Microsoft Solutions Partner for Modern Work

Microsoft is a very strong player in the UCCaaS sector.

As well as the immensely popular Teams app, which offers various telephony integrations, they offer this as part of an end-to-end collaboration suite, which extends from Sharepoint through enterprise-scale customization capabilities via Power Apps.

With these services easily accessible via the 365 online suite, they are able to address the smallest to the largest organizaations and their UCC requirements.

The Future of Work

Microsoft describe their UCaaS offering here, with it being contextualized within an overall Modern Work practice.

Giovanni Mezgec, VP Modern Work Marketing, describes the associated partner marketing program. This is intended to support partners driving adoption of, and managing Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Teams Devices, and Microsoft Teams Rooms, delivering employee experience services and solutions for Microsoft Viva Building custom apps and solutions on the Microsoft 365 platform to meet the specific needs of customers.

Here they describe the market opportunity for Modern Work partners, with a sales playbook for Remote Work Practice Development. They published a report series Reimagining the Future of Work, to engage senior executives around a compelling theme of transforming office work.

Teams Phones and Rooms

Microsoft Teams Phone is Microsoft’s technology for enabling call control and Private Branch Exchange (PBX) capabilities in the Microsoft 365 cloud with Microsoft Teams. It works with Teams clients and certified devices, and allows you to replace your existing PBX system with a set of features directly delivered from Microsoft 365.

Teams Rooms run software that is built on top of the powerful Teams platform and designed for use on Teams Rooms devices and shared hybrid meeting scenarios.

UC Today explores the channel partner opportunity for Teams, explaining the role and importance of the Operator Connect capability. Teams Rooms Tech Talks provide a helpful tutorial session on Selling Teams Rooms.

Azure Communications Services

Microsoft’s key strength is their holistic enterprise Cloud platform and complete suite of services.

As they describe here Azure Networking enables remote work, and especially potent is the developer tool set Azure Communications Services, multichannel communication APIs for adding voice, video, chat, text messaging/SMS, email, and more to all your applications, which positions them powerfully for the CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) use case.

For example as this case study explains how ABN Amro uses Microsoft Teams and Azure Communication Services to bring fully customized Teams meeting capabilities directly into the bank’s own digital banking portal for customers, creating a streamlined meeting experience where they can book meetings without having to leave the portal.

Empowering developers to work with these communication components makes possible an array of dynamic innovation scenarios. Lynk and Co even brought meetings into the car, highlighting the diversity of opportunities for UCCaaS niche specialisms.

Copilot Ecosystem

A critical dimension is that Microsoft is opening up this platform to third-party developers, via their Copilot Ecosystem.

At Microsoft Build 2023 they announced a joint commitment from Microsoft and OpenAI to support and grow the AI plugins ecosystem, embracing an open standard for plugins that integrates across OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s copilot offerings, including Bing Chat, Dynamics 365 Copilot, Windows Copilot, and Microsoft 365 Copilot.

There is such a vast array of knowledge work scenarios that these innovations can be applied to, that Microsoft alone could not address. It needs an equally large network of partners with the multitude of domain expertise required, and in turn presents each with a uniquely powerful market opportunity as AI becomes the largest catalyst for new technology adoption we’ve ever witnessed.