OTTAWA, Aug. 6, 2014 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Mitel� (Nasdaq:MITL) (TSX:MNW), a global leader in business communications, today announced it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the Leaders quadrant of the latest Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications.

"Mitel has made bold moves this past year with a series of in-house innovations and acquisitions that have deepened our portfolio, expanded our global reach and accelerated our cloud communications solutions. We did this for our customers to offer broader choice and better service to help make them more successful. We believe our innovation and expansion contributed greatly to our move from the Visionary to the Leaders Quadrant," said Rich McBee, CEO, Mitel.

Over the last twelve months, Mitel has emerged as a global leader in business communications, with #1 market share in EMEA and Western Europe, as well as market share gains in the highly competitive North American market where it now has a #3 market share position*. Further driving the company's momentum is its portfolio of Cloud communications along with its integrated business communications solutions. This includes contact center in addition to traditional unified communications.

This is the second Gartner Magic Quadrant in recent months where Mitel has advanced. Mitel was positioned in the Challengers Quadrant, up from niche player in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Center Infrastructure [Drew Kraus, Steve Blood and Sorell Slaymaker, May 22, 2014].

In addition to Mitel's fully integrated business communications approach and flexible cloud options, Mitel believes that focusing on protecting its customers' investments and extending their value contributed to its move to the Leaders Quadrant. For instance, Mitel offers the industry's broadest portfolio of solutions, including those that maximize the Microsoft investment and leverage Lync.

VMware's broader message on the latter is the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC), meaning it's more than just about the network alone, but it's also software-defined compute, storage, etc. As an old colleague of mine on the vSphere product management team pointed out to me, the ESXi hypervisor has really been software-defined compute and storage for many years now, having long done more than just abstract hardware like the CPU into its virtual equivalents. Securing software-defined network traffic is becoming increasingly challenging - using hardware security appliances that can only inspect at a few fixed, static points in the physical network risks losing visibility or applying the correct rules on increasingly abstracted and dynamic network flows. As soon as virtual switches were introduced in early hypervisors, inter-VM traffic could now bypass the physical network; SDN further exacerbates this with additional constructs like overlay/underlay tunnels and logical (i.e. changeable) ports, IP's and MAC addresses.

Fortinet is previewing this year our new FortiGate-VMX virtual appliance integrated with VMware's SDDC platform, interoperable with vSphere, vCloud, and NSX. While Fortinet has long invested in VMware solutions, with nearly a dozen security virtual appliances released in the past few years for vSphere, FortiGate-VMX represents a major leap forward with tight hypervisor integration and orchestration. FortiGate-VMX has direct visibility into all virtualized network traffic in ESX, and is further coordinated to automatically scale up and down to secure elastic workloads and ESX clusters. What this ultimately means is security itself is yet another layer of Infrastructure-as-a-Service that can be agile and software-defined as well, to provide seamless and consistent security for and as part of the underlying SDDC platform.

For more about our new VMware-based solution please check out our launch announcement. If you are attending VMworld U.S. in San Francisco this year, please come by Booth #410 to learn more about FortiGate-VMX and our other solutions for VMware environments.