The Channel Partner Guide for Voice Enabling Microsoft Teams Part 2
Daily Brew: Part 2 of 5: Special 1 Week Event from SIPPIO
Creating New Streams of Recurring Revenue by Driving Value with SIPPIO
This week, take a quick daily coffee break and invest some time learning more about Microsoft Direct Routing and SIPPIO. Grab your favorite brew and spend a little time on this growing trend and opportunity to Put Voice in Microsoft Teams. We’ve packaged these into short, 10 min reads and at the end of the week, we will provide a conversation guide for you to share with your customers interested in learning how to gain more value from Microsoft Teams.
PROMOTE VALUE: VOICE ENABLE MICROSOFT TEAMS
Solution providers can guide their customers to realize greater return on investment by voice enabling Microsoft Teams. Utilizing all of the features versus some of what Teams has to offer promotes employee productivity, flexibility to work from anywhere and lessens the upkeep of multiple toolsets.
There are a few ways to enable voice capabilities in Microsoft Teams. One is through a Microsoft calling plan. This option has its merits but is tailored for a finite segment of customers and offers little opportunity for a solution provider to add value. The porting and billing functions are basic which puts additional overhead on the enterprise customer.
The second option, Direct Routing, exemplifies the brilliance of how Microsoft goes to market. Designed for enterprise customers wanting more control of their telephony services and migration plans to the Microsoft environment, Direct Routing provides a build-it-yourself option combining carrier services and cloud infrastructure through a Session Border Controller (SBC).
In this scenario, the SBC is akin to a traffic cop managing traffic between the dial tone and Teams. The solution runs in Azure or another data center to render calls into Teams. An average enterprise with 3,000 users would need to deploy around 20 SBCs each requiring separate configuration and management. Multiply that across dozens of sales or service locations and deployments become very expensive and unwieldy.
Most Direct Routing solutions are limited since they are built as one-offs and as a result, are highly costly given the complexity and skill sets required. Each deployment basically starts from scratch every time while often introducing vulnerability and security risk by fragmenting the solution between ‘on earth’ and the cloud.
In addition, the expertise required to deploy, configure, and manage this infrastructure is expensive and difficult to retain. This strategy not only hinders the speed of new-user activation, but also misses an opportunity to quickly deploy a cost effective solution in a ‘as a Service’ model for easy of consumption, billing and scaling up or down. For additional information, reference this article written by Irwin Lazar on Optimizing Native Voice for Microsoft Teams Direct Routing.
Direct Routing as a Service
The most viable option for adding voice to Microsoft Teams is end-to-end Direct Routing as a Service (DRaaS). These solutions are designed and architected to leverage the power of Microsoft’s cloud, built with security, scale and redundancy. Shared services minimize professional services and eliminates overhead costs.
A true DRaaS solution will be architected and governed by experts in carrier services, direct routing, data center, security and Teams. Activation will be simple, visible and intuitive with automation for set-up and ongoing management. Professional services will focus on the needed planning, migration and decommissioning versus building. Costs are predictable, fully inclusive and provide contract flexibility without managing ratios or surprise overage charges.
As organizations are in various stages of migrating workloads to the cloud, DRaaS is the preferred strategy for avoiding the complexity of building in-house to ensure customers are focused on their business instead of their backend. Tomorrow’s post will detail how service providers can leverage SIPPIO to activate new, revenue-producing user accounts in a matter of minutes with DRaaS.