Mark Herbert, co-founder of Call2Teams and Head of Partner Innovation for Dstny Automate talks through the opportunities that working with Microsoft Teams presents. Looking at how to simply add calling to Microsoft Teams to make the most of the rise of Microsoft Teams.
1. Sizing up the Microsoft Teams voice opportunity
2. Adding voice to Microsoft Teams
3. Why is Call2Teams different?
4. Global leader in voice-enabling Microsoft Teams
5. What is the forecast growth for PSTN calling in Microsoft Teams?
Sizing up the Microsoft Teams opportunity
Microsoft Teams is Microsoft’s fastest-growing business application of all time!
There’s been quite a lot of time for that to be in, so that’s a pretty good achievement.
Microsoft Teams are well beyond 270 million monthly active users, probably heading toward 300. They’re putting on about 3 million users every month or so. So, it’s growing at a rapid rate.
Within the UC marketplace and collaboration, Teams is becoming one of the main dominant platforms.
Adding voice to Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams fairly early on brought in telephony capabilities, so the ability to make and receive phone calls from within the Team’s client, and that, from a user perspective means that they only have one application to use during their workday. One application where they can access their files, edit, collaborate, message, and also talk externally from the organization.
The telephony aspect has always been included as an add-on to Microsoft Teams, and still is. So, customers are faced with the challenge of, ‘I want to bring calling into Teams, how do I achieve that? What do I do about my existing phone platform, replace it, or somehow integrate it?’
Call2Teams has the ability to integrate an existing telephony estate into Microsoft Teams, to give the end user that single application to do calling, but still retain the enterprise Unified Communications system and all of the processes and procedures that are bound into that.
Call2Teams and our partners help customers quickly get that calling experience, but without compromising their existing enterprise telephony estate.
Why is Call2Teams different?
Call2Teams is different to other direct routing providers in that we connect to a PBX and not just to a PSTN SIP Trunk or just the general telephony world. Having that connection to a customer’s existing PBX and UC platform means that the migration really on to Microsoft Teams as a calling experience is much easier, they don’t need to do a replacement project, it’s simply an add-on project, so things become a lot easier, there’s much less change, much lower risk and costs for customers.
That’s why we’ve built a platform to do this in the cloud, customers don’t need to deploy any software or hardware. And that cloud now spans the globe across six Azure regions, on four continents and has become, we’ve been told this by the market analysts in the business sector, the de facto way to voice-enable Microsoft Teams, for a very large sector of the market.
We’ve been working with our partners to give them access to a Team’s offer for their customers. That’s really important, where our partner community are facing the challenge of customers asking them, “How do I Teams enable this?”. Our partners need to easily get that experience to the end-user, and we have given them exactly that. So, we’ve really helped our partner community.
Our partner community are faced with a growing market. So as Teams grows, their opportunity grows as well. So, we’re seeing continual growth within our market. It’s not just a migration tool. It’s actually a new proposition, interesting for customers to use.
Call2Teams, a global leader in voice-enabling Microsoft Teams
Call2Teams has the benefit of working with Microsoft Teams and the growth of Microsoft Teams has also given growth within Call2Teams, as channel partners become more aware of the need to Teams enable their solution. Today we have partnerships with over 300 really good service providers and UC provider partners around the world. Our end-user communities are in over 110 countries. We really are a truly global operation.
We run a 24/7 managed service to provide this, we’ve got extremely skilled individuals who can really understand the challenge of this integration we provide. So Call2Teams, within its partner base, we can see access into organizations with hundreds of millions of Teams users, and that for us is the challenge – how do we help our partners activate that base and gain the market share within their existing customers?
Today, within Call2Teams itself on our platform, and also within the Dstny group, we have about 1 million users using Microsoft PSTN services.
Where you see Microsoft saying that they’ve got 12 million PSTN-enabled users, we’ve got somewhere between 8% to 10% of those users. It really is quite an achievement, to have a significant market share of the entire global PSTN market within our group. So that’s really an exciting statistic for us.
What is the forecast growth for PSTN calling in Microsoft Teams?
The latest analyst growth projections, show that those 12 million users which are PSTN enablement today are probably going to double in the next three to four years. So that market share, and that’s also with Teams growing as well, but certainly just the PSTN-enabled users will double.
If you look at the analysis from the Cavell Group, then they are showing that doubling of PSTN-enabled users over the next three or four years. We’re looking really to how we can help our partners become part of that growth, and I don’t think that’s going to be too difficult really, to see how we can achieve some really exciting numbers going forward.