CIO OPINION
Several years ago – pre-pandemic – network giants such as BT, Gamma, Colt, AT & T, Verizon and Lumen Technologies first started offering cloud-based services. This was the first iteration of cloud telephony. The on-premises Private Branch Exchange( PBX) infrastructure that businesses used to handle calls was replaced by servers in the cloud as part of the carrier’ s technology and network. This led to the virtualisation of calls that could be received wherever the user had an internet connection, as opposed to a physical location in the office dictated by a Public Switched Telephone Network( PSTN).
This marked the beginning of the end of phone calls coming into a building, being routed to a desk, and that being the only place they ring.
Around the same time, we started to see collaboration tools take off too.
The dawn of Microsoft Teams
In fact, Teams is Microsoft’ s fastest-growing business app in the company’ s history. The pandemic was the catalyst for the platform achieving mainstream adoption. At the time( in 2020), the CEO Satya Nadella said,“ We have seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.”
The unification gap in Unified Communications
The gap in the major UC platforms, such as Microsoft Teams, Cisco’ s WebEx and Zoom, is that telecoms is a separate implementation.
What many multinational businesses fail to realise is that something must be done additionally and separately from simply investing in a UC platform to deliver truly unified communications. With an out-of-the-box Microsoft solution, for example, it’ s not possible to make or receive a call to or from a mobile or business phone directly to or from Teams – far from unified.
With around 320 million active daily users, Microsoft Teams is by far the market-leading collaboration tool today, particularly amongst larger multinational companies. Following previous iterations with OCS, Lync and Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams came to the fore pre-COVID-19, and certainly enduring the pandemic, as the Unified Communications( UC) platform of choice, allowing organisations and their workforces to function in both remote and hybrid settings.
It’ s this demand for a more seamless model that supports telephony, audio / video conferencing, messaging and collaboration, that has led to another big restructuring within the telecoms industry in a relatively short time frame.
Telephony has not only migrated to the cloud, but it’ s now being integrated with UC platforms. With the integration of telecoms into Microsoft Teams, for example, if you have a business phone, the experience
www. intelligentcio. com INTELLIGENTCIO NORTH AMERICA 45