Pure IP’s Teams Predictions for 2022

Teams voice migrations will surge in 2022, with Operator Connect, Direct Routing, ACS and SIP Connect reshaping cloud calling. Published on UC Today.

Tom Wright

To kick off 2022, UC Today sat down with Tom Arbuthnot – Microsoft MVP and newly appointed Solutions Director at Pure IP – to ask him what he expects to be the big Teams trends this year.

Teams Phone Adoption will Accelerate

There was a huge wave of Teams adoption driven by the pandemic, when face-to-face meetings were no longer an option. This was mostly meetings and chat.

Arbuthnot said that many are now comfortable enough with the Teams platform to bring in other elements of their communication and collaboration estate.

Specifically, he expects the number of voice migrations to Teams to surge this year.

“It’s clear there has been an explosion of growth driven by people that have gone to Teams during the pandemic. They’ve moved all their meetings to Teams but in 2022, they’re moving the phone system over.”

Voice has become an increasingly important area of growth for Microsoft over recent years, which was highlighted when it announced Operator Connect last year. This gives businesses three options for plugging voice into Teams, alongside Direct Routing and Calling Plans.

Arbuthnot said that he expects Operator Connect to be the method of choice for most businesses.

“My opinion is that most people will go with Operator Connect, if they can, because it’s so simple. It takes all the management and complexity away from the customer and puts it on the carrier and Microsoft,” he said.

“If a business has straightforward requirements, and they just want to get to the cloud, I think Operator Connect will be the default. However, there are still valid use cases for Direct Routing, particularly when you get into more complex countries where there is a need for a local SBC or local connectivity”

Businesses Will Take Analogue Devices to the Cloud

Many businesses are in the process of moving their telephony to the cloud, but it’s easy to forget that some elements of this transition may be more complex than first thought.

Arbuthnot said that connecting remaining analogue devices to the cloud will be the final piece of the jigsaw for amany companies on their cloud journey.

This is an area that Pure IP has specialised in for some time, not least through its launch of SIP Connect last year.

“Connecting analogue devices to the cloud is often the last part of getting rid of the old PBXs,” Arbuthnot explained.

“There’s big demand for cloud voice and getting a typical knowledge worker to the cloud is relatively easy. But there are a lot of things like alarm systems, lift phones, modems and fax machines that are still important parts of businesses processes. All these things need to be considered if businesses want to move them to a fully cloud-managed model.”

Collaboration and Line of Business Integration Trends Beyond Voice Will Emerge

Voice may be a key component of Team’s growth this year, but Teams has the potential to touch virtually every element of business communication.

Arbuthnot said that he expects to see the platform become more prominent in other areas, particularly because of other developments from Microsoft that can be interwoven with Teams.

One area he highlighted was communication platform as a service, or CPaaS, for which Microsoft goes to market with Azure Communication Services (ACS).

ACS lets developers build voice, video chat and telephony into their applications, and is built on the same underlying technology that powers Teams. Interoperability between ACS and Teams was made generally available by Microsoft last year.

“I don’t think many organisations have fully got their head around just how much Teams offers, particularly with the ability to build line-of-business applications directly into it,” Arbuthnot said.

“This could include B2C scenarios, like healthcare to patients or retailers to customers, but also internal line of business challenges.”

“I think we’ll see more line of business things come into Teams as part of the workflow – so people won’t chat in teams and work somewhere else, they’ll actually work in Teams”

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