Zoom is giving the top two a run for their money, adding on powerful voice capability. CallTower announced last month the addition of Zoom Phone to its stable of UCaaS offerings, expanding on their extensive services from Microsoft and Cisco.
Zoom Phone provides customers with the ability to make voice calls alongside the conferencing calls that made them a verb during the pandemic. These plans are being offered under a “Bring Your Own Carrier” arrangement where Zoom license holders can purchase CallTower for the voice component piecemeal.
Or if they choose to streamline the process, organizations can bundle their Zoom licenses and access to CallTower’s global voice under a single contract via Zoom partner CallTower.
This is all good news for organizations looking to include one of the top three UCaaS products into their workspace, improving their capacity for collaboration and communication internally and with outside partners and customers.
The addition of Zoom Phone marks the logical progression for CallTower and its customers, expanding its already expansive collection of UCaaS and CCaaS offerings, including Microsoft Teams, Direct Routing for Teams, Webex, among a host of others.
Speaking with CallTower’s Chief Revenue Officer William Rubio, he tells UC Today that, “CallTower already has a strong relationship with Zoom, which we’ve expanded upon with our acquisition of OneStream Networks last year. Being able to provide licenses for Zoom Calling and now as a carrier for Zoom Phone helps to round out our offerings with long-time partners Microsoft and Cisco.”
In a Microsoft Teams World, Why Zoom Phone?
Given the dominance of Microsoft and Cisco in the workplace, UC Today was curious as to who exactly the customer is for Zoom Phone?
“Chances are that your grandparents and kids know how to use Zoom,” says Rubio, explaining that, “It became nearly ubiquitous and synonymous with conference calling during the pandemic, including for whole categories of people who had never spent time conference calling over video.”
“So when it comes time for some of our customers, who may already be a Microsoft shop, to add cloud voice on top, a lot of folks we speak to want to go with Zoom because they are already so comfortable with it,” he says. “Zoom is incredibly easy to use, and the pre-existing familiarity with it makes it a simpler transition for a lot of people when making a transition to the cloud for their organization.”
“A lot of customers have made that decision that they’re saying ‘I’m using a Zoom meeting, why don’t we just go ahead and tack on the phone part of it as well?'” he adds.
For a lot of customers, according to Rubio, their decision to go with Zoom comes out of an internal discovery process where they find out what works best for each of their departments.
“So maybe the dev and admin teams prefer to work with Teams, but management will discover that their sales and marketing teams are already running a shadow IT on Zoom, so the logical next step is to just make it official and give them Zoom Phone to bring everything under one sanctioned roof,” Rubio explains.
While most organizations are not likely to replace their existing Microsoft Teams or voice with Zoom Phone, Rubio does see Zoom Phone as an attractive option for switching out the on-prem services like Avaya and Mitel as well as the more private label UCaaS platforms that may be floating around out there like 8×8 and RingCentral.
Why Choose Zoom Phone?
There are a slew of good reasons to give Zoom Phone a look. Here are just a few.
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People know it. They love it.
It’s stable, secure, and familiar.
Take advantage of the opportunity to avoid lengthy onboarding and a ton of support questions.
Your teams have already been using Zoom to attend classes, catch up with family and friends, and pretty much everything else. Getting them to use it for work is going to be an easy lift.
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Features. Lots of features for where you work
Along with all of the features that you’d expect like voicemail, call transferring, call forwarding, etc, and the fact that it can replace your PBX, one point that stands out is its flexibility.
Zoom plays very well with others. Device-agnostic, it works well on computers, conference room systems, mobile, you name it.
It also integrates well with your Microsoft ecosystem like Outlook.
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Global Coverage
The pandemic gave Zoom the opportunity to grow faster than they would have otherwise, meaning that for a young company, they have reliability and service that punches above their weight across the world.
When paired with CallTower’s extensive global voice support, made stronger by their acquisition of OneStream Networks last year, Zoom is going to give customers the support they need wherever they are on the map.
My Thoughts
CallTower has always presented itself as a provider of solutions over any given product.
Having built out their extensive offerings for Microsoft and Cisco over the years, adding Zoom Phone as an option for their customers makes perfect sense.
We have seen in the past couple of years during the transition to remote and thereby cloud, that Zoom has climbed its way up to be a major competitor with the other UCaaS players like Microsoft and Cisco, even if it is to a smaller degree than these giants of the industry.
In March, Zoom announced that they had surpassed the 5.5 million seat mark in Q4, up from the 4 million stats they released in September last year. This is even more impressive when you compare the rate of growth to Microsoft’s reported addition of 5 million PSTN seats to their Teams Phone.
To be clear, Zoom is not going to replace Microsoft anytime soon, if (ignoring their scale) only for the fact that Redmond is the beating heart of many an organization’s operations, making adding voice with Direct Routing the easiest tack on for them.
That said, when paired with Zoom’s collaboration solutions, there are plenty of reasons why Zoom Phone, along with the other bits that Zoom has on offer — all backed by CallTower’s unified platform and service — has value worth following up on.
