Mitel Uses Amazon Chime SDK to Deliver Integrated Collaboration Application

For nearly 50 years, Mitel has provided business communications services to customers worldwide. Today, the company powers cloud-based communications solutions, advanced collaboration and contact center applications, and onsite communications platforms for more than 70 million users in 100 countries.

To support its vision of providing seamless, highly scalable applications, Mitel created CloudLink, a cloud applications platform that uses a microservices architecture and is deployed on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Mitel’s collaboration applications are built on the CloudLink platform to provide Mitel customers with advanced capabilities integrated into their suite of applications. As the demand for video collaboration grew, Mitel evaluated several options for enhancing its existing offer in that space. “We had different video solutions from third-party providers in the past that didn’t deliver the seamless capabilities our customers wanted. Our choices were to build our own solution, buy one, or find a technology partner with whom to build one,” says Mona Abou-Sayed, vice president of collaboration and applications for Mitel.

Mitel chose to work with AWS to collaboratively define and implement the Amazon Chime SDK, which developers can use to take advantage of the infrastructure and services that drive the Amazon Chime online meetings service. Given its architecture, capabilities, and flexibility, Amazon Chime technology was a natural match for Mitel’s CloudLink-based applications. “We worked alongside AWS to identify key features ahead of launch to ensure that the technology was a perfect fit and would enable us to add video calling and screen-sharing capabilities into our existing solutions,” says Abou-Sayed.

The company augmented its CloudLink platform with the Amazon Chime SDK to enable video and screen-sharing features across its portfolio. Leveraging the CloudLink platform, Mitel integrated video screen share, audio/video conferencing, chat, and collaboration capabilities into its MiTeam Meetings unified communication application, which initially launched to the company’s MiCollab customers. MiCollab is an enterprise collaboration software platform used by 1.8 million customers worldwide. The new collaboration functionality will also be extended to other aspects of the Mitel portfolio in coming months.

Mitel took advantage of the Amazon Chime SDK to quickly develop and deploy MiTeam Meetings. “We reduced our application development time from months to weeks by using the Amazon Chime SDK to deliver the video and screen share for our solution,” says Abou-Sayed. “Because the technology was integrated with our existing AWS-based CloudLink platform, our developers worked with familiar APIs and services. This accelerated our development and delivery, enabling us to launch our MiTeam Meetings solution at a critical moment when global demand for remote working and collaboration tools surged as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Currently, Mitel customers who use MiTeam Meetings can experience fully integrated voice and video collaboration using web browsers, with a plan to expand to a mobile application later this year for iOS and Android. “Using the Amazon Chime SDK, we created a solution that supports our vision of seamless communications and collaboration,” says Abou-Sayed. “Customers using MiCollab can escalate a voice call or chat session to a video or screen-sharing session using MiTeam Meetings with the click of a button. This gives users a way to quickly bring together remote global teams through immersive, face-to-face meetings. This is exactly what our customers wanted, and we are delivering it by leveraging the power of AWS services.”

Mitel plans to use additional AWS services to meet its ongoing business needs. “As we progress, we will expand our market opportunities by considering other AWS services such as AI, digital assistants, and machine learning for integration into our collaboration portfolio,” says Abou-Sayed. “We are excited for what the future holds, and we look forward to using AWS services to deliver solutions that enable productivity for our customers.”

To learn more, visit aws.amazon.com/chime/chime-sdk.