Since its launch in the second half of last year, Operator Connect has generally been well received by the market and is growing in popularity as one of the three options available to add external calling to Microsoft Teams.
But despite all the publicity and its global reach, there are still a few misconceptions floating around the market creating unnecessary barriers for companies considering its adoption.
We spoke with Ian Guest, Marketing Director at Pure IP, to get his feedback on the points in question, focused on the migration process, costs and its general reliability.
“It’s not unusual for new solutions to be greeted with some degree of scepticism and uncertainty in the early phases of its life, as regardless of the development effort, those early days are going to contain an element of learnings. That is only natural,” said Guest.
“But in the case of Operator Connect, much of the learnings were done before the product was released into the market. As one of the original partners involved in the program, we saw the process first-hand from conception to launch.”
Guest continued, “When Operator Connect went into public preview in May of last year, much of the heavy lifting had been done and the solution was already robust enough to support the initial early adopters. True, there were still tweaks being made at that phase, but by the time it got to GA, there was no question that Operator Connect was going to be a serious option to support enterprise telephony.”
With a growing number of customers using Operator Connect, it would appear that the unreliability might be somewhat of a red herring, or at worst, limited to small bumps in the road that you would expect from any solution during a preview.
Or could the reliability be linked with the topic of migrating to Operator Connect, the next question posed to Guest.
“The process of migrating to Operator Connect is in theory simpler than with other platforms, particularly if you know what you are doing.” He continues, “Migrating services from other non-Teams services is relatively straight forward with everything being done in the M365 admin centre. Numbers are provisioned and pushed directly into the customers admin center.”
He continues, “Migrating from Calling Plans or Direct Routing is again relatively easy but needs to be done a specific way to ensure services are not affected or numbers locked. Done correctly with the support of a knowledgeable Operator Connect partner, there is no problem.”
That then bought us onto our last topic; the associated costs, and specifically, whether Operator Connect is more costly than Direct Routing.
“This could be true but only because the decision on pricing comes down to each individual carrier on Operator Connect and isn’t mandated by Microsoft. From our perspective at Pure IP, we make no distinction between Direct Routing and Operator Connect pricing.”
Guest continues, “Operator Connect is less complex than Direct Routing for both the customer and carrier, so, in our eyes, there is no feasible reason why Operator Connect should be more expensive. It is probably more likely to happen with carriers who have legacy revenue streams, such as consulting services, to protect.”
