Pioneering connectivity for the mission-critical industries of tomorrow, Mitel’s vast portfolio of cutting-edge software platforms streamlines government and enterprises into a new age of workflow management. Terence Tutaan, Head of Region – Australia, New Zealand, and South Pacific, details the company’s expertise in business telephony.
POWERING THE WORLD’S CONNECTIONS
Originally known as private automatic branch exchange (PABX) in the 1970s, the business telephony industry has greatly evolved, still underpinning the foundational need for stable and reliable communications of the enterprise space whilst adapting and modernising to new technology paradigms.
Integral to the smooth running of organisations across the world, this specialised sector of the ICT industry has historically catered to a vast customer base, ranging from the small independent business market to the government and big enterprise sector with thousands of users.
In the South Pacific, many of these public and private organisations operate Mitel systems as part of their critical infrastructure. From major hospitals, defence, and various branches of the emergency services to blue-chip companies and heavy industry, Mitel has been consistently used for mission-critical needs for decades and continues to evolve in the age of cloud and artificial intelligence (AI).
Continually ensuring the strength of its reputation, the company’s state-of-the-art unified communications (UC) technology and contact centre platforms are integral to streamlining enterprise and government bodies across the world.
“Since the 1970s, our industry was the core of business communications for every enterprise – large and small.
“Today, technology and market trends see the ubiquity of the mobile phone and tenanted internet telephony as the go-to for small business, but large business needs can be very different,” introduces Terence Tutaan, Head of Region – Australia, New Zealand, and South Pacific.
Indeed, as cloud-based telephony has become more prevalent, witnessed through the rise of platforms such as Microsoft Teams, it has been a disruptive force in the telecommunications (telecoms) industry, similar to many other sectors in this digital age.
Small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) now gravitate to such software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms, but larger organisations still have their own unique requirements.
THE CENTRE OF CRITICAL CONNECTIVITY
Within this context, many pre-existing manufacturers in the business telephony space have been absorbed by bigger industry players including Mitel, which has spent the past few decades acquiring smaller entities.
Through the company’s delivery of hybrid mission-critical telephony infrastructure, it has been able to withstand a changing industry landscape in which cloud-only telephony has become far more prevalent in the SME market.
“In Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) in particular, when other cloud-based telephony companies began to emerge in 2018, this major tech disruption trend common in so many industries (such as taxis versus ride sharing) seemed destined to similarly impact Mitel,” Tutaan recalls.
Nevertheless, it soon became apparent that a lot of hospitals, government departments, and major hotel brands could not solely rely on an internet-delivered telephony service that was dependent on network availability, as it was more likely to go off air due to network and power outages.
“This would be particularly detrimental for critical areas within large enterprises, government, and emergency services agencies. Whilst internet telephony is here to stay, for whole organisations – or at least the areas within them where downtime and outages are severely disruptive, brand damaging, or even life threatening – Mitel’s fully redundant design sets it apart.
“The realisation that these organisations actually needed our style of business communications again was a lightbulb moment and really made a difference to companies like Mitel, who are once more the platform of choice in the bigger end of town,” he adds.
The company has since witnessed a significant rise in the number of large tenders and government and enterprise opportunities, experiencing more growth in the past 12 months than it has in the previous three years.
As such, although this sector represents a smaller number of businesses compared to the SME market, the dominance of frontline workers needing always-on and dependable communications services in this sizeable (by employee) government and enterprise space means Mitel is strongly relevant in these lucrative market segments.
BUILDING ON INNOVATIVE FOUNDATIONS
In ANZ and the South Pacific, Mitel predominantly focuses on five key verticals across the government and enterprise landscape – healthcare, education, hospitality, emergency services, and heavy industry – whose increasing complexities play to the company’s strengths.
The needs of these customers for whom communications is mission-critical – whether in security, compliance, data sovereignty, or high connectivity uptime – continually drive the business’ growth.
Mitel is ideally positioned to produce foundational platform software and deployment architecture that creates an unparalleled dependable business telephony network in its UC and contact centre products.
At the core of the company’s technology is five-nine’s availability – a percentage metric of system reliability that is considerably higher than that of mobile and internet phone networks. (continued on page 8)
“This means that our systems are designed to minimise downtime to mere minutes as opposed to many hours per year – as it is with other technologies. Hours-long downtime can mean significant reputational damage or even life-threatening situations,” Tutaan emphasises.
