A disruptive voice

Today, we’re marking Microsoft’s announcement of the general availability of Operator Connect for Microsoft Teams with the launch of an entirely new BT-branded global managed voice service.

It’s at the cutting edge of future voice services innovation. Delivered directly through Teams, it securely integrates telephony, engineered for quality of service, with the very latest in digital collaboration.

For customers, it will provide pace, simplicity and reach, helping them accelerate their digital transformation by enabling new productive, hybrid workstyles built around Teams.  

Voice and telephony services have been around for a long time. If you’re a CIO, the chances are you’ve got a mixed bag of voice technologies and services, fixed and mobile, spread across your organisation which may differ from country to country or even site by site. At the same time, your colleagues’ use of Teams has been soaring since the start of the pandemic.

At BT, we’ve seen the number of customers using our managed Teams service almost double in the past year. And according to Microsoft, total calls on Teams surpassed 1 billion in a single month for the first time earlier this year.  

Having seen the benefits of digital tools and workstyles, your colleagues now expect to use them to their full potential. They prefer the ergonomics of simply clicking to talk via the Teams app than using a separate phone or voice service. They assume they’re secure and expect a reliable, quality service. And this is as true in the office as at home - and on the move.

Operator Connect for Microsoft Teams with BT offers a simple and secure way of calling in Teams via BT’s global voice network backed with assured end-to-end service controls for high quality, low latency voice conversations. It’s an entirely new way for multinational organisations operating in different countries to choose and enable their voice services and it doesn’t matter if you’re an existing BT customer or not.

Ripping up the rule book for an established technology like voice is never easy. When you do, it’s good to have experts on hand — two great enterprise technology, cloud and security brands recognised as leaders in their respective fields. It also helps if your service provider has already invested in a technology platform to remove the complexity of change and offer simple choices.

As BT and Microsoft look forward to delivering Operator Connect for customers across the world, Omar Abbosh, corporate vice president of industry solutions at Microsoft, said: “Operator Connect with BT calling plans is the first step in the realisation of our new strategic partnership with BT and meeting the needs and demands of today’s customers.”