Mitel (News - Alert) has announced a Virtualized Datacenter Accreditation program for a variety of cloud-based unified communication services. The program offers a verification process to certify the infrastructure qualities and attributes needed to support Mitel voice and unified communications applications. It is aimed at data centers, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-services (IaaS) providers, and is currently available in the U.S.
Artisan Infrastructure, Host.net (News - Alert) and Hosting.com are leading the way and have already been certified as IaaS providers. The companies intend to support or offer hosted voice and unified communication solutions based on Mitel cloud-ready software within the next few months.
The Mitel program ensures that MSPs and Mitel authorized partners may leverage cloud-based infrastructure to provide world-class managed unified communication solutions. Qualified IaaS and PaaS providers must achieve a number of technical certifications from both Mitel and VMware to receive the Virtualized Datacenter Accreditation. They must also demonstrate technical competencies for supporting business continuity, high availability, disaster recovery and redundancy, important factors for outsourced enterprise-grade physical and virtual facilities.
"Managed Service Providers in North America are interested in augmenting their service portfolio with unified communications services," said Bob Anderson, Mitel's vice president, U.S. channel marketing. "However, in today's competitive environment, you can't rush to market with a user experience that might be less than optimal. Quite literally, a great user experience is the powerful competitive differentiator in the market today. With today's announcement, we're providing a program designed to ensure our solutions are optimized with the provider's cloud-based infrastructure."
The accreditation program offers a number of benefits for cloud-based service providers. IaaS providers may offer differentiated services and may also add unified communications as a service (UCaaS) to their existing solutions. IaaS providers are also identified and branded so that MSPs may easily partner with them on hosted unified communication service offerings.
"Our MSP customers have long wanted to offer hosted UC services, as they are keenly aware of the demand for these services among their SMB customer base," said Brian Hierholzer, president and CEO of Artisan Infrastructure. "By working with Mitel and its accreditation program, Artisan Infrastructure is providing a voice optimized network infrastructure to better serve our joint MSP customers and enable them to compete and succeed."
MSP certifications are on the rise as the demand for cloud-based services increases. Cisco (News 
- Alert) recently announced three new security specialist certifications to keep up with network demands created by cloud computing, mobility, social networking and enhanced applications.
Edited by
Tammy Wolf
Genesis Digital Appoints Darren Hakeman as Chief Executive Officer04/25/2024