Mitel has announced some management changes related to its mobile effort. The company in relaying this news again emphasized the growth of LTE and reiterated the mobile enterprise strategy it unveiled in October.
Former Mavenir CEO and Mitel Mobile Division President Pardeep Kohli has been tapped to head up Mitel 5G Cloud Connectivity as president of that effort. BG Kumar takes Kohli’s place as president of the Mitel Mobile Division. In his new post Kumar will be in charge of engineering, operations, product line management, profit and loss, and sales of the division.
These changes, Mitel said in a press release issued today, will help it and its carrier customers ready themselves for the continued ramp up in global demand for 4G LTE services. The company added that, according to industry analysts at Ovum, global LTE subscriptions exceeded 1 billion in the fourth quarter of last year and are expected to see strong double-digit growth in the next five years.
Mitel caters to tier 1 carriers, including cellular network operators, with such products as its virtualized VoLTE, VoWiFi, and RCS solutions. The company today reminded us that in November it reported its global footprint of mobile customers expanded from 17 to 31 in six months.
Indeed, the company has been heavily pushing the message that Mitel is a mobile company for several months now. Mavenir, known for its voice, video, and messaging solutions for mobile carriers, is a key part of that strategy. Mitel announced the Mavenir acquisition last year around this time, which also is around the time of the big Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona.
Mitel has also been clear for some time that it sees itself as one of the consolidators of the unified communications space, in which the company is already a leader, along with competitors Avaya, Cisco, and ShoreTel. In addition to Mitel’s acquisition of Mavenir, Mitel in the past couple of years has purchased contact center companies OAISYS and prairieFyre, and desk phone companies Aastra and Inter-Tel. It also made a couple failed passes at ShoreTel. And late last year there were reports that Elliott Associates was pushing for Mitel to pair with Polycom.
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