Today at the VMware Partner Exchange 2012, VMware and Mitel unveiled the integration of Mitel’s Contact Center Solution for VMware View, which can enable contact center managers to deploy and manage agents anywhere in the world, while empowering the center to lower costs.

This solution provides contact center agents with cloud-based access to contact center functionality as well as a unified desktop and communications device (soft phone or desk phone) wherever they may be.

In addition, Mitel announced the availability of Mitel’s virtualized Unified Communicator (UC) Advanced client software for VMware View.

"We chose Mitel specifically because they were the only vendor we evaluated that could integrate with our VMware View-based virtual environment," said Russ Johnson, president of Fuse Networks. “The flexibility of Mitel’s open UC architecture combined with VMware’s leading virtualization solutions gave us a consolidated communications infrastructure that we could manage like any other virtual application."

Desktop virtualization using VMware View decouples desktop components from physical devices and delivers them as a managed service from a centralized location, such as the data center or from the cloud. By centrally managing the desktops, applications and user data in the data center, organizations can benefit from improved manageability and control. When used in conjunction with Mitel’s Contact Center Solution, contact center and communications applications can be deployed as a single unified solution in a virtual desktop environment, enabling IT departments to reduce costs, while also extending their desktop and mobile environment to anywhere an end-user has an Internet connection.

For the contact center manager, this can allow for greater flexibility when bringing on additional agents during times of peak capacity, while maintaining centralized control over each agent. IT managers can reap similar cost and control benefits, while delivering their end-users a rich, consistent and high-performance desktop experience to any qualified device – including tablets and smartphones – whether in the office or on the go.

"Our contact center customers have consistently pushed for more flexibility in terms of managing their agents, as well as continued integration with virtualization technologies of all kinds," said Stephen Beamish, Mitel's VP, Corporate Marketing and Business Development. "They will now have the ability to deliver their agents’ contact center, desktop and softphone capabilities as a unified, virtualized application – it doesn’t get more flexible than that."