I first wrote about Direct Routing for Microsoft Teams on this blog in September 2018 when I described it as Microsoft’s telecoms coming of age. I subsequently organised a Teams workshop on the subject in London which was really well attended by ITSPs from the UK and Europe with standing room only at the back. By that time Netxis had already established a Microsoft setup at our laboratory in Rue Du Trone in Brussels, initially using a Skype For Business setup and subsequently Teams. All the mainstream Teams certified SBC vendors are Netaxis partners.
Wind the clock forward around 18 months Microsoft Teams Direct Routing is a hot topic right with the massive upsurge in homeworking during the coronavirus crisis. Although not all the industry is thriving during the pandemic a certain market sector is doing very well and these are the Service Providers offering Direct Routing for Teams.
In the UK this week we have had Commsverse, an online conference dedicated to the Microsoft teams ecosystem. I made a presentation entitled “Layering of Additional Services on Top of Microsoft Teams & Centralised Control Over Voice for Internationally Distributed Teams Deployments”. A bit of a mouthful, an observation that was made by the organisers when I submitted the idea for a speaking slot. I agreed with them and had intended to make it more succinct but forgot and never got around to doing it. As it happens the title said exactly what I was going to talk about and in the end I figured it was ok anyway.
In the run up to the event I was a little nervous as I like to engage with an audience and with a Teams based virtual conference I would not be able to tell if people laughed at my jokes or not. As it happens the talk turned out ok and I had a number of people turn up at the virtual breakout session to chat with me afterwards.
The preparation in the run up to the event was most useful. I have always found writing blog posts handy as it means I have to learn the subject before writing about it. It may seem obvious but this is also the case when it comes to making presentations. You might reasonably expect that someone standing up at a conference to know a bit about their subject matter.
In talking about how to add voice services to the Teams collaboration suite I was not only educating potential customers and subliminally pitching the Netaxis expertise but I was also educating myself. Yes it is easy to say you can patch your PBX into your Teams environment but actually I had one of those lightbulb moments where I finally really got to understand it all. When giving a talk I like to know a subject in a little more depth than just reading out the words on the slides.
The build up of the slide deck was a walk through how an on premise SBC environment evolved to a fully cloud based ecosystem making use of different regional clouds around the world.
Every man and his dog seems to be jumping on the Teams Direct Routing bandwagon now. I’d like to think we have been on it pretty much since T zero but I too will be writing a few more blog posts on the subject over the next few weeks. Stay tuned but if you want to know more in the meantime get in touch.
The featured image btw is a slide from the talk showing me before lockdown and me now. I assume it got a small laugh.
