Mitel & Tech Data Join in Pursuit of United States SMB Market

When it comes to small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) in the United States, it's a tough market for just about anyone to break into. But Mitel (News - Alert) just recently signed a distribution agreement with Tech Data Corporation in a bid to strengthen its own position to take on that difficult, but potentially very rewarding market.

Mitel, which focuses on both cloud and premises-based unified communications systems, as well as their common accompaniment of collaboration solutions, aligned itself with Tech Data Corporation thanks to "[its] significant market reach and presence," which gave a lot of boost to Mitel's own efforts to upgrade both their own reach and the reach of their channel partners.

Additionally, with Tech Data (News - Alert) Corporation involved, Mitel has the opportunity to provide extra service to "a select number of existing Mitel channel partners focused on the SMB market in the U.S.," as well as open up its reach to a broader number of potential customers.

Tech Data Corporation, meanwhile, sees plenty of advantages in dealing with Mitel, as expressed by recent remarks from Tech Data Corporation's vice president and general manager of Advanced Infrastructure Solutions: "Mitel's off-the-shelf SMB platforms help to enable a significant portion of the SMB market. We are excited to add Mitel to our AIS offering to help both existing and new solutions providers take advantage of the growth opportunities in this evolving market."

Under the terms of the agreement, Tech Data Corporation will begin distributing the Mitel UC360 Collaboration Point and the Mitel 5000 Communications Platform. The Mitel UC360 is geared toward multimedia communications, and was only released earlier this year, while the Mitel 5000 is more a complete applications platform, boasting both a suite of applications along with support for up to 250 users.

Naturally, when it comes to unified communications for SMBs, there are a lot of products in the field. Mitel can therefore use just about any advantage it can get its hands on to make successes in the field happen. Allying with Tech Data Corporation should go a long way in giving Mitel and its channel partners the extra reach it needs to get more of the market under its control.

If Mitel can keep up the quality on their product offerings, which doesn't seem to be too much of a problem, the broader market they'll have access to as a result should result in not only higher sales, but also better profits.

Considering that Mitel recently took some hits in the market, losing about 4 percent of its market share in the unified communications front, it needed a little something to help shore up the losses and bring back the missing market share, as well as maybe lay hands on a bit more than it lost.

Higher sales and better profits are the driving force behind most businesses, so Mitel looks to be making all the right moves in a very tight market sector.

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