NEWS FLASH Mitel Completes Merger With Aastra

[rossiv]

Came across this on my Facebook feed earlier.
Mitel Completes Merger With Aastra

Jan 31, 2014

• US$1.1 billion in diversified annual revenue
• #1 market share in Western Europe
• US$100 million global cloud business
• Global customer base of 60 million customers

OTTAWA, Jan. 31, 2014 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Mitel® Networks Corporation (Nasdaq:MITL) (TSX:MNW), a global leader in business communications, today announced it has completed its merger with Aastra Technologies Limited. With US$1.1 billion of combined annual revenue and 60 million customers worldwide, Mitel now has one of the largest global footprints in the industry and is driving consolidation in the US$18 billion business communications market.


Looks like the Aastra name is going away in favor of keeping the Mitel name. I can't say I saw that coming.

LINK for the curious

 

[atsak]

Let's just hope they don't run this Ottawa telecom company into the ground like the last one.

 

[leemason]

I've never worked out why the Mitel 3300 is so popular. It's a pain to manage. The web management interface is awful!

 

[matthew]

Yeah, I have a love/hate relationship with Mitel. My colleagues have much the same thing with the current Aastra systems. Let's hope that in the merge they keep the good and throw out the bad, but experience tells me the opposite will happen.

 

[leemason]

Very true. Like when HP took over Compaq. They threw away Tru64 in favour of HP-UX!

 

[tbrummell]

I've never worked out why the Mitel 3300 is so popular. It's a pain to manage. The web management interface is awful!

Glad to see in the years since I worked at Mitel they haven't implemented anything different. LoL When that interface was released I worked in the remote admin group, we went from RS232 connections via modems to the SZX2000 which was nice and quick to dialup modems @ 56K downloading all that garbage HTML, a routine task went from 30 seconds on the 2000 to 10 minutes on the 3300 (think....changing time.....when you have ~1000 systems to do). It sucked.

 

[leemason]

I've worked on both the Mitel 3300 and the Aastra (Ericsson) MX-ONE/MD-110 and I have to say I much prefer the way the Aastra system does thing. I suspect though that they will go with the Mitel interface in the future purely based on the number of systems installed. Also there is absolutely no comparison between the Mitel contact centre system and the Aastra Solidus eCare system. Aastra is so much better!

 

[matthew]

Yeah, the MD-110 and MX-One are miles ahead. The 4xx series seem to be a bit under done though.