Microsoft Teams as a tool, with channelised chat, collaboration and meetings capabilities is the tech success story of the pandemic. It is Microsoft’s fastest growing business app – ever. According to their CEO (Satya Nadella), they received more than 3 years-worth of adoption in the first 3 months of the pandemic – and it’s still rising.
During the pandemic many organisations realised the benefits that Microsoft Teams provided by allowing their employees to continue to communicate, collaborate, and importantly remain productive despite not being in the office. In the most extreme of circumstances, remote working was implemented in every company across the globe, and those with Microsoft Teams were able to make the transition far easier than those without it.
If anything, the pandemic proved without question that cloud services are essential in today’s working environment. The ability to communicate, collaborate, and engage with customers and partners from any device, and from any location has opened-up opportunities for organisations to embrace a new hybrid way of working, one that is better for them, and better for their employees.
Of course, key to this is Microsoft Teams’ core ability to bring together and connect users through standard collaboration features such as chat, conferencing and document sharing. Connecting teams users as if they were in the office, allowing them to ‘continue working as normal’ at home, is clearly the success story of what has been a particularly trying time for everyone.
As we start to hopefully emerge from the tail end of the pandemic, and organisations begin to review the overall impact it’s had on their business and working practises, I’m sure you’ll agree that the majority will see Microsoft Teams and Cloud Services as a significant investment that has exceeded original expectations.
What we are also seeing is as organisations are continuing to review what other benefits these services can provide, there is an overwhelming interest and aggressive deployment of Microsoft Phone System.
Microsoft has long provided stable and increasingly functional PSTN services via Lync and Skype, and we’ve seen how Teams has enhanced this offering still further. Cloud telephony is clearly here to stay and should be at the forefront of thinking as to how best organisations can enhance their investment in Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft Teams is clearly the benchmark cloud telephony platform today, with many organisations realising the substantial commercial and soft benefits it affords. Organisations adopting Phone System (Microsoft’s name for Teams PSTN services) have been able to consolidate resources associated with managing a disparate legacy PBX estate and embrace a singular platform with standard user experience across devices.
As we consider and recount how Microsoft Teams has consolidated management of UC technologies across the business and how Microsoft Phone System will enhance this experience still further, there is however one area of the PSTN world that remains complex, requiring considerable effort to manage and understand. I am of course referring to the world of the carrier.
Cloud telephony addresses so many issues associated with maintaining and supporting traditional on-premises equipment, but doesn’t address the issue for multinationals who still require relationships with different local carriers in regions across the globe. Carriers by nature have to be regulated in the countries that they provide service. Meaning they are typically regional, owing to the physical networks that they own, hence why the world’s largest carriers tend to provide services to users in a relatively small range of countries.
These services are often locally managed by teams and personnel in the countries these services are provided. This results in little to no central administration, meaning there’s a general lack of understanding from a centralised business perspective as to what services are being provided where, what the cost of these service are, and how long these contracts have left to run.
As you can see, this is a considerable barrier to those looking for a single, consolidated platform.
Having recognised the opportunity to address this final hurdle and streamline the management and administration of the whole UC&T environment, thus ‘closing the loop’, LoopUp are able to engage with customers and act as a single trusted provider across all elements of your Microsoft Phone System cloud telephony estate.
Engaging with LoopUp enables you to have all your users on Microsoft Teams Phone System from one service provider, on one global network, administered on one management system – wherever in the world they may be.
Or put more simply:
- One global service provider
- One cloud implementation
- One central management platform
Ultimately improving customer buying power, whilst removing a significant headache for many organisations, which frees up more time for more innovative projects.
Contact us for more information if you’re interested in finding out a little more about us.
