Microsoft Teams has experienced exponential growth during the novel Coronavirus period. Back in March, Microsoft reported 44 million daily active users, and just over a month later, the company had gained an additional 31 million daily active users, bringing its user-count to 75 million.
Along with a rise in demand for viable work from home solutions, many organizations that selected Microsoft Teams quickly realized to achieve an effective unified communications experience, it needed to integrate its enterprise telephony with the popular team collaboration app. This is where service providers and integrators come into the equation.
They’ve had to help many companies who realized that Teams is great for internal communication and collaboration, but even better when used for external conversations and to connect millions of new remote workers with customers.
The folks at AudioCodes say this is where those in the partner community are able to step up and offer a viable resolution. “Traditional voice resellers have seen their business impacted by the growth of Microsoft Teams into the UC space they previously dominated, so to keep those customers they needed to integrate their PBX business with Microsoft Teams quickly and easily.”
Jason Wyatt is a UC specialist, technology marketer and wears a lot of other hats over at AudioCodes, and he told me, Microsoft 365 resellers are also at their busiest and trying to keep up with the growth of Teams, but may lack the voice experience and skills necessary to connect the two environments. AudioCodes Live Cloud for Microsoft Teams is AudioCodes’ solution for Microsoft 365 resellers, integrators, as well as service providers, and the interest levels are high as a result of the rapid growth in Microsoft Teams, Wyatt shared.
“As more companies realized they needed strong voice capabilities in addition to Teams collaboration, our AudioCodes Live Cloud for Microsoft Teams offering took off in popularity”
The solution enables service providers and Microsoft 365 partners to customize UCaaS offerings based on Microsoft Teams and white-label the services. AudioCodes extends the voice connectivity infrastructure setup via Direct Routing SBCs, customer onboarding, user lifecycle management, and tools for monitoring, reporting, as well as, analytics. All this creates quite a compelling argument and will likely enable the further sales of its Live offering as Microsoft Teams continues its growth in the UC space. “For us, and for partners, the flexibility of the platform is one of its top-selling points.”
“Also, we know we can help partners get their Teams voice services up-and-running quickly, all service providers have to do is to supply data connectivity and SIP trunking minutes”
AudioCodes’ offering breathes new life into the Teams platform by enabling users to connect professionally with key business stakeholders such as customers and suppliers, via the ‘AudioCodes Live’ services and optionally, a series of Teams-certified IP desk phones and dedicated video and audio meeting room devices, too. All this, bundled into a subscription-based per user per month model that provides enterprises with the agility they need.
I’m told downsizing, and upscaling, should you need to, is a simple undertaking with the use of AudioCodes Live for Microsoft Teams. As we continue to forge into the future, there will undoubtedly be other challenges we face to enable high-quality voice on the Teams platform (for external purposes), but for now, it seems as if AudioCodes is well-positioned to capture a large portion of the market who seeks advanced telephony integrated with the Microsoft Teams client.
