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Executive Summary

Cloud-computing opens up significant opportunities for delivering a feature-rich unified communications (UC) experience. With decades of experience in telephony, Mitel provides UC suitable for all business needs.

Mitel has recently declared MiCloud Connect one of its two “go forward” cloud platforms. MiCloud Connect is focused on the needs of the small and medium business (SMB) market.

Mitel Networks Corp. commissioned Tolly to analyze the feature set of its Mitel MiCloud Connect solution along with comparable solutions from 8x8, Inc. and RingCentral using product documentation.

In all the key areas analyzed, the Mitel MiCloud solution is comparable to or exceeds the offerings from 8x8 and RingCentral. See Table 1 for an “At A Glance” comparison.

Call Management

The Mitel solution provides the same key call management functions as 8x8 and RingCentral and that one would expect in an business-class system. Mitel’s options include: flexible call recording options, voice mail along with feature-rich call transfer, join, forward, park and various call pickup options.

Collaboration

From presence to multi-point video conferencing, to scheduled and ad-hoc conferencing and webinars - Mitel has it all. Mitel offers comparable audio/video conferencing functionality to 8x8 and RingCentral. Where Mitel and 8x8 support up to 25 users in audio conferencing, RingCentral Standard is limited to 4 simultaneous users.

The Mitel Teamwork collaboration application provides workspaces, file sharing, messaging, integrated conference calling and task list functionality to enhance team-based projects.

Contact Center

Mitel, 8x8 and RingCentral each offer contact center as a service (CCaaS) solutions as options in their communications suites. Mitel’s and 8x8’s CCaaS solutions are comparably priced while RingCentral’s – an OEM from NICE inContact – is significantly more expensive (2x) for like functionality.

Desk Phone Capability

Like 8x8 and RingCentral, Mitel supports industry-standard SIP VoIP conference and wireless phones and accessories from vendors such as Polycom, Ascom, Spectralink and others. Unlike 8x8 and RingCentral, Mitel also designs and manufactures its own phones offering five different models, from basic through an executive color-screen model. Mitel also provides a soft phone desktop PC/Mac OS X application - as do 8x8 and RingCentral.

Integrations

Mitel MiCloud integrates with major as well as niche CRM, email and other vertical apps. Mitel supports Salesforce, Zendesk, Desk.com, Google G Suite, Microsoft Dynamics and NetSuite among other apps. Mitel also currently provides integration with Microsoft Outlook. RingCentral significantly limits available integrations with its Standard plan potentially forcing upgrades to more expensive plans.

Cost

While the three vendors do not have identical pricing approaches and models, a basic comparison shows that only the Mitel and 8x8 solutions provide unlimited minutes. Mitel charges $37.99 for the Premier plan and 8x8 charges $35 per user for its X5 plan. While RingCentral charges $24.99 for its Standard plan, that includes only 1,000 minutes of usage. Prices exclude contact center functionality and exclude desk phones. Given Mitel is the only vendor that manufactures phones, it is expected that Mitel provides favorable pricing for packages inclusive of phone rental.

Data Center Infrastructure

Like RingCentral, Mitel maintains two data centers in the US separated by 1,000 miles.  8x8 maintains three US data centers. Globally, Mitel maintains 4 data centers to support Connect. 8x8 has 15 data centers in 9 countries. RingCentral does not publicly document its global data center footprint.

Of the three, Mitel is the only one that claims ANSI/TIA 942 “Rated-4” status (the highest possible) for its US data centers. To achieve this rating requires fault tolerant site infrastructure with expected site availability of 99.995%. With Mitel, there is full redundancy - power, cooling, storage, network connections, etc.