There are plenty of good reasons for businesses of all sizes to deploy Microsoft Teams, with a common thread being the need to support a collaborative work environment. Most IT decision-makers recognize that the market has moved on from using applications in a standalone fashion, and how Unified Communications represents a more modern approach to collaborative forms of working.
As businesses become increasingly cloud-centric, UCaaS is emerging as the leading deployment model for collaboration, and given Microsoft’s desktop dominance, it’s easy to see why Teams is often the first choice for IT. There certainly is no shortage of purpose-built UCaaS offerings to choose from, but for Microsoft-based IT environments, Teams is the fastest and easiest path to cloud-based collaboration. This approach may allow IT to quickly move on to more pressing and complex challenges, but I often hear how this is a more complex situation.
IT Challenges When Deploying Teams for Collaboration
Teams is – and can be – a one-and-done decision for collaboration, but for businesses that are early in their cloud journey, there are a few more layers to consider. The starting point for what makes things complicated is the fact that telephony remains integral to collaboration, as well as still being a core communications application. Telephony has never been native to Microsoft, and while viable partner options exist for Teams, many businesses still remain tied to premises-based phone systems.
Integrating these premises-based systems with cloud-based Teams will present challenges, some of which will only become apparent after deployment. VoIP has been displacing TDM for years, and as more forms of voice become cloud-based, enterprises are losing their in-house telephony expertise. This makes it harder to IT to navigate the subtleties of legacy telephony when it comes to integration with Teams.
Even if IT has that expertise, there are other legacy telephony realities to consider when compared against the flexibility and economics of cloud-based collaboration platforms like Teams. Premises-based phone systems may be built to last, but maintenance contracts are costly, upgrade options are limited, EOL support will come at some point, and the sunk costs make this capital investment difficult to justify to keep supporting.
On a related front, Millennial workers are more inclined to use smartphones for voice than desk phones, leading to higher mobility costs for the company. These are just a few of factors creating pain points for IT once they start their cloud journey to UCaaS with Teams. Fewer and fewer IT organizations are willing or able to take on all these telephony challenges once deploying Teams, and this presents an opportunity for channels.
How Channel Partners Can Respond
As channels evolve their offerings to become cloud-based, they need to strike a balance between offerings they can comfortably support, along with driving both top and bottom-line growth. Those premises-based phone systems that customers still use may have kept the channel partner strong financially in the past, but they are not serving the end customer’s needs very well today. As these customers start getting comfortable with Teams – along with other cloud applications – a chorus will rise, asking why can’t they do the same with telephony?
Demand for Teams remains strong – and that’s a good thing – but channels don’t earn big margins, often less than 10%. The real payoff is selling a very sticky platform that makes it easy for customers to get on their cloud journey for collaboration. As Teams takes hold, partners can layer on other cloud applications that they are well-positioned to support, such as conferencing, call recording and e-faxing. This is what drives their growth – especially margins – and Teams can be a very good anchor for enabling those opportunities.
But then there’s voice, perhaps the stickiest application of them all, but one that most channel partners can’t support very well on their own. Microsoft Calling Plan is the path of least resistance, but the limitations as a voice solution are well-known, especially for global customers. Perhaps just as important, Calling Plan isn’t really a revenue-generator for channels, since the payback is usually a credit towards Microsoft marketing to support the business.
The better way to go is for channels to offer their own cloud voice service that seamlessly integrates with Teams and provides a consistent UX across all communications modes. Direct routing has been widely touted as the solution here, and many vendors offer some form of this. That said, direct routing is really a methodology for voice-enabling Teams rather than being a turnkey solution that partners can sell.
While many partners would like to build a voice practice to enhance their overall book of business, they are not generally inclined to build the solution, and that’s why direct routing alone isn’t the full story. What they really need is a platform that connects dial tone to an SBC, and manages the provisioning, call routing, administration, billing, reporting, etc. – all in a highly automated manner and activated quickly – not six months from now.
That requires a range of expertise that channel partners generally don’t have, and when it comes to optimizing the customer’s cloud investment in Microsoft, this calls for telephony integration capabilities with Teams and often Azure, along with maintaining relationships with carriers that support Teams. Not only does this represent a complete solution to voice-enable Teams, but it provides a welcome alternative for having to contact Microsoft for telephony-related technical support.
How Even Microsoft Comes Out Ahead
It should be clear now how both channels and end customers would benefit. Having a proper cloud telephony solution for Teams further validates IT’s decision to go with Microsoft as they adopt cloud for collaboration.
Let’s not forget Microsoft, as they represent the third leg of a stool upon which rests what all businesses – and partners – want as digital transformation reshapes the workplace; namely a complete, fully integrated UCaaS platform that enables collaboration across all modes and work environments.
Not that Microsoft needs our help, but the UCaaS market is very crowded, and many players have the native voice capability that Teams lacks. Their Calling Plan has shortcomings and isn’t the most attractive offering for channels to sell. Not surprisingly, then, it’s not getting the traction Microsoft expected, but it’s also not a big money-maker for them. Their business is software and cloud, and their priority in this market is selling Teams licenses, not voice minutes. Voice makes Teams sticky, and if offerings like Partner Portal help drive daily active usage metrics, then Microsoft is happy.