Mitel’s comprehensive offerings are the result of an extensive history of innovation that has set it apart as the longest serving in the business telephony sector.
Founded in Ontario, Canada in 1973, Mitel has long been a pioneer in its industry with many world-first achievements and, to this day, continues to deliver new ideas and enhancements to its niche markets.
“We now have over 2,100 patents, so we pride ourselves on our history of innovation and leading the industry,” he smiles.
Although Mitel is officially Canadian-owned, it has amassed a vast geographical footprint due to a plethora of noteworthy acquisitions, including that of Unify in September 2023. A previous division of Siemens, the acquisition provided Mitel with a trusted base in Europe, as well as the Middle East, Asia, and the Pacific.
Nine years earlier, the company also absorbed Aastra Technologies Ltd., which had a pre-existing legacy in Ericsson Enterprise products, unlocking another strong global enterprise market footprint.
“These acquisitions have brought us a really strong presence and the most tried and true UC platforms in the world, along with a very loyal customer base, who move with us in technology cycles,” Tutaan prides.
THE BEATING HEART OF HOSPITAL COMMUNICATIONS
The COVID-19 pandemic was a particularly pertinent event for technology transformation, particularly in the healthcare space, where many organisations utilised emerging cloud-based communication technologies at a point when there was great pressure on the industry.
“These platforms are great for knowledge workers, but there are two to three times more frontline workers than there are knowledge workers in the world.
“That’s where we fit really strongly – actually servicing the frontline workers with our solutions and unifying with knowledge workers via our integration platforms,” Tutaan explains.
Looking at the nursing crisis in particular, the COVID-19 pandemic proved how stretched for time many health workers are due to an overabundance of responsibilities, leaving them with little time to answer phone calls.
Through the integration of Mitel’s software with hospitals’ patient records, nurses and front desk staff can save precious time by reducing call handling time per call, allowing them to focus more on patient care.
The combined technologies, assisted by modern application programming interfaces (APIs), now make this possible.
As such, when taking a call, nurses can quickly access vital pieces of information applicable to that specific patient, or alternatively divert the call to the appropriate specialist, department, or room, thus shaving off critical minutes and seconds per call.
“Multiply that by hundreds of calls, it gives back hours to nurses in a single ward, and there are huge productivity gains. It also has a positive impact on nurses’ well-being, which could minimise time off for work stress.
“Therefore, by utilising Mitel’s technology, our applications and modern workflow designs are offering major benefits across the healthcare market,” acclaims Tutaan.
“That’s where we fit really strongly – actually servicing the frontline workers with our solutions and unifying with knowledge workers via our integration platforms”
Terence Tutaan, Head of Region – Australia, New Zealand, and South Pacific, Mitel
VIRTUAL INTEGRATIONS
Mitel works closely with its healthcare-managed service partners to deploy cutting-edge technology through myriad platforms.
A noteworthy example is the company’s patient bedside infotainment systems, the HiMed Cockpits, which are exclusively supplied to the local market from its strategic partner Siemens and implemented in many hospitals across ANZ.
“Patients can watch Netflix, browse YouTube, and place an order for food and drink all on one screen. Doctors can also access vitals, records, and other pieces of important information on the same platform, allowing them to have conversations with patients there and then,” Tutaan explains.
“Our integration specialist partners have combined the patient and clinician experience by linking and sharing information between the HiMed system and the hospital’s electronic medical record (EMR) and nurse call systems.”
Complementing its UC and contact centres for its clients, Mitel is also harnessing the innovation of other leading-edge software innovators.
“When different repositories of critical data, frontline portal tools, and interfaces can all share the same information, it significantly speeds up response times for a vast range of systems,” he elaborates.
Mitel has a long history of partnership and collaboration with its ecosystem of specialist software partners. These leading-edge innovators provide genuine incremental gains to the needs of critical industries.
The Mitel Technology Network (MTN) is an alliance of highly complementary companies that combine with the core Mitel telecoms technology to deliver a far more integrated and expanded experience to staff and customers of client organisations.
“Imagine technology software per industry – whether it be enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), workforce management, or EMR and practice management systems in healthcare – that expands the benefit from these tools and applications by interconnecting them with the Mitel communications tools.
“This adds more value for the end user by making daily tasks – such as accessing critical information from traditionally disparate portals and tools – much simpler and faster,” Tutaan points out.
HYBRID CLOUD STRATEGY
A decade ago, early notations of the industry dictated that organisations should follow the global trend and move all of their many tools and applications into public shared data centres.
