To keep pace with changing customer demands, unified communications vendor Mitel announced new enhancements to its Global Partner Program that aim to make it easier for partners to grow their businesses and help guide their customers through new directions in hybrid communications.
The
enhanced partner program, which builds on
earlier changes unveiled by Mitel in June 2025, includes progressive benefits, performance-based incentives, and a new recognition and marketing promotion program for partners investing in specialization in verticals and emerging technologies, including AI, according to the company.
“The biggest change is that Mitel has redesigned its partner program to reflect how the market itself has changed, including how customers buy, plan, and what they now expect from communications technology,”
David Petts, the company’s chief sales officer, told ChannelE2E. “Today’s customers are no longer choosing between cloud or on-premises. They are choosing hybrid and multi-cloud models that give them flexibility, resilience, and control, especially in highly regulated and mission-critical industries like healthcare, financial services, public sector, retail, hospitality, and manufacturing. That shift fundamentally changes what they need from their technology providers and their channel partners.”
The enhancements are in response to feedback from partners, said Petts. “Through ongoing partner engagement and advisory conversations, partners told us that they wanted clearer expectations, a rewards and recognition framework that aligns with today’s customers’ needs, and stronger long-term support.”
Another major change is that the latest partner program is explicitly designed around customer outcomes, not just partner incentives, he said. “Every element ties back to what customers care about most: long-term value, consistent experiences, strong service delivery, and guidance through complexity,” said Petts. “By rewarding retention, enablement, and recurring engagement, Mitel is encouraging partner behaviors that lead to healthier customer lifecycles, stronger adoption, and more sustainable relationships.”
Helping Partners Enhance Their Roles as Trusted Advisors
Also guiding the new program are changes designed to help Mitel partners become stronger and more trusted advisors who can guide customers through modernization at the pace that customers require, said Petts. “We have built a program around how customers operate today, not how the market worked five or 10 years ago.”
Customers today prioritize long-term value, continuity, and guidance in a more complex marketplace, which the updated partner program will address, said Petts.
“We have introduced a single, unified global program with a harmonized structure, incentives, and discount model to reflect the reality that customers now operate across environments, regions, and regulatory frameworks,” he said. “We have also expanded how partner value is measured, incorporating retention, specialization, enablement, recurring engagement, and long-term customer success.”
Smart Moves as the Unified Communications Market Continues to Evolve: Analysts
The decision to change partner program reward incentives to a points-based system that rewards partners for activities across the entire customer lifecycle, not just point-of-sale, is still novel in the UC industry,
Devan Adams, principal analyst at Omdia, told ChannelE2E. “These new systems have revolutionized other markets like cloud services, and more partners in other industries want vendors to adapt by retiring old, outdated programs. Our research shows that lifecycle rewards are the number one benefit that partners seek in vendor programs, more than conventional benefits like marketing support and pre-sales and technical support.”
Adams said that Mitel’s emphasis on lifecycle rewards and vertical specialization are moves that eventually every unified communications (UC) vendor will have to adopt or risk higher partner churn.
“Mitel’s move is definitely motivated by evolving with the latest IT industry trends and applying them to the UC market,” said Adams. “Aligning its program with recent enhancements by Cisco and Zoom, Mitel is offering a strategic response to the growing demand for professional and managed services in the UC space.”
Shelly Kramer, founder and principal analyst with Kramer&Co., said that she is seeing a “massive wave of partner program reinvigoration happening right now, and it is actually one of the most significant channel trends heading into this new year.”
In Mitel’s case, its moves are part of a much broader industry realignment that is being driven by the shift to hybrid infrastructure, the focus on AI integration, the search for monetization paths, and other complexities that organizations are dealing with today, said Kramer.
“This complexity is something vendors do not or cannot tackle directly, so the channel is critical,” she said. “We have also seen other factors driving this focus on partner ecosystems, including partners being dissatisfied with the cumbersome deal registration processes and complexities of vendor portals. Vendors have realized that the more complex their programs are, and the more difficult they are to work with, the more deals and opportunities they lose, and are working to remedy that situation.”
Mitel has been obsessive and smart about fine-tuning its partner program and supporting the partner community, especially since these latest changes come just seven months after last summer’s enhancements, said Kramer.
“When you talk with partners about the benefits they experience as part of the Mitel partner ecosystem, that is obvious,” she said. “Happy partners drive sales and deepen customer relationships. From what I have seen and heard directly from the Mitel partner community, Mitel is doing a great job of fostering partner relationships and strengthening its partner programs at every opportunity. These enhancements to the Global Partner Program are designed with partners in mind: bigger discounts and higher earning potential, retention incentives, and specialization opportunities are definitely something partners are excited about.”
