Summit Automotive has standardized its voice architecture with Mitel (News - Alert) to meet the speed, deployment and scale needs of its family of automotive dealerships. Summit Automotive Partners selected Mitel as its communications provider based on Mitel's robust and flexible architecture and seamless integration of voice and data in a virtualized environment.

Summit Automotive Partners is an integrated group of successful dealerships committed to building lasting relationships with customers, employees, manufacturers and local communities. Summit has started the deployment of the Mitel Communications Director   (MCD), Mitel Unified IP Client for Sun Ray and Mitel Applications Suite (MAS) in concert, across its existing dealership group. Mitel's ease of deployment and flexibility is consistent with Summit's growth strategy.

A Mitel communications solution will give employees at automotive dealerships better control over their communications. This enables employees to prioritize their interactions and work more productively and also allows the dealership to automate key processes, such as incoming call handling and outgoing service reminders. According to Rick Dell (News - Alert), president of Mitel, dynamic and growing companies like Summit Automotive prosper when supported by Mitel's flexibility and advanced architecture through offerings such as virtualized voice that bring performance enhancements that drive bottom line results.

The flexible deployment architecture of MCD allows Summit to loosely couple locations into a highly adaptable and resilient network and decouple if they choose to divest a location. The Mitel Communications Director call control software allows users to operate their communications system with flexibility, ease and reliability. The Mitel Unified IP Client for Sun Ray provides simplified and secure authentication for both voice and data. This in turn allows unified hotdesking for enhanced workforce flexibility and also enables Summit to drop thin clients into place and configure credential information in the back office.

Summit's thin client strategy is enhanced by Mitel's expertise in virtualized voice. In fact, Mitel's expertise will allow Summit to seamlessly utilize existing VMware investments with both the Mitel voice and Sun Ray environments in the future. The enterprise grade, flexible and high performance Mitel technology is matched by its Mitel TotalSolutions Program (TSP), which helps Summit to effectively plan for expenditures on an operating expense basis. This will enable Summit to streamline investments and increase project cost accuracy to a low single digit percentage point.