The release of the Microsoft Call Records API has enabled Enghouse’s flagship call accounting software to extend its advanced call analytics application Proteus to MS Teams — bringing this valuable insight to existing and prospective users of Microsoft’s world-leading collaboration suite.
We spoke to Enghouse’s Head of Products, Trevor Davis, who explained that this kind of data was vital intelligence to businesses undergoing huge transformations, and facing big decisions about where and how they intend to work and collaborate in future.
“Traditionally Proteus has worked as a powerful tool for cost management, capturing every call detail from a communications platform, working out the cost for different types of call, and providing independent checks for invoice approval, as well as identify unexpected costs quickly.”
Costing complexity
Today’s suddenly distributed workforces are dealing with ever more complex challenges for communications, and comparing costs and packages from multiple suppliers has become increasingly complex, never mind evaluating the cost impact of making changes to an already intricate multi-vendor situation. “You might have a mix of hot-desking, remote working, call centre and back office”, Davis continued, “and each of these resources requires reliable communications infrastructure. For the user that might be a desk phone or a soft phone and within the network one or more gateways to bridge the enterprise network to the PSTN network and potentially on to a cloud solution like Teams. As a business manager you’ll need a reliable management tool to help manage that complexity. Additionally, when transitioning from a legacy solution to a modern unified communications platform like Teams you can’t just switch one system off and switch the other one on… Proteus can provide a very detailed and accurate snapshot on how people are using the legacy platform, so the business can make an assessment of what the effect of changing will be, and hence the change can be managed with minimal business impact.”
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Trevor Davis[/caption]
With the addition of MS Teams to the list of supported platforms, Proteus’ capabilities are extended, to compare the ‘apples and oranges’ on offer from different providers in a meaningful way — even to make intelligent choices within the service mix offered by one vendor.
“You can purchase just the Teams service from Microsoft, via a Microsoft 365 business plan, but Microsoft also offers calling plans in certain regions as well.” Davis explained. “In the UK, for example, there are two options for enabling PSTN calling from Teams. The first is called Direct Routing and requires a session border control to link between the enterprise, Teams and PSTN network. The advantage here is that businesses are able to choose their preferred calling plan supplier. The second option is to let Microsoft be your calling plan provider. You can even mix and match the two options. If you are feeling a bit confused by all of these choices Proteus can help out because it allows for comparisons between supplies based on your specific call records and can therefore help you decide which option best suits your business’s needs.