Today, however, thanks to real-world experience with cyber threat events, catastrophic network outages, compliance pressures, data sovereignty needs, and duty-of-care obligations, these past norms are increasingly challenged.
As such, there is a global movement to use the cloud in a more pragmatic and hybrid way.
For example, some of Australia’s private and public K-12 education bodies recently trialled their school sites and metropolitan administrative offices with cloud-based telephony.
Whilst the knowledge workers in the office sites were well-served by softphone clients on personal computers, the frontline workers in the classrooms much preferred traditional desk or wall phones due to their robustness, reliability, and ease of use.
Moreover, remote schools which were more prone to internet and power outages simply could not risk downtime from cloud-only telephony.
Therefore, some schools chose a hybrid combination of on-premises and cloud telephony, whilst others stuck to on-premises only.
“This hybrid cloud design philosophy is being adopted by a major government school body in Australia’s populous east, including their remote outback campuses.
“We are a technology of choice for such critical deployments because of our platform’s ability to be completely tailored for the schools’ needs, including centrally managing all education sites as a whole whilst providing the utmost dependability of a 5×9 geo-redundant system,” Tutaan states.
Indeed, the company’s technology is deployed in such a way to ensure that every school across the region has connectivity.
This means including design principles such as carrier diversity, geographical redundancy, and automatic failover routing. Satellite services are also included in the network mix, particularly for the remote regional sites.
“We make sure those schools in regional areas have connectivity no matter what, regardless of the unfortunately commonplace natural disasters like bush fires or flooding expected every few years in Australia.
“Our systems and networks are responsible for ensuring all remote community schools are in contact with the outside world,” assures Tutaan.
“2026 is about execution and scaling what we’ve done in small pockets to establish our prevalent regional strategy in ANZ and the South Pacific, seeing it come to life for our end customers and many partners”
Terence Tutaan, Head of Region – Australia, New Zealand, and South Pacific, Mitel
STREAMLINING CARE
At the helm of recent technology transformations, the rise of AI is having a major impact on contact centres, which sit at the confluence of business telephony and customer experience (CX) management.
The integration of AI within contact centre technology means that organisations are better able to optimise their workflows, improve the CX of inbound callers, and increase employee productivity.
This is demonstrated by the recent launch of Mitel’s CX contact centre platform, which leverages AI to help streamline hospitality customer service.
“Making staff at the hotel front desk a lot more efficient is a role AI plays, addressing basic guest questions such as what time the pool opens.
“It answers in real time and can then pass on the call to relevant staff if that’s what the guest wants,” Tutaan explains.
Mitel is likewise leveraging AI to streamline the provision of care in hospitals.
During the early iterations of AI as a voice chatbot to speak to callers in a contact centre setting, analysts found that the average wait times, quality, perception, and overall experience on phone calls had actually not improved in the three years since its roll-out. In fact, surveyed callers said their experience was worse than before the AI bot, which prompted a diversification of thought in how this technology was used.
“Instead of AI talking and dealing with the public, it is now also pointed back at the staff receiving the call because a lot of the feedback highlighted that callers wanted to talk to a real person.
“When you point the AI back to the people receiving the calls or making the outbound calls to customers, AI can instead provide assistance to staff – accessing information quicker, helping anticipate the direction of the live conversation, and prompting the attendant or agent with the necessary information that they would’ve otherwise had to search for manually from many different systems,” he details.
SCALE AND EXECUTION
Going into 2026, Mitel’s objective in ANZ is to solidify its brand as the best-in-class voice and pre-eminent provider of messaging technology to its five key verticals, for whom business communications is a mission-critical application.
Although the company’s relevance is to the broader large government and enterprise market, it hopes to continue aligning itself to the exacting needs of narrower industry groups within this sector. Mitel will do this by customising and tailoring its solutions to best integrate within these more specific environments.
“This is really the beginning of a new branch in our journey. In the last year, we have formulated our direction and strategy and shaped our route to market.
“2026 is about execution and scaling what we’ve done in small pockets to establish our prevalent regional strategy in ANZ and the South Pacific, seeing it come to life for our end customers and many partners,” Tutaan closes.
Mitel will achieve this goal by working closer with the complementary innovations from technology alliances and deep expertise of its integration partners.
This will further enhance its operations, ultimately cementing the company’s leadership position as a mission-critical provider of UC and contact centre technology in the ANZ region and globally.
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