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unified communications. With an out-of-thebox Microsoft solution, for example, it’ s not possible to make or receive a call to or from a mobile or business phone directly to or from Teams – far from unified.
It’ s this demand for a more seamless model that supports telephony, audio / video conferencing, messaging and collaboration, that has led to another big restructuring within the telecoms industry in a relatively short time frame.
Telephony has not only migrated to the cloud, but it’ s now being integrated with UC platforms. With the integration of telecoms into Microsoft Teams, for example, if you have a business phone, the experience of making and receiving calls to and from all numbers is fully incorporated... fully unified.
The limitations of geographically defined telcos
Riding this wave, the likes of BT, Gamma, Colt, AT & T, Verizon and Lumen Technologies are all part of Microsoft’ s Operator Connect partnership programme – an operatormanaged service that allows external phone calls to and from Teams. While this cannibalises their own cloud telephony solutions to some extent, it allows them to integrate their telecom capabilities with Microsoft Teams.
But, for enterprises, there are limitations to working with these telco giants, particularly when it comes to global organisations. Their legacy was laying copper wire into buildings to deliver telephony. While network provision, i. e. broadband with peripheral services on top, has replaced telephony as carriers’ primary business, their core asset of fibre and network is still very much a physical business. And, as such, they remain largely geographically defined, whereas enterprises, on the other hand, are scaling at a multinational level.
The attraction of multinational consolidation
So where does that leave multinational enterprises who are still dealing with the perceived reality of managing an international patchwork of multiple in-country carriers, contracts, tariffs, equipment and services and the prohibitive complexity that comes with it? These multinational businesses are naturally keen to consolidate how they buy and manage telephony integrated with UC platforms, such as Microsoft Teams, globally. Why would they choose to continue managing telephony disparately and locally when they are now managing their primary Teams communications set-up centrally and globally?
With the advent of single vendor service providers capable of deploying, delivering and supporting telephony anywhere in the world – all integrated with Teams – multinational customers benefit from the equipment-free implementation of Teams cloud telephony. They can also achieve this with one global contract, one global management portal, one global tariff and one global support team.
For the enterprise, the cost savings and operational efficiencies are compelling and for the end-users the communications are, finally, truly unified. �
Steve Flavell, Co-CEO and Cofounder, LoopUp
Intelligent SME. tech
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