Canadian Blood Services, a not-for-profit, charitable organization that supplies about a million units of blood to more than 700 hospitals throughout Canada, has selected a Mitel solution based on the Mitel Freedom architecture to connect mobile employees and help manage organizational growth and efficiencies.
Officials with Mitel, a global provider of business communications and collaboration software and services, said that the first phase of the deployment will include Virtual Mitel Communications Director (Virtual MCD), Mitel Unified Communicator Advanced (UC Advanced), and Mitel Applications Suite (MAS).
Virtual MCD leverages VMware vSphere 4 to allow Canadian Blood Services to consolidate Mitel's voice applications alongside non-voice business applications in its datacenter.
"Canadian Blood Services has two strategic directions. One is managing growth and the other one is managing efficiencies,” said Terry Cairns, chief information officer for Canadian Blood Services, in a statement. “And as a result, virtualization becomes extremely important to help us enable both of those.”
"Through the Mitel Freedom architecture Mitel allows us to bring voice into our virtualized environment. The Mitel Freedom architecture also gives us the opportunity to use some of our existing technology and makes it easier for us to manage within our infrastructure.”
Mitel UC Advanced provides desktop and mobile users a single interface to access all of their Mitel communications capabilities, including voice, video, presence, instant messaging, and conferencing – extending their in office experience anywhere.
"Our company philosophy is to give our employees the tools to connect anytime, anywhere,” said Ivo Mokros, director infrastructure management and architecture for Canadian Blood Services. “We believe that Mitel UC Advanced will completely transform the way our employees communicate with each other.”
Mokros said that an employee could start a chat with a colleague, escalate that to a voice call, and then to a video call, while at the same time being able to bring in other employees to collaborate on the project.
This, he said, “helps increase productivity and encourages collaboration."
Maplesoft Group, a national systems integrator headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, designed and implemented the solution at Canadian Blood Services.
"We believe Mitel, as a UCC provider, is leading the market with the Mitel Freedom architecture. This allows us to work with the customer to design an architectural solution that fits their environment," said Jack Gulas, chief technology officer for Maplesoft Group.
"With this particular project, we were able to work with Canadian Blood Services to seamlessly address the communications needs of its mobile employees and fit into the organizations virtualization strategy.”
In April, TMC reported that Mitel had announced the availability of its Unified Communicator (UC) Advanced software for the Android mobile operating system.
The Mitel UC Advanced is a unified communications client that integrates presence and availability, secure instant messaging, audio conferencing, and web and video collaboration with the call control capabilities of a business communications system. It is capable of integrating into business productivity tools such as Microsoft hosted Exchange/Outlook and Office as well as IBM Lotus Notes.
Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2011, taking place Sept. 13-15, 2011, in Austin, Texas. ITEXPO offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. To register, click here.
Anil Sharma is a contributing editor for HealthTechZone. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by
John Lahtinen
