MTL Global Networks, a subsidiary of SnT (Ship n Track) Global Sdn Bhd, will drive growth of Mitel Networks's IP (Internet Protocol) -based communication solutions and IP telephone sets in Malaysia & Singapore, following its appointment as distributor for these two countries in Kuala Lumpur on 13 May.

Prior to this, Mitel only had resellers in Malaysia. Under the agreement, MTL will distribute Mitel's range of unified communications solutions uniquely suited to small to medium sized businesses. These will include the Mitel 1000 and Mitel 3000 series communication systems, its range of IP telephone sets, and the Mitel Communications Suite.

For example, the Mitel 3300 IP communications platform supports feature-rich IP communications and advanced user applications over the corporate local and wide-area networks (LAN & WAN).

In business communications it supports mobility solutions, team working solutions (collaboration), customer interaction solutions and messaging solution, and moreover it's highly scalable from as few as 10 users to as many as 65,000 users.

The Mitel Communications Suite is a piece of software which runs on Sun Microsystems servers and provides the functionality of the Mitel 3300 ICP communications appliance over a company's Sun data network.

“We'll focus Mitel solutions at the 600 contact centres with between 20 and 30 seats, at banks and financial institutions with multiple branches,” said MTL chairman, David Wong Nan Fay.

Mitel's major customers in Malaysia include Asiaspace and Cuscapi. Asiaspace use Mitel solutions primarily to provide helpdesk and troubleshooting solutions for its WiMAX customers, while Cuscapi provides business management solutions, collaboration and information exchange solutions between a company's staff and their customers.

“The market for IP PBX is still growing, while fixed line growth has stalled, and it's important that businesses know how to use broadband pipes to help them make money and to change the way they work,” said Gwilym Funnell, Mitel Asia Pacific managing director and vice-president.

Based in Kuala Lumpur, MTL will also serve as Mitel's sales, marketing and technical services hub serving both countries.

Founded in Canada in 1972, Mitel specialised in supplying PBX (private branch exchange) systems – or what basically are internal telephone circuit switching systems – to enterprise customers.

A PBX essentially is an internal telephone switch which enables communication between internal extension telephones, with options to access outside lines on the public switched telephone system (PSTN) such as by dialling 9.

“More recently, Mitel has IP telephony and unified communications systems,” said Funnell.

Those legacy analogue PBX systems operated over separate networks from the digital, IP-based computer networks and bridging between them required what's called computer-telephony integration (CTI) equipment.

However, with both voice, data, audio and video carried over a single, integrated digital, IP-based network, it not only is cheaper and more efficient but also enables a wider range of multimedia services, including work collaboration, unified messaging, the viewing of videos, text to speech conversion such as the reading out of e-mail messages over the phone and so on.

For example in a call centre, an all IP network makes it easier for the system to automatically access the customer's account information from the computer system based upon the caller's phone number provided by the telco's CliP (caller line identification presentation) facility and present it on the agent's screen so they can address them by name and interact with them more quickly.

Moreover an IP PABX enables the headquarters and branch offices in different parts of the country or the world to appear as a single entity and route calls seamlessly between extensions anywhere with no telco charges. This also enables least cost routing, where calls from Malaysia to say to Manchester in the UK are routed at no cost to its office in London through the company's international communication network, then on to Manchester over the public telephone network, thus minimising call charges.

“Shared services outsourcing (SSO) centres, which are one of the three clusters, including Creative Multimedia and Information Technology (software development) which can benefit from the use of an IP PBX,” said Saifol Bahari Mohamad Shamlan, vice-president, Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC), who officiated at the event.

SSO operations within MSC Malaysia contribute 30% of its revenue and provide 40% of its employment.

Hosting of shared services

At the same time, MTL also signed an agreement with Asia Contact Centre Networks (ACCN) to provide seamless connectivity between ACCN's contact centres in different locations, and SnT's contact centre. ACCN is a partnership between SnT and the Sonic Group to provide a ready contact centre infrastructure for customers to provide their services over.

Essentially providing outsourced call centre services, this service will be especially useful to small businesses which don't want to invest in their own call centres.