Operator Connect (OC) was launched in late September 2021, allowing organisations to enable PSTN services in Microsoft Teams with participating operators.
The enterprise voice solutions provider, Pure IP, was in the first wave of approved OC providers, giving the company a rare perspective to assess the effectiveness of the programme.
Ian Guest, Marketing Director at Pure IP, gave his verdict on the progress of OC over the past 12 months: “Operator Connect is a clever and yet simple addition to the family, taking up the middle ground between Calling Plans and Direct Routing, and from our experience I think it is a success for Microsoft.
“We’ve been lighting up about 15 enterprise customers a month on Operator Connect. That is a considerable number of businesses saying this is the way they want to do it.
“It shows that there is traction in the market. It is bridging the gap between something quite complex to ‘set up and run’ and something which they can spin up relatively quickly and easily, with the emphasis being on the operator.”
Microsoft recently announced it has 12 million Teams PSTN users. That figure is set in stark relief beside the platform’s nearly 300 million monthly active users, but its growing popularity is undeniable.
Popularity is not everything, however. Guest reflects on developments over the past 12 months.
From a technical standpoint, OC provides an intermediary option to direct routing and calling plans. It also offers the flexibility and convenience of managing everything in your tenant, so you don’t need to configure new solutions to connect to your environment, as you do with Direct Routing. Instead, the onus is on the operator to connect you to the right services.
From a technical perspective, the product has also matured, with more APIs helping with migrating numbers from Direct Routing, and updates to the user interface to display a greater choice of services and search and filter options to find the right service for your tenant.
Guest believes that, on a technical level, there are not many scenarios in which Direct Routing would be preferable to Operator Connect, particularly for ‘standard’ user scenarios which count for a large proportion of requirements. He is quick to add though that it is not a case of an ‘either/or’ decision as you can use a mix of Operator Connect and Direct Routing
Turning to the OC programme, Microsoft have also released successive programmes related to OC, including Operator Connect Accelerator, Operator Connect Mobile, and Operator Connect Conferencing.
Guest says the new announcements show development but can slow projects down as customers attempt to understand and evaluate the proposition, and it becomes a question of educating and re-educating customers following these releases.
The Future of Operator Connect
If you look at the way Microsoft’s communication portfolio has evolved over the last five years, it has changed from an on-premise Skype-like business environment to Teams online, supported by new deployment methods such as Operator Connect. Microsoft will be looking for ways to evolve its service further in the future.
Observing the way communications are becoming more cloud-based and Microsoft’s drive around Azure technologies, Guest believes we may see Teams and Azure or ACS (Azure Communication Services) coming together in the future, offering even more ways to deliver cloud communications.
It is not clear to what extent Teams and Operator Connect will change in the future; it may simply make changes inside and outside the platform and programme without really changing things from a user perspective. Either way, history tells us Operator Connect will continue to develop and be around for several years yet.
Reflecting on Pure IP’s plan going forwards, Guest said: “We have always followed an agnostic approach and are continually evolving our offering to connect the old with the very latest, ensuring we meet customer and market requirements.
“Voice will continue to be an important part of the mix when it comes to enterprise communications, but platforms and methods of consumption will continue to change.
“As a business, we need to continually adapt to ensure we provide customers with a single, seamless experience regardless of whether it is via a traditional PBX, cloud service or business application.
“With specific reference to Teams and Operator Connect, that involves us providing a wrap of services around the platform for example to connect Contact Centres or legacy environments.
“It is also about understanding the evolution of the Microsoft services such as Azure Communications Services (ACS) and the new opportunities they offer.”
If you are interested in finding out more about Pure IP’s Operator Connect services, you can visit their website.
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