When you own most of your technology stack, you can do awesome things and you have expectations way beyond what dinosaurs can even imagine as possible. In fact, I often wonder what strategy beyond ‘we need Teams’ some of these muppets are following. They’re giving access to their customer base with literally zero value-added, to the 800 Pound Gorilla that is going to eat their lunch, and all for a quick buck. When said Gorilla decides they’re irrelevant, or rather, realises they’ve never even tried to be relevant, there’ll be a little purple radioactive puddle left on the floor.
Alas, when we set about implementing Teams, we wanted to do it properly, in a way that gave our customers a path to the future. It isn’t a silo tick-box exercise, but something beautifully integrated that gives real power and the ability to migrate gracefully from hosted PBX to Teams, or the other way, fully or partly. We think there’s enormous power in Teams, but also enormous power in hosted PBX, both as a means to manage the voice channel. Why make your customers choose a forklift upgrade that obsolesces you? Why not give them a glide path, or better still, the best of both. Back when businesses added value we called that a solution!
On our Hosted platform Teams numbers exist alongside a PBX seat. This means when you manage calls into, out of, and across the platform you can use Teams and SIP interchangeably for a given end-user customer. A user can have their calls routed to SIP or Teams, or both. You can enjoy platform features such as extension dialling, to and from, Teams or SIP. You can set-up platform features like call-recording or call-queues, into a hybrid estate of users – SIP, Teams or both – and of course you can change it whenever you like.
Microsoft are already working on their own CCaaS solutions so call queueing in a pure Teams environment will be coming, but at what cost, and how will it work for organisations who are not ready or able to be 100% Teams, or prefer a CRM other than Dynamics? Abstracting relevant features away and using Teams for what Teams does best, SIP for what SIP does best, enabling our customers to build an actual solution to their users’ challenges and add value seems logical to us! By contrast, those who have done Teams as a magic tick-box exercise and are adding zero-value, might as well be obsolesced away because there is no loss of solution whatsoever, just a shiny suit cut out of the middle. To butcher a metaphor: you don’t have to be able to outrun a 800-Pound Gorilla, you just have to run faster than the person next to you. As dinosaurs’ resellers get eaten, I like to think Simwood customers will be far away in the distance and, crucially, still moving, solving tomorrow’s problems.
Through the powerful medium of the screenshot, here’s a few examples of what I’ve just described in action.
- Here’s a sample call-queue where one of the members is using SIP and another is using Teams. Imagine this in a hybrid or multi-site call-centre environment.
- Teams users can be reached on their “legacy” PBX extension if they have one. Yes, Dorris on reception can work the way she’s always worked, even if some of the user base have migrated to Teams. There’s a lot of power in traditional PBX functionality that Teams doesn’t replace, so why lose it?
- Here’s an example of a call into a business routing to someone who, for whatever reason, wants calls presented in parallel over SIP and Teams, so they can choose which one to answer it on. Personally, I love Teams as a mobile / car client but I much prefer our Communicator on my desktop.
That’s just a few of the things you can achieve with this and the combinations are limitless. Now, at the risk of sounding like a late-night shopping channel, how much do you think all this costs? Others will charge you for UC and then charge you again for Teams, and won’t give you any of this convergence. So how much extra do we charge you for the convergence? Well, nothing! If you buy a UC seat, Teams is free in most circumstances so you can migrate or use both at zero cost. If you go Teams only there’s obviously no ‘seat’ being charged so we’ll just charge you for the Teams. Both will cost less than either via the purple route and you can rest confident there’s an army of shiny-suited knuckle draggers long behind you to feed the 800-Pound Gorilla.
“But”, I hear you cry, “we have our own UC Platform and just use Simwood for Carrier Services”. Relax my friend, do you really think we’d forget you? Simwood is vertically integrated, there’s no magic boxes. Most features we build into Hosted start in Carrier Services on which it builds. That makes the Sipcentric platform a reference implementation for things you can consume yourself in a lot of cases. We know we’ve got some documentation to catch up on but if you have a Teams enabled number on Carrier Services, you can deliver calls to it by sending them to us as an outbound call with the simple header `X-simwood-platform: teams` and we’ll take care of it. If you want to force the CLI on the Teams call to be that of an internal extension, just pass `X-simwood-forcecli: 1`. Job done!
That’s the power of the Simwood PotatoⓇ .
