Microsoft still have a way to go to translate the dominance of its Teams collaborations platform into direct routing customers according to Xelion Managing Director, Dave Reynolds.
Speaking to UC Today, Reynolds said that it was a “huge ask” for traditional resellers, focussed on selling mobile or Cloud PBX, to embrace Microsoft’s suite of solutions but added that resellers would be key to the success of direct routing in the SME market.
“Obviously Teams dominate the collaborations market now because it’s bundled with Microsoft 365, everyone gets it automatically installed and it’s on your screen before you know it, so people start using it.
I think direct routing in the channel is a challenge, although we’ve seen good take-up of it, I question whether it’s as big, in the channel, as people might claim. In the enterprise market, it is massive because Microsoft manages those enterprise accounts directly and they’re not going through resellers and dealers so the adoption is simpler.
But Microsoft can’t service the channel, so I think the take up in that market will be driven by how good resellers get at selling those services, and if resellers want to sell their services. We expect the 65 to 70% of our customer base that are Microsoft 365 customers to take our integration service next year, but only a small portion will then take the next step to enable direct routing.”
Reynolds added that barriers to adoption within the SME market include the cost of extra licences as well as the added work needed to incorporate direct routing into an overall solution.
“If you’re a small business with 20 employees and you want to give everyone direct routing, you have to have a 365 subscription, you need a phone system licence, then you’ve got your direct routing charges and also core costs on top of that.
Those costs can be bundled of course, but I think the cost implication is felt most in the SME sector. The enterprise sector doesn’t see that because they’ll go all in and operate separate call centres which won’t run on Microsoft. They don’t need a one size fits all solution because they’ll have specific products to service-specific branches of their business.
For a lot of resellers, I think it is a huge challenge learning Microsoft products but the vendors that have the most popular direct routing products will be the ones that are very click-and-go and don’t require any configuration. The solutions that make direct routing look and feel like you’re ordering, provisioning and setting up a traditional Cloud PBX licence or service will be the ones that will have the long term gain.”
