November 2021: “RingCentral will pay Mitel $650 million to acquire intellectual property rights and patents covering network and call management, security, and infrastructure. Demonstrating its commitment and excitement about the partnership, Mitel’s existing investor group led by affiliates of Searchlight will invest $200 million in equity in RingCentral as part of the transaction.”
Now did RNG get $900M worth of ARR from that deal? No. How many of Mitel’s 35M users went to RNG? No idea.
Now Mitel has a deal like Avaya has with Zoom.
Here’s the funny thing, NEC launched their version of this in 2021. It is called NEC Bridge and works by connecting NEC PBX customers to cloud functions and mobility. It seems funny that everyone is making a big deal out of Avaya and Mitel doing what NEC did 3 years ago. Well, a lot of pundits and analysts had their foundational work with one or both of those companies, so everything Avaya or Mitel do is amaz-balls! Except it isn’t. If it was would Avaya have gone bankrupt 3x?
The bottom line is that complex on-premise PBX systems are not going to cloud any time soon. AI, mobility and other functions in cloud communications are wanted by companies and a Bridge product provides that.