Back in November, Mitel announced a partnership with Ringcentral. Under this agreement, the telecom provider would retain all of its standard on-premises offerings while offloading UCaaS functionality to Ringcentral. Sounds like a pretty good call, right?
Maybe. Maybe not.
The truth is that Mitel has been going downhill for quite some time now — and that’s something even the best strategic partnership won’t fix.
Here’s what we know: it’s time to drop them for someone better. Read on to learn the five very good reasons why it’s time to dump Mitel for good.
#1: They’re Stuck in the Past
Arguably the most crippling problem with Mitel is the fact that its products feel like relics of a bygone age. First, unless you’re willing to go to the extreme up-front, their solutions lack many of the out-of-the-box features that are essentially table stakes in modern communications platforms. Far more egregious than this, however, is the interface.
Clunky and woefully outdated, it tends to make even the simplest tasks feel like cumbersome exercises in frustration.
#2: A Lack of Flexibility
We live in a world defined by flexible, distributed work. People no longer want to be chained to their desk or anchored to a physical office. They want to work from anywhere and at any time.
And if your business doesn’t allow them to do precisely that, there’s a good chance they’ll leave. Don’t just take our word for it, though. Let the numbers speak for themselves.
- 39% of US adults would consider quitting their job if their employer was inflexible about remote work. That figure increases to 54% worldwide.
- Another survey found that 58% of workers would “absolutely” look for a new job if they weren’t allowed to keep working remotely at their current one.
- 90% of people want at least some flexibility in where and when they work.
- From February 2020 to August 2021, searches for remote work increased by 500%.
Basically you need to support distributed work, and that starts with ensuring you have the proper infrastructure in place to do so. And while it’s true that Mitel does provide remote work solutions, that’s not necessarily their specialty. Their focus is much more geared towards business phone systems.
And they’re going all-in on that focus for the foreseeable future.
#3: An Uncertain Future
The majority of Mitel’s cloud-focused offerings will reach end of sale in June 2022. Although the company will continue to honor existing licenses and commitments, it’s effectively abandoning the entire MiCloud line in favor of pushing people to RingCentral. They haven’t announced end-of-life for any of these products yet, but it would be naive to think that won’t be coming in the near future.
And even in the near-term, all research, development, and updates for the MiCloud line has ceased while the company downsizes, even laying off executive leadership associated with MiCloud.
#4: High Cost, Poor Functionality
Mitel has a well-earned reputation for being prohibitively expensive. That’s not even accounting for the fact that if you decide to use an on-premises solution of theirs, you’re looking at costly, complicated, and difficult to maintain hardware. Worse still, as many reviewers have pointed out, Mitel’s contracts tend to be quite unfair — and you don’t even get what you pay for from them, either.
Instead, you end up saddled with a phone system with frequent dropped calls, malfunctioning units, and terrible call quality. Making matters worse is the fact that concurrent with the June 2022 end-of-sale darefor MiCloud, Mitel intends to push a significant price hike onto users of the platform. This is likely an attempt to push users into adopting RingCentral’s solutions in lieu of Mitel’s, but that doesn’t make the tactic any less scummy.
Speaking of RingCentral…
#5: Too Many Vendors
There’s an old adage that we believe is very applicable here. Too many cooks spoil the broth. That can be very readily applied to a business’s vendors. The more vendors you have, the more complicated it becomes to navigate through multiple contracts, licenses, and integrations.
Having too many vendors with too many different solutions is not only a usability issue, but also a security risk. The more moving parts there are in a system, the easier it is for someone to crack that system. That’s the biggest issue with the strategic partnership between RingCentral and Mitel.
It may seem like a savvy move on the surface, but do you really want to introduce yet another vendor to the list?
Choose A Better Provider. Choose G12 Communications
Like Mitel, we have several decades of B2B telecommunications experience.
The main difference is that unlike Mitel, we’ve made the necessary effort to evolve with the times. Our experience is a foundation for our expertise — a tool we use to understand your business’s communications needs and deliver a purpose-built, all-in-one solution.
All without shady contracts, unreasonable pricing or dropped calls.
Book a meeting today and see what it’s like to work with a cloud communications provider that offers world-class solutions and support.
