Over the past year, Microsoft has reported surging demand for Microsoft Teams. The starting point of the journey by a typical business customer is with team chat, collaboration and content creation. Following the successful first step, businesses are realizing that they can quickly add meetings and voice services, retire their legacy PBX and thus take a significant step towards true digital convergence and efficiency.
Part of the challenge faced by many businesses who embark on this convergence journey is that they may not have sufficient IT skills, and specifically a telephony specialist, to drive the processes and implement the necessary migration and implementation tasks. This is where the Microsoft global community of partners steps in to aid the customers. Some of these partners come from a telephony background, some are traditional service providers, and others are experts with Office, SharePoint, Active Directory and Azure but have little to no previous expertise or resources for voice communications including design, planning, deployment and operational tasks.
To enable these partners to respond to the growing demand and engage their business customers in a full-stack conversation around Microsoft 365, AudioCodes is offering our Live for Microsoft Teams services.
- AudioCodes Live Cloud is, as the name suggests, a cloud-based white-label platform designed to allow partners (typically with backgrounds in managed services) to easily build and bring to market new UCaaS offerings. It is ideal for partners who want to quickly build a multi-tenant Microsoft Teams voice service but are hesitant to build a new dedicated infrastructure involving upfront CapEx investment. Providers who leverage AudioCodes Live Cloud would typically bundle their calling plans (or partner with a PSTN provider) as part of their offer to customers.
- AudioCodes Live for Microsoft Teams is a suite of AudioCodes products that are delivered as a managed service, designed with simplicity and efficiency in mind, to enable partners (typically Microsoft 365 Office, SharePoint and cloud partners) to resell Microsoft Teams managed voice services to their customers.
There are 3 types of offers that are designed to address different customer demands:
Essentials
Microsoft Teams Direct Routing functionality enables businesses to leverage their existing PSTN contracts and minutes plans using a Microsoft-certified Session Border Controller (SBC). Essentials is a per-user-per-month offer and is the easiest and quickest way to enable Direct Routing for business customers thanks to a set of automation tools that configure the SBC and the Microsoft Teams tenant.
Pro
To help customers who have little experience in, or the capacity to handle, employees’ lifecycle management (including moves/adds/changes, Teams tenant management, device management and reporting), AudioCodes Live Pro is a per-user-per-month offer that is based on intuitive and graphical web-based tools. The Pro offer also includes all the capabilities of the Essentials offer.
Premium
For customers who want to outsource their Microsoft Teams voice services, AudioCodes Live Premium allows for a fully managed service, including on-premises integration with existing telephony solutions, as well as data network troubleshooting support and complementary migration planning and deployment services. In addition, AudioCodes’ planning and deployment capabilities enable Microsoft partners to deliver a complete Teams migration service to their customers and tailor their offer to match specific requirements, including remote branches, international locations and meeting rooms. The Premium offer includes extensive “day 2” monitoring capabilities designed to help the quick triage of service affecting issues.
Partners can provide all three Live for Microsoft Teams services to their customers. Essentials and Pro are delivered via the AudioCodes Live Cloud platform, while Premium can be resold to the customers. AudioCodes portfolio of IP phones, conference, video and analog devices further help bring a complete offer.
Contact AudioCodes to learn more about ways to become a service partner.
