August 29th, 2018 | 11am EDT

Direct Routing presents a new opportunity to capture revenue generating customers by delivering customized PSTN packages to Microsoft customers that are utilizing the voice capabilities of Microsoft Teams. The new architecture recently released by Microsoft ushers in a new opportunity to take market share through hosted, multi-tenant solutions.

Register for our webinar on Wednesday, August 29th at 11am EDT to learn how to capitalize on the momentum of customer migration from Skype for Business to Teams for voice, and the opportunity for new business that it represents. Brad Chapin, Director of Strategic Alliances and Shambhu Rai, Sr. Principal Product Manager will share what is changing and how to best position your business to take advantage of this opportunity.

REGISTER TODAY to receive our complimentary "Microsoft Direct Routing for CSPs FAQ" document!

Join us as we discuss the below topics and more!

• New Business Opportunities
• SIP Trunking to New Microsoft Teams Architecture
• Migration from Skype for Business to Teams for Voice
• Q & A

First Name: * Last Name: * Work Email: * Company: * Title: *  

Brad Chapin
Director of Strategic Alliances
Ribbon Communications

Shambhu Rai
Sr. Principal Product Manager
Ribbon Communications

Dwight Morse
Product Marketing Manager
Ribbon Communications

Capitalize on the momentum of customer migration from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams for voice

We're going to take you through a lot of different aspects about Microsoft teams kind of where it's come from how long it's been around, some of the new features that really are important for carriers, and how you can leverage what Microsoft has been doing. A lot of their migration from Skype for business to teams will go into more details about various routing options of how you can deploy this within your network along with some of the different scenarios that make sense. We'll also go into some of the challenges that enterprises face today that really are opportunities for you. Then kind of wrap it up with a few use cases and a little bit more.

Microsoft's adoption of Unified Communications (UC) in general, if you're familiar with Microsoft you know that they've been doing Unified Communications (UC) for a number of years. They started over a decade ago, probably over 15 years ago, and acquired Skype a couple years ago. When they did that they rebranded there UC offering Skype for Business. Skype for Business has billions of users, millions of minutes, billions of installs on this platform. So when we talk about hybrid voice deployments we're really specifically talking about Skype for business. If you look at their last quarterly report, again, tremendous growth from Microsoft. So if you look at how many people are paying year-over-year, you know, big growth up there. If you look at the revenue, again, lots of revenue and if you look at Gardner's most recent report just last month in terms of UC players, Microsoft always shows favorably on the list. 

So in this webinar, we're gonna talk about Microsoft Teams. What Microsoft Teams is, how it differs from Skype for Business, and then how Microsoft has kind of shifted their strategy to really include a lot of you and provide you with a piece of the pie with the ability to generate revenue. Microsoft celebrated about a year of Microsoft Teams, so if you're not familiar with Microsoft Teams, it's a platform that Microsoft is moving towards. It's a little different than Skype for Business and the traditional Unified Communications (UC) because it has the pervasive chat. So chat continues, people work in teams or channels and over the past year, more than 3 million teams were created. If you look at kind of the user base all over the globe people are using this, over 181 different countries are using Microsoft Teams all over the globe. So if you just offer services in the U.S. that's all right, because there's a good adoption within the U.S. But if you're a carrier that offers services elsewhere, there's a good chance that you can get a revenue stream from those teams users today, and we'll talk a little bit about how a few of the markets differ than other countries based on what Microsoft calls, "Calling Plans."

It's available in a lot of different languages, so really this is I would say Microsoft's flagship product for Unified Communications (UC) and migration to Unified Communications (UC). It offers a few different features and functionalities, like that pervasive chat, and they're working on making sure that all the feature transparency is the same between what people have escaped for Skype for business and with Microsoft Teams. There's also a lot of, what I would call, document repository sharing as well and that's kind of a big difference between Skype for business. Skype for business was more about sharing a desktop or maybe sending a file one-to-one, while Microsoft Teams is really about collaboration and having all your stuff centralized.

If we look at some of the use cases and what Microsoft calls Direct Routing, we'll first take a step back and talk about Skype. So Skype was, as I said, Microsoft's first foray into delivering Unified Communications online. So traditionally customers had bought Skype for Business, or prior to that, Lync, or as I mentioned earlier, OCS or LCS. That was all an on-premise implementation and as more things have been moving to the cloud and more customers have been tolerant and actually expecting to get their services from the cloud. A lot of that has just been through a variety of other commercial services that have made cloud and the security of the Internet, and even the stability of the internet, a more effective way of using technology. Microsoft has transitioned their products to also take advantage of that migration.