Microsoft Teams – What Telecom Resellers Need to Know

Microsoft Teams is exceeding 44m active daily users and just celebrated its 3rd birthday. It’s the fastest growing product in the company’s 45-year history and it streamlines all things collaboration for the way people work in the modern world. 

The Secret Power of Teams 

Telecom resellers should be looking at the broad capabilities of Teams because it wraps activities, instant messaging, file sharing, calendars, applications, meetings, video and voice calling into one easy–to–use collaboration platform. Your Outlook contacts are at your fingertips, meetings are a single step to set-up and a click to join; no downloads, no dial-ins, no plug-ins, no upgrades. It just works.  

Like the video killed the radio star, Teams has the potential to wipe out the need for any other collaboration tool in the work environment. Still need convincing? Teams goes where you go – work from home, the beach, a coffeehouse, the office, over WIFI, over data and federate with valued customers and partners. Microsoft touts it as the desktop for the modern workplace, and the statistics suggest the positioning is working.  

The secret? Most organizations already own it as part of their M365/O365 entitlements. 

The X Factor 

Still, some resellers view the desktop is as far away from the traditional PBX as you can get. Owned and operated by different teams, largely resold by different types of channel sellers until now. Once Microsoft put direct routing capabilities into Teams, this provided companies like SIPPIO Voice to natively enable external voice capability as a service. The significance of this is twofold:  

• SIPPIO Voice enables the full power of Teams as a unified communications environment by putting voice in Microsoft Teams.  This increases the customer’s ROI, stickiness and usability of M365 even further since they typically hold the entitlement.  Teams provides a seamless experience across desk phones, laptops, mobiles or tablets, the client or a browser, making an efficient and cost-effective collaboration tool.  By adding voice wherever users choose to work, it also makes it a truly viable alternative to traditional telephony services.  
• SIPPIO Voice can be used as a pure cloud solution, integrate with an existing PBX or run alongside it. It provides a global footprint in 60+ countries, compliance with all major security standards and the ability to add call recording, contact center and analog devices. From a partner perspective, it’s a complete white label, hosted cloud solution and ready to activate users within minutes.

The Opportunity  

With 254 million Microsoft M365 users, adoption of Teams is accelerating so it seems telecom resellers have a choice: ignore the threat or embrace the opportunity.  

Faced with the opportunity, we are seeing customers ask for the opportunity to reduce costly maintenance contracts by moving to a per user per month OPEX model. Customers are seeking partners to help them modernize their voice services. This is the time to bring your telephony expertise to the table and guide your customers to put voice in Teams.  

 

Dawn-Marie Elder is COO, SIPPIO.