Voiceflex is reporting a surge in Microsoft Teams direct routing as organisations adapt to the new era of hybrid work.
Direct routing connects Teams to an organisation’s traditional phone network (PSTN). This enables them to make, receive and transfer calls to and from Teams like a traditional PBX system, but without the need of having a hosted telephone application or on-premise PBX.
Voiceflex says that between October 2020 and October 2021, the number of SIP trunks it sold increased by 20 percent. However, sales of Microsoft Teams direct routing increased by 80 percent.
“We would have expected that because it’s a net new market for us, but it’s quite a considerable uptake in the marketplace. Predominantly, we’ve seen it at the larger end of the market – at the top end of SME, 50 tenants applications and above,” said Paul Taylor, sales & marketing director at Voiceflex.
There is particular traction within organisations looking to use direct routing to connect its international operations quickly and easily connect via a single tenant.
“We’re working now with one potential customer which is going into 60 countries around the world, on the same tenant, and looking for international SIP breakout. We’re also working with another which has 3500 users on the same Microsoft tenant. Another has 270,000 Microsoft users,” said Taylor.
“Because they use one platform for communications, they are looking for one complete platform for their voice connectivity worldwide, which we’ve never seen before. It’s a unique offering that we can break out in so many different countries from the SIP offering.”
Opportunity for partners
At the same time, Taylor said Voiceflex is seeing the number of traditional telephone calls dropping through the floor.
“When you buy an onsite PBX, when you work out how many telephone lines you need per user, you normally do an aggregate of one in four. So if you’re selling a 12 user system, you will put in three telephone lines in. Once you get a degree of mass, it’s one telephone line required for every 20 users. With Teams, we’re actually seeing the concurrent call rate across the platforms is about one in every 30.
“A lot of people are moving away from making telephone calls and are instead using the internet – whether that’s WhatsApp, Teams or a Zoom to make their telephone calls to organisations”
Taylor said that while organisations may base their licensing requirements on how many lines they needed on their previous phone system, they are increasingly interested in the cost savings to be reaped under Teams direct routing – and it’s up to partners to advise them.
Moreover, he believes it is value add-ons such as statistical analysis, consultancy, providing call recording on the front end, or fraud allocation to the billing platform, which is winning the company, and its partners, more business.
For example, explained Taylor: “As part of our offering, we run a statistical analysis. That’s very beneficial with that kind of application because resellers can look at that on a weekly basis and advise the customer accordingly. They can tell them if they have more calls than are being answered. So do you need to change your business hours, or do you need more telephone lines on for the peak periods?”
Taylor said the company as “learned a lot” over the past 12 months, and it will be carrying this knowledge into 2022.
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