Mitel’s CEO Don Smith and Paul Butcher, President and COO, opened the conference with comments on the developments of the past year including its successful acquisition and integration of Inter-Tel and the continued momentum of the leading Mitel 3300 IP Communication Platform and Mitel 5000 sales into the EMEA markets.
“This year’s forum was a phenomenal success, our best attended yet. Mitel is number one in the UK market for SME IP Telephony solutions with organizations with less than 100 users and a strong number two in the total market for IP Telephony solutions for organizations of all sizes,” commented Graham Bevington, EMEA VP and managing director, Mitel. “Mitel is clearly the intelligent choice for IP communications solutions. We have a very strong direct relationship with our channels and we are very proud of our joint accomplishments, working proactively as one team to achieve our goals.”
Sir Terry Matthews closed the conference with the Order of Merit awards ceremony, honouring the top channel partners within EMEA. This year the awards recognised not only the highest revenue achievers for the region, but also those showing the highest revenue growth year-on-year, and those with the most innovative vertical solution implementations. Amongst the winners were:
Azzurri Communications (for EMEA channel of the year),
Executel (highest revenue growth achiever),
Actimax (top SME channel),
Midland Communications (best solutions implementation in local government) and Universal (best solutions implementation in the legal sector).
John Massey, managing director, Actimax commented: “Winning this award is very good for our organization because it enables us to use it as sales collateral. We have put a lot of effort into selling Mitel both last year and this year since the merger with Inter-Tel, and we are very pleased to have had this effort recognized.”
“Mitel is one of very few vendors who hold a sales conference where their most senior representatives take three days out to be with the channel, sharing information. It really demonstrates the importance of the channel to Mitel. I was also impressed by the way that business partners are encouraged to give feedback to Mitel and that all feedback is listened to and acted upon,” said Stuart Mico, CEO of Midland Communications.