By Simon Woodhead
Love it or hate it, Teams is here and isn’t going away. While we showcased a prototype integration with the Sipcentric platform back at SimCon3, we’ve not done anything with it.
Frazer has banged on about needing Teams for seemingly every new prospect; I’ve pushed back asking to see just one willing and able to buy it rather than it being a tick box exercise. I think we’re still in tick box territory in the market but in our latest strategic thinking, something has changed and it has new relevance. I won’t go down that rabbit hole just yet, save to say that to be where the puck is going, we need Teams.
Now, if you’re responding to a tickbox requirement, the conventional approach is to either not bother until the tick boxes missed hurt, or to take a short-term get-it-done type approach to being able to tick that darn box. This is the old finance vs sales tug of war – sales want the tickbox, finance can’t see the point, and technology isn’t involved! It has led many competitors to not bother with Teams, and many more to procure magic boxes or services that they can daisy-chain with other magic boxes, where relevant, to keep sales quiet. If you’re thinking strategically, that approach is horrific; if you’re thinking strategically, you do it right.
So, that said, I’m delighted to announce that Teams is coming to the Simwood network and we’re looking for beta testers. ‘Doing it right’ doesn’t involve magic boxes on some of the edges but instead requires Teams to be integrated right into the core, viewed as a first-class transport alongside SIP and the PSTN. That’s what we’ve done, with Teams endpoints configurable as trunk types just like SIP or the PSTN. We think it is pretty cool and while nothing ever stands still here, with plenty of improvements to make over time, from a strategic perspective we’re where we need to be, before we need to be there, even though others have ticked the box for some time. They’ll say we’re late to the party; I’d say we don’t want to go to that party!
This means one massive thing for Carrier Services customers and that is that Teams is an option on every number on the network. UK geographic numbers, USA numbers, ported numbers, your hosted ranges, mobile numbers, non-geo numbers… You get the picture. Just as you’ve set SIP as an endpoint before, now you can set Teams where appropriate. And this is global.
This isn’t available on the Sipcentric platform yet but given our vertical integration, once live in Carrier Services, it can be consumed by the Sipcentric platform, and so on down the line.
If you’re interested in beta testing this please get in touch with Frazer and we’ll pop you on the list. We’ll be announcing pricing (which will enable you to be disruptive) once we’re live-live.
