By Danilo Piatti, Mitel

There’s something special about a gathering where you can learn everyone’s name before the first coffee is finished. On November 5th, we welcomed a small group of Mitel users to Villa Sparina Resort in Gavi, about an hour from Milan in the Piedmont hills, for our third annual Mitel User Group event in Italy. Like the first two, it was more a conversation among people who know each other’s work than a conference.

We began with a welcome coffee and some catching up, then moved into a Mitel strategy update covering where we’re headed as a company and what that means for the customers in the room. The innovation and roadmap session followed. Because the group was small, it turned into an open discussion, with plenty of direct questions about the features and timelines that matter to their own deployments.

Fabio Pettinari then shared the latest from the Mitel User Group, including what the community has been working on and how members can get more involved. Having the MUG voice in the room is important to us, because the best ideas we hear usually come from users talking to other users.

The final session was my favorite: customer testimonials and best-practice sharing. Hearing how Marcello Maggiora from Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo approached AI and Cybersecurity in the UC space sparked the kind of practical exchange you can’t script, the “here’s what worked for us” advice people take home and use on Monday.

We ended the day around the dinner table. The conversation continued there, along with some excellent local Gavi wine.

My thanks to everyone who made the trip, to the MUG for being part of the day, and to the Villa Sparina team for their hospitality. Three years in, this group feels like a community. I’m already looking forward to the fourth.