Even as South African organisations embrace online and collaborative working as well as remote and hybrid working environments, enabled through tools such as Microsoft’s productivity suite – including Microsoft Teams – voice calling has remained a separate system, often as a result of technical challenges and high costs associated with integration.
It is not ideal for an organisation to remain stuck in the status quo, as running multiple communication systems creates an administrative burden, requires paying for duplicate services, and prevents a single view of the customer experience. To simplify operations, it is vital to move into one unified ecosystem, placing your telephone system in the same environment as the collaboration tools your business already uses.
To add further complexity, organisations are dealing with highly uneven last-mile connectivity when it comes to remote or hybrid working. IT teams must now manage office users on a stable, managed infrastructure alongside home workers who are entirely reliant on consumer broadband. Access to connectivity varies significantly depending on location; urban offices might use robust Fibre-to-the-Business (FTTB), and remote branches may rely on LTE, while home users often use Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) connections that can be less reliable.
Furthermore, hybrid work increases the sheer variety of endpoints that businesses must consistently support. These include:
- Desk phones and softphones.
- Mobile apps.
- Browser-based clients that undergo continuous, disruptive updates.
- Varying user profiles, from knowledge workers needing full UC&C integration to transactional workers who only require basic voice calling.
Moving to a single communication ecosystem provides massive business benefits. When all users operate within the same environment, the business gains visibility into everyone’s presence, making it easy to know the appropriate time to call, message, or invite someone to a meeting. Additionally, this integration provides deep productivity insights into team interactions, allowing businesses to optimise workflows and break down the frustrating walls between the “front office” and “back office”.
With Microsoft 365 being incredibly pervasive, many local organisations have turned to Microsoft Teams for workplace chat and video meetings. However, research from BMIT indicates that fewer than 5% of local Microsoft Teams users actually have voice natively enabled. Consequently, most companies end up running disconnected systems indefinitely, maintaining a completely separate PBX system just to handle traditional voice calls.
Organisations have historically resisted adoption because adding voice natively to Microsoft Teams was complicated and expensive. It required purchasing a specific Phone System license and working with a provider offering Direct Routing to connect to the public switched telephone network – a lengthy process that featured prohibitive setup costs.
Native solution for Microsoft Teams users
Telviva’s Call2Teams is a cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that sits between any Microsoft Teams Phone, PBX or SIP Trunk and Microsoft Teams, and does not require any additional hardware or software. It is a true multi-tenant cloud service and is consumed on a per-user subscription. Being a native solution that lives directly inside the Microsoft ecosystem, rather than being clumsily bolted onto the edges, offers businesses multiple advantages:
- Speed and Cost: Setup costs are significantly reduced, and deployment time is slashed from weeks to mere days, while costs are up to 25% lower as compared to Direct Routing. They also stand to benefit from being part of a cloud free-call community of over 90 000 users, including Teams users who are connected to Telviva’s network.
- Easy Migration: The simple setup process allows businesses to seamlessly port and keep all their existing numbers, including DDIs.
- Zero Complexity: The provider absorbs all the technical complexity, meaning the business does not have to become an IT expert or manage Session Border Controllers (SBCs) themselves.
- Single Point of Accountability: There is one point of contact when things go wrong, eliminating the blame game between Microsoft, the cloud telephony provider, and the SBC vendor.
- Advanced Features: Unlock Class 5 PBX features within Teams, such as call transfers, call conferencing, advanced call handling, and more.
- Governance: Use Microsoft Teams to manage users and policies, while Call2Teams gives you access to features such as regulatory-compliant, auditable, and retrievable call recording.
- Seamless Experience: Users stay in the familiar Teams environment with no need for separate hardware, desktop phones, software, or apps to make native voice calls.
- Unified Workforce: Microsoft Teams users with natively enabled voice and voice-only users can communicate effortlessly as though they are on the same system.
When adopting cloud voice solutions, organisations must work with a provider that offers genuine local support and deeply understands the South African network environment – which is exactly what Telviva provides. Telviva has already done the heavy lifting of mapping its platform to ICASA, POPIA, and number portability obligations, ensuring that critical local regulatory requirements do not disappear once you move to the cloud.
By integrating your Microsoft Teams with Telviva’s Call2Teams, you can seamlessly manage voice calls, video meetings, and team chats from a single, unified platform. This integration enables powerful features like switchboard access, voicemail, and call forwarding directly through Microsoft Teams, greatly enhancing productivity and communication across your entire organisation. Contact us today to learn more.
By Rob Lith, Chief Commercial Officer at Telviva