Mitel
More info
- Creator
- Terry Matthews, Michael Cowpland
- Released
- 1973
- Type
- Telecom company
Canadian maker of business phone systems that was originally meant to sell lawnmowers.
Founded in 1973 near Ottawa by Terry Matthews and Michael Cowpland, two engineers from Bell-Northern Research. The name comes from a plan to import lawnmowers – "Mike and Terry Lawnmowers" – which was dropped for telephony once they worked out where the money was. Mitel's digital switches made it one of the big PBX vendors of the 1980s.
The founders went their separate ways: Cowpland started Corel, Matthews started Newbridge Networks. Mitel itself survived the shift to VoIP and SIP by buying rivals such as Aastra and ShoreTel, and now competes with Avaya for a market that Teams and Zoom are eating from below.