Mitel is in exclusive negotiations with Atos to acquire Unify, the UCC services businesses of the Atos group. In an announcement released on Tuesday afternoon, the company said Unify’s portfolio, partners and talent would significantly expand Mitel’s scale and offerings.

Mitel officials said the combined company would have the operational scale, portfolio, geographic reach, go-to-market resources and financial profile to modernize the UC experience for customers faster and more effectively than either company could do alone.

Mitel and Unify would also have a collective customer base of more than 75 million users in over 100 countries. Their channel community would exceed 5,500 global partners. The proposed transaction would also expand Mitel’s reach and organizational scale, and lead to increased global revenues and profitability, the company said.

If the transaction goes through, Mitel will acquire Unify’s voice platforms, collaboration and contact center products, device and endpoint portfolio and related intellectual property. Unify would also bring a managed services business to help enterprise organizations digitally transform their communications environment. Additionally, the companies would together address the needs of customers in core verticals. These include health care, public sector, hospitality and financial services with complementary vertical experience, integrations and products.

Flexibility and Choice

Mitel’s Tarun Loomba

Tarun Loomba is Mitel’s president and CEO.

“The UC industry today holds significant opportunities to grow through M&A, aligning well with Mitel’s strategy and expertise,” Loomba said. “The value this deal creates for customers, partners, investors and employees is exciting. Mitel and Unify’s channel partner communities represent a wealth of expertise available to guide customers forward as they aim to communicate and collaborate more effectively, particularly in this new world of hybrid work.”

Loomba would serve in the same leadership capacity for the combined company.

He added that the impending acquisition would result in customers with “greater choice and flexibility throughout the lifecycle of their business communications.”

Anurag Agrawal, founder and chief global analyst at Techaisle, agreed with Loomba’s outlook.

Techaisle’s Anurag Agrawal

“In the UC market, when most vendors are over-indexing themselves on cloud communications, Mitel is taking a systematic approach, staying true to its strength in offering flexibility and choice to the customers,” he said. “It is focused on the modernization of communication solutions. The acquisition of Unify from Atos will likely catalyze the offering even more… The challenge for Mitel will be to enhance further its partner program to address the needs of a substantially more significant customer base.”

Better Positioning Mitel

The proposed transaction accelerates Mitel’s ability to strategically address the evolving communication needs of global businesses with an even broader range of on-premises, hybrid, private cloud and enterprise managed services. According to industry analysts, UC will continue to be the deployment model of choice for many companies for the foreseeable future and this transaction will better position Mitel to meet this demand.

Unify’s Marcus Hänsel

“Unify and Mitel both have a deep heritage in the communications market centered around customer needs and a channel-driven go-to-market strategy,” said Marcus Hänsel, chief executive officer of Unify at Atos. “Mitel’s commitment to UC, heritage of success and experience integrating complementary global businesses gives us great confidence in our future together.”

That is welcome news for both companies’ channel partners and customers, analysts say.

451 Research’s Raul Castanon

Raul Castanon is senior research analyst at 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence.

“[This deal] is a strong testament to Mitel’s commitment to continue investing in unified communications. While UCaaS tends to steal the spotlight, UC represents a significant opportunity. The deal significantly expands Mitel’s market footprint as well as its capacity to scale global operations supporting partners and customers. This includes the expertise that the two companies have built, addressing the requirements of organizations in sectors such as healthcare and hospitality. Finally, the deal could be instrumental for Mitel to accelerate its plans to expand into enterprise managed services, complementing its existing on-premises, hybrid and private cloud business.”