Microsoft Certifies Cisco Session Border Controls

We first learned of the news from Microsoft MVP, ‎Principal Solutions Architect, Modality Systems, Tom Arbuthnot, on his popular Tom Talks blog. There he wrote, "Cisco’s Session Border Controllers and the Cisco Unified Border Element (CUBE) are now certified for Microsoft Teams Direct Routing. Arbuthnot added, "Seeing two of the biggest players in the space working together like this is great." Further commenting, he said:

"We're awaiting the ability for Microsoft Teams Rooms to connect directly to Webex meetings and Cisco’s official Cloud video interop service to connect its standards-based endpoints to Microsoft Teams meetings"

When this does happen, rest assured, there will be a lot of happy end-users out there who rely on the robustness of each of the two platforms. Here's a list of Cisco's new interoperability functionalities, which have been certified, and run on IOS XE Amsterdam 17.2.1r:

• Cisco Unified Border Element (CUBE) for 1000 Series Integrated Services Routers
• Cisco Unified Border Element (CUBE) for 4000 Series Integrated Services Routers
• Cisco Unified Border Element (CUBE) for 1000V Series Cloud Services Router
• Cisco Unified Border Element (CUBE) for 1000 Series Aggregation Services Routers

According to Microsoft, the company only supports phone systems if certified devices are connected via direct routing. The collaboration company said it works with each vendor to work on the SIP interconnection protocols and to perform tests using third-party labs. Only devices that pass the tests are certified.

AudioCodes, Ribbon Communications, Oracle, and Metaswitch are a few other vendors that integrate deeply with the Microsoft Teams collaboration app. Filipp Seljanko, Senior Program Manager, Real-Time Communications, PSTN Direct Routing, Microsoft, first confirmed the new capability on his LinkedIn page, and the official list of system integrations has been updated.

Microsoft also rolled out Teams-Skype interoperability earlier this month. Now, on either platform, Microsoft said "Customers can discover users via an email search, then chat or call using audio/video. Clients supported include desktop, web, and mobile (iOS/Android). Admins can control user access to this feature from the Microsoft Teams Admin Center."