Microsoft made headlines back in March when they announced their plans to launch Operator Connect.
Offering a new, lower friction method for adding voice service through the PSTN, brought organizations of all sizes a faster way to get their voice calling up and running directly for Teams from your Microsoft Portal.
This new service reduces friction points in the onboarding process, eliminating the need for the longer implementation cycle that normally comes with adding voice calling to your set of UC tools.
Now CallTower, one of the leading providers of Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS), has announced that they are joining the list of Operator Connect providers.
A Microsoft Gold Partner and the only provider qualified to offer voice for GCC High, the addition of Operator Connect to CallTower adds to an already strong offering in the market.
So, in case you missed it, here’s a quick recap of what Operator Connect is and why it may be a game-changer for a new segment of the market.
Overview of Microsoft’s Operator Connect
The key points of the Operator Connect program are as follows:
- Customers can start buying voice (PSTN) services from operators directly through Microsoft’s O 365 control center
- The operators manage your PSTN and Session Border Controllers (SBCs) infrastructure so that you don’t have to
- Since you are buying directly from the portal, you can skip the usual process that comes with onboarding a new service. Just sign up and start getting your people talking through Teams
One aspect that has caught a lot of folks’ attentions is the expansion of international calling that is now on offer.
While Microsoft has long offered voice calling directly through Teams, the service has been admittedly limited — especially when it comes to factors such as local networks outside of North America. In their announcement for this latest service, Microsoft declared plans for adding new countries to their Teams Calling plan including New Zealand, Singapore, Romania, Czech Republic, Hungary, Finland, Norway, and Slovakia.
This brings their list up to 26, which is an improvement, but still falls short of what working with a partner solutions provider can help you to achieve.
This is one area where CallTower has worked with customers to leverage their global network of data centers and infrastructure to support high quality UC services and calling with over 100 countries supported worldwide.
Operator Connect vs Direct Routing — Which Route to Go?
Microsoft appears to be doing something very smart here by launching Operator Connect as a new option for adding a voice component to your org.
There are probably plenty of smaller businesses that had not considered themselves to be in the market for voice calling through Teams. Integrating your PSTN calling into the rest of your UC and workflow environments had largely been viewed as the purview of enterprises and other big scale operations.
But those days are gone. With the pressures of the past two years during the pandemic leading companies to undergo a wave of massive digital transformation, there is an understanding that organizations of all sizes need to tighten up their operations and adopt the right tools for the job.
The hardest part about implementing a change of any kind is knowing where to start. Direct Routing has been around for a couple of years, but if you didn’t know that you needed it, then you probably didn’t look at how to start the implementation process.
