Wednesday, September 30th | 11am EST

Microsoft Teams use has gone massively in 2020. Today, most of that use is limited to using Teams for collaboration and file sharing. However, IT managers are rapidly extending Teams use by turning up its Phone System capabilities, to place and receive business phone calls. MSOs need to act immediately by delivering focused messaging to this audience and by preparing their networks to deliver SIP Trunks for Teams Direct Routing. Providers already have most of the network elements in-place to win in this space, but their SIP trunking business is at immediate risk if they don’t focus on this market.

This webinar will delve into the characteristics of this market and the enterprise buyers’ expectations when choosing a SIP Trunking provider for Direct Routing. Ribbon expects Microsoft Teams to have 25 to 30% of the UC market in just a few years. We will explore what services and even what messages are required to acquire these Teams accounts. There are no geographical barriers to competition, Teams users can buy trunks from any provider, anywhere. That creates both opportunity and risk, the first movers will capture the business. We will look at how providers are winning new business today and what will be required as the market matures.

This webinar is for Cable providers interested in delivering SIP Trunking and managed services to organizations of all sizes:

• Why are businesses adopting Microsoft Phone System and connecting with Teams Direct Routing?
• What is the market opportunity for SIP trunking for Microsoft Teams?
• Will enterprises adopt Teams Phone System entirely or migrate over time?
• What is required in your core network and at the enterprise edge to securely connect Teams to the PSTN?
• What are some of the deployment models (technical and financial) for MSOs and enterprises?
• Real-world case studies
• Live Q&A

Greg Zweig
Director, Solutions Marketing
Ribbon

Brian Gregory
Director, Channel Marketing
Ribbon

WEBINAR: Cable Providers Must Enable Direct Routing for Microsoft Teams

Wednesday, September 30th | 11am EST

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This has been a massive transition and there has been a significant uptick in the usage of products like Teams because of COVID 19. There has been a large movement to video-based communications, both for business purposes and for learning purposes. And most people believe once we find our way past this pandemic that movement will continue and solutions like Teams are going to be a big part of how work gets done. A question being asked is what has the adoption of Microsoft Teams been by the workforce? One of the big transitions that we see coming up is the movement to have teams being a larger part of the enterprise, particularly with Direct Routing. Direct Routing, meaning, the integrating phone services into Teams. The employee base already knows what Teams is and they’ve already been trained and has already experienced it. This makes the transition to voice services into Teams to be very easy and painless. In 2021, we expect to see a greater level of adoption of Teams. Many of the large cable providers, particularly in North America, are already seeing that their contact centers and call centers are receiving more inquiries from customers about how they can provide Direct Routing for Teams.

Let’s talk about the market itself from industry analyst. We use some third-party data from analyst firms on looking at the overall unified communications market and how much Microsoft Teams is poised to take a slice of that market. Most analysts believe this is $25-30 billion a year market going into the early part of the next decade. Using some basic assumptions on how what we believe Microsoft is poised to take, they're going to be roughly between 20-30% of the overall market for unified communications. That's a staggering number considering all of the folks that are in this marketplace today. And, I'd say there's two big reasons for that. The first is Microsoft obviously been in this market for awhile with Skype for Business and other products. That section of the market's going to be moving to Teams over time and that's slowly happening. Then the second is really how Microsoft has gone to market with teams and bundling that with the overall Office 365 suite and it really comes for free.

So what does that entail?

As a company looks to move to Teams for their phone system there are four things to consider. First, you need to license the phone system. Microsoft has a license structure, most commonly in the enterprise's look at the E3 and E5 licenses. The E5 includes the Microsoft phone system while the E3 is required for an add on. So, that really unlocks the telephony component of Teams. Second, once you've licensed it, you need to connect to the phone network and there's two main ways of doing that. There is Microsoft Calling Plans that are focused to the maybe down market. The other is Teams Direct Routing, which is using a third-party telephony provider for voice services. Thirdly, there’s configuration. The one critical element there is it's a requirement to have a session border controller as the demarcation between the Microsoft Network and the phone network. That’s a required element, a certified session border control. Ribbon is a provider of certified session border controllers. Fourthly, there’s deploying the monitoring and analytics security to make sure that your environment is working as it should, with doing root cause analysis, solving problems, all the kind of things that a service provider would do as part of their service offering.