Mitel (News - Alert) is one of the leading providers of Unified Communications (UC) software solutions. The company demonstrated at VMworld 2011 Europe, a significant technical advancement that has been specifically designed to further increase the already growing deployment of desktop virtualization for IT departments.   

Mitel has gone on to integrate its virtualized Unified Communicator (UC) Advanced client software with VMware View 5. This integration will now allow Mitel and VMware to offer soft phone and mobile device integration with a desktop virtualization environment.  

In a release, Jan Wouter van den Doel, ICT manager of Delta Psychiatric Centre & Forensic Psychiatric Centre De Kijvelanden said, "Psychiatric Centre & Forensic Psychiatric Centre De Kijvelanden have been using Mitel's virtual MCD and Unified Communicator Advanced for some time, so we've already recognized the benefits of a virtualized Mitel Freedom architecture. Taking the obvious next step of virtualizing both the PC and the desk phone and unifying their functionality seems a natural and intuitive one to Delta. Our organization demands mobility and secure desktop access from multiple branches. As a result we are escalating our strategy to migrate our IT infrastructure to one that is optimized for virtualization allowing us to deploy this strategy as and when required."

The power of desktop virtualization will now be further enhanced with this new collaboration as it enables a user's voice solution and UC applications to be simultaneously deployed as a single unified solution in a virtual desktop environment. IT departments, who take advantage of this, will be able to reduce their costs while at the same time being able to extend their desktop and mobile environment to anywhere a user has an Internet connection.

Peter Hale, Senior Analyst, MZA Ltd, said, “The adoption of desktop virtualization continues to grow as organizations take advantage of lower costs and more efficient administration. The announcement from Mitel represents a significant enhancement of the technology.

Christopher Young, senior vice president and general manager, End-User Computing, VMware said that "VMware and Mitel have helped 'crack the code' on streaming communications and collaboration applications to the virtual desktop, thus giving IT freedom from the 'walled garden' approach driven by legacy IT vendors. Mitel's Freedom architecture, which already delivers an open, single software solution on a virtual machine, has now been augmented to support streaming on the VMware View desktop client software. By doing so, VMware is taking another step forward in enabling universal desktop access, delivering a truly open model that benefits both IT and the user."