Mitel held their latest symposium in Kuwait in a bid to promote and communicate their values as a company to the channel ecosystem across the Middle East region. 
Mitel held the symposium at The Millenium Hotel in Kuwait on February 13th, which followed on from the success of their event last week in Dubai.
Mitel’s leadership team are on a mission to reinforce their values and principles as a company all over the region.
We spoke to two of their senior executives to find out a little bit more on the objectives they want to derive from these types of channel roadshows.
How important are events like this one here in Kuwait for Mitel to really highlight the impact their portfolio of products and solutions are having on the IT eco-system across Middle East?
Feras Zeidan: Every vendor that is extremely serious about partner empowerment and enablement has to continuously invest in partner education and engage with the channel to demonstrate innovation, share the roadmap and the partner programme evolutions from classical on prem into hybrid cloud, etc.
This is a continuous process. At Mitel, our channel is the key to our success so we consider that investing in channel partner events is essential.
Apart from roadshows, we’ve also developed the competence circle for example, which is a complete educational series on a bi-weekly basis that educates our partners on key technologies, targeting both sales and technical sales.
So, for us, training and certification, tools improvement, face-to-face events and meetings, webinars, specifically for our platinum and gold partners is critical. Equally the alignment with our distributors is important to help us cover & grow our silver and gold silver partners.
We are a family, it’s a team sport – and our role as a vendor is to continuously provide value to our channel community through trainings, appropriate partner programs, incentives and empower them to be able to support each and every organisation on their transformation journey.
A key element of the value chain we provide to our partner are third party integrations and alliances.
When you look at the government and the private sector, their digital transformation can only be successful if we work to deliver an integrated solution, able to seamlessly connect with Microsoft Teams for instance, to a telemedicine third party solution, or to enable Whatsapp integration in the contact centre solution and advanced recording.
All our alliances are built to deliver total end-to-end solutions, and these events are an opportunity to empower our partners and promote our ecosystem overall.
What did attendees learn from the executives delivering keynote presentations at the Mitel Symposium here in Kuwait?
Feras Zeidan: This event addresses two types of partners. Those who are already part of our family: these partners are already onboarded, certified, they’re doing business with us and thus know intrinsically the value of Mitel.
On the other side, there are new partners, who are interested, or who want to work with a major vendor like Mitel.
So, during the Mitel Symposium we focused on demonstrating our technological and commercial values as well as our ability to integrate with third party technologies.
On the portfolio front, attendees get an overview of our roadmap and hear from the innovations and the continuous evolutions we’re making on our products and solutions.
As an example, we showcased a demo of the Mitel assistant that will be launched in the next months, a free software that will integrate our IP telephony infrastructure with Microsoft Teams.
We also put the emphasis on the scalability, redundancy and security of our solutions, which are more than ever critical points for organisations of all sizes.
What are fundamentally the key outcomes and objectives that Mitel wants to achieve with these roadshows across the Middle East?
Asif Khan: The Mitel Symposium is Mitel’s primary channel event for the Middle Eastern market, and we opted to start with the UAE last week, and then followed up here in Kuwait, and we have other dates across the Gulf and Middle East region in the months ahead.
Fundamentally, we’re looking to communicate our values, showcase our solutions, our innovations and updates and share what’s next at Mitel.
We also aim at introducing the value proposition from Mart Networks to our channel partners, be it in terms of product fulfilment, logistics, operations, credit or technical pre-sales support.
Our partnership with Mart Networks is already proving to be very successful in the African region, and that’s the reason why we decided to extend it to Middle East.
Can you tell our readers more about the partnership between Mitel and Mart Networks?
Asif Khan: Mitel first signed a partnership with Mart Networks a few months ago to address the African region.
We recently extended our contract with them in the Middle East region, and the symposium last week in the UAE was designed to launch and roll out this partnership to our channel partners.
With this agreement Mart brings a lot of value to our channel partners as they have the resources and the logistics on the ground, making sure that the products are fulfilled effectively and efficiently to our partners.
They also provide presales as well as post-sales support to our channel partners, together with financing.
What we gained out of this relationship thus far in the African region is a huge success, and we are confident we can replicate this with Mart Networks in the Middle East.
What do you think where the key points Mitel delivered to their channel partners here during this symposium in Kuwait?
Asif Khan: During this Symposium, our channel community had a chance to experience our commitment, and get a clear view on the way we’re going to support them and their customers during their UCC solutions lifecycle. These events are a great opportunity to exchange, build and reinforce our relationships with our channel partners.
Channel partners also had the opportunity to learn more about our new partnership with Mart Networks and the benefits and opportunities it represents for them.
In addition to this, we looked at the kind of solutions we focused on a few key verticals like the hospitality sector and the government sector.
Our objective was to effectively communicate our message and our new partnership with Mart Networks.
Both roadshows in the UAE, and now in Kuwait have been a huge success, and we’re going to keep that momentum up with Qatar and Oman in the coming months.
This year is going to be very exciting for Mitel from a marketing perspective, as part of our efforts to communicate our values to our channel partners, as well as building a strong installed base with new end customers.
