[July 01, 2009] Mitel: undersells its Dynamic Extension solution Tweet Jul 01, 2009 (Datamonitor via COMTEX) -- Canadian telecoms player Mitel has launched Dynamic Extension, a robust call control capability for mobile employees. While the company has been positioning the solution as a way to reduce cellular toll charges, it has neglected to pitch the solution's promise of enhancing communication-enabled business processes (CEBP) through innovative twinning technology. At its annual meeting of business partners in Las Vegas in June, Mitel held a smaller set of sessions aimed at industry analysts. Although those sessions covered a lot of ground, one recently announced product, Mitel Dynamic Extension, seemed surprisingly underserved by the Mitel pitch. Company executives went to a lot of effort to show off the product and its ability to reduce costs, but the potentially valuable connections to many of Mitel's other applications seemed to go unremarked upon. This could simply be an oversight caused by the company having too much information to cram into a crowded program, but it seems more probable that Mitel has decided to wait a while to emphasize the ways in which Dynamic Extension can help foster new ideas of business process automation. Of late, Mitel has been focusing much of its product development and marketing on communications applications, and has shifted much of its attention to modern unified communications (UC) and enterprise applications such as collaboration, messaging, mobility and contact centers. By moving down the call control path and essentially cleaving the software from its hardware, Mitel now has a feature server offering. This allows it to provide customers with a software-based telephony environment and allows for better traction in heterogeneous switch environments. Mitel calls Dynamic Extension a license-activated call control capability for mobile employees. The application allows users to make or receive calls to or from up to eight devices, whether those devices are attached to a Mitel switch or not. Mitel dubs this a Personal Ring Group. The user can define these Personal Ring Groups to include up to eight devices. To an outside caller, the Personal Ring Group will seem to be the user's office extension, but the user can initiate private branch exchange (PBX)-like features, including call transfer and teleconferencing, from any of the devices in the Personal Ring Group. By supporting a ring of up to eight devices, Dynamic Extension goes further than many other mobile twinning options from Mitel's competitors, solutions that often only support a single twinned device and may not come with an included handoff mechanism. More basic twinning allows users to link their desk/office phone with another phone, usually a wireless handset or a cell phone, so when the desk phone rings, the twinned phone also simultaneously rings. Dynamic Extension allows a worker to have essentially a single number wherever they are and, more importantly, it allows workers to be more easily accessible to customers and co-workers. The application also works well with Mitel's strength in the small and medium size enterprise (SME) market. Because it is license activated, needing no additional software or hardware, it is an easier to administer solution than most twinning solutions, which clearly increases its appeal to smaller, resource-strapped companies. The solution can play an integral part in the CEBP initiatives of Mitel's customers. CEBP attempts to reduce human latency by embedding communications in enterprise business processes, while Dynamic Extension makes mobile workers much more accessible. The two go perfectly hand-in-hand. A CEBP-like process that triggers a phone call to an employee can be greatly improved if the pool of available and appropriate employees is expanded and that is what Dynamic Extension allows. Due to the current economic climate, Mitel's focus on lowered costs is certainly understandable, but the company's new technology seems to have other benefits on which it can shine a spotlight. Datamonitor believes that the CEBP and contact center benefits would make a great sales pitch for Mitel in the medium and long-term, and hopes to see Dynamic Extension marketed down those paths shortly after its official release. Ian Jacobs http://www.datamonitor.com Republication or redistribution, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without prior written consent. Datamonitor shall not be liable for errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]