All-in-one collaboration solutions have become increasingly important for communication service providers (CSP) to offer as part of their solutions suite. For many service providers offering voice in today’s market, they are competing against giants like Microsoft Teams for messaging collaboration revenue — and losing the battle. Of 270 million monthly active users, only 80 million are Teams Phone users. As CSPs continue to let Teams Phone plans erode their share of the voice market, what options do they realistically have?
One solution is to capitalize on a “with Teams” strategy that builds upon Microsoft’s already existing technology. Alianza for Microsoft Teams voice-enables Teams with a native dial pad and carrier-grade quality, CSPs can offer their end-users Microsoft Teams voice calling and collaboration in one place — while increasing their own growth in the wake of Microsoft’s success.
There’s A Massive Market Opportunity for Service Providers
As a Senior Director of Product Management at Alianza, service-provider built integrations, products, and features are always top-of-mind for me. Rather than competing with market leaders that can out-spend and out–innovate your business, CSPs can instead focus on a strategy that merges Team’s big-brand status with Alianza’s flexibility and cloud native services.
Alianza for Microsoft Teams leverages and extends Alianza’s feature-rich capabilities to voice-enable Teams with carrier-grade quality, reliability, and administrative ease.
Connecting Alianza’s cloud to Microsoft Teams broadens service offerings and integrates with the Teams collaboration your SMB and enterprise end-users already use on a daily basis.
The Best of Both Worlds: Introducing Alianza for Microsoft Teams
The market opportunity for service providers is huge. Only 30% of monthly active users are Teams Phone users, which leaves 190 million active Teams users with no voice capabilities when it comes to communications.
Why Alianza for Microsoft Teams for Service Providers
Think Microsoft Operator Connect is your only real option to enable native voice calling in the Teams dial pad? Not anymore. Until Alianza for Microsoft Teams, Direct Routing was a heavy uplift for both communication service providers (CSPs) and Teams administrators, requiring complex configuration of the SBC as well as voice calling and user policies in the Teams admin center. As a result, many CSPs turned to third party Microsoft partners for configuration and setup only to be hit with high upfront costs and customer syncs that required days if not months.
Although Microsoft offers documentation to enable Direct Routing or put their Calling Plans into practice, it’s a fairly intense do-it-yourself approach that requires specialized expertise. Alianza for Microsoft Teams ensures successful implementation by automating the voice configuration between the customer’s Microsoft 365 tenant and Alianza.
- 2-Step Connectivity. Add licenses and sync, it’s that simple. We’ve gone beyond Direct Routing to layer on PBX provisioning, which eliminates the heavy technical lift for CSPs.
- Direct Routing-as-a-Service. Skip the huge undertaking required to implement Direct Routing. Our solution is turnkey, no expertise required.
- Built-in Automation. No PowerShell cross-platform scripting required to build, test, and deploy, meaning no extra work for the Teams Admin.
- Eliminate CAPEX. Our cloud-based SaaS model is OPEX only. In competing integrations, service providers who elected to implement Teams voice calling without Direct Routing were hit with upfront licensing costs of ~$10,000 for the first 100 active, concurrent sessions and another ~$5–10,000 in setup costs.
- Faster Time to Market. Alianza for Microsoft Teams can be enabled and set up in minutes, so you get the most out of your investment now, not a year from now.
- Turnkey Solution. No need to outsource to a Microsoft reseller in order to navigate the complexities of setting up Direct Routing yourself.
- Security. End-to-end encryption of both signaling and media is enforced between the integration and Microsoft 365. Additionally, administrative access is controlled by Azure/Microsoft 365 single sign-on; no user credentials are stored by the portal.
- Grow Quicker. With Alianza for Microsoft Teams automation, CSPs don’t need to define the SBC and PBX templates every time they sign up or move an end user to the Teams integration.
- Flexible User Management. Per user, per month subscription provisioning and billing with user-by-user rollout for predictable CSP margins and end-user pricing.
For more information, see Alianza for Microsoft Teams Solutions Brief.
