This post was originally written and posted by Mark Haranas from CRN on September 25, 2017.

Mitel completed its acquisition of fellow unified communications vendor ShoreTel for $530 million Monday in a move to become one of the largest Unified-Communications-as-a-Service vendors in the world.

"Mitel and ShoreTel are now stronger together and even better equipped to help take our customers to the cloud, seamlessly and simply," said Rich McBee, president and CEO of Mitel, in a statement.

"In an apps economy and IoT world that depends on real-time communications, providing an agile, responsive and brilliantly simple customer experience becomes wildly important," said McBee. "[ShoreTel CEO] Don Joos and the entire ShoreTel team have institutionalized and mobilized that mantra, and put in place a cloud-first portfolio we are excited to take to customers globally, and a cloud culture and organization we are thrilled to embrace and expand in Mitel."

Mitel said the acquisition of ShoreTel makes it the No. 2 market-share player in the global UCaaS market. Partners were pumped to hear of the acquisition, which was announced in July.

Mitel, which was recently featured in Gartner's 2017 Magic Quadrant for UCaaS, expects the acquisition to give the Ottawa, Canada-based vendor a $1.3 billion boost in annual sales.

Both Mitel and ShoreTel customers and partners can continue to count on thee same cloud and on-site solutions they always have, said Mitel in a release. Mitel will provide ongoing service and support for all products throughout their life cycles. Customers and partners will be notified and updated in advance of all product announcements.

The combined company will be based in Ottawa and will operate as Mitel. The company will have approximately 3,200 channel partners and a broader communications and collaboration product portfolio. Mitel now has a global workforce of approximately 4,200 employees.