which Sprint will include Mitel’s hosted PBX solutions in its wider Cloud Wholesale Services portfolio.
Channel partners of Sprint can now resell Mitel’s cloud-based voice and UC solutions, especially in the SMB space, and Mitel and Sprint mentioned that demand is very high at the moment for inexpensive and hosted voice, UC and collaboration solutions.
The president of Sprint Emerging Solutions and Global Wholesale, Matt Carter, said: “Organizations worldwide are turning to cloud services that support their business requirements in a timely and cost-efficient manner. This agreement with Mitel augments our Wholesale Cloud Services offer with the industry's leading unified communications solution ... [and] ensures we continue to enable our resellers with easy-to-use, affordable and high-performance cloud solutions that they can quickly take to market without the expense and hassle of having to create their own services.”
The president of Mitel’s CLEC arm NetSolutions, Jon Brinton, said that Mitel and its channel will be able to provide some of the non-Mitel Software-as-a-Service solutions available in Sprint’s Cloud Wholesale portfolio.
Mitel and Sprint have had a similar sort of partnership for some time, but the new deal will expand that partnership and allow Mitel and its partners to deploy their cloud offerings alongside applications outside of the UC space.
Brinton said: “We offer Sprint services today through our Mitel [NetSolutions] division, and now we are adding some more components that are within the Sprint Wholesale Cloud portfolio that we can offer through our channel or to our end users. So when you have clients that want some additional application – whether it's storage, security or other cloud-based software components that are outside of [Mitel's] normal market space – it gives us an easy way to have that application attachment for those clients.”
This month, the Wholesale and Emerging Solutions business unit of Sprint will announce the cloud services portfolio; there is a variety of cloud-based services in the suite, of which Web hosting, Web security and online backup are a part.
The Mitel-Sprint agreement demonstrates another recent move between UC vendors and service providers in order to transfer their solutions to the cloud. For example, Cisco has signed on 40 partners, of which the distributor Ingram Micro is one; it provides its Hosted Collaboration Solutions (HCS) platform. Avaya has also recently stated that Verizon will begin to carry its new UC- and video-as-a-service solutions. (CY) Link