Microsoft Teams Phone in Large Enterprise with Alistair Pidd

Tom Arbuthnot: 0:00

In this Teams Insider podcast, I talked to Alistair Pidd at Pure IP. We get into how Teams Phone is going in the large enterprise. So, rolling out Teams Phone, adoption, some of the challenges, some of the things around the pace of change of Teams Phone, how enterprises are managing their teams to deal with operations and projects, and also what Microsoft could potentially do to help with the large enterprise. Thanks for watching. Alistair is professional services director at Pure IP and Pure IP are also the sponsor of this podcast. So we thank them very much for their support of everything at Empowering Cloud. On with the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to the pod. Looking forward to this one. I've got Alistair on from PureIP. Alistair and I have a lot of offline conversations about what's going on with PureIP customers, what's going on in the market, he's given me more than one tip of have you seen this message center item that's going to change the entire world and Oh yeah, that's quite important. Alistair, do you just want to introduce yourself and give people a bit of context about your, role at Pure.

Alistair Pidd: 1:00

As, you say, Tom, I I work at Pure IP and I look after a number of different teams that sit more on the sort of enterprise side. Pure IP has got lots of carrier based sort of services that we do, but the teams I look after are the guys that configure Teams or roll out the SBCs on site or the project managers that that kind of manage all those projects in. So we get a lot of information around what's happening on the enterprise side, what's happening in terms of customers and how they're using things. So it's quite an interesting place to be, especially drive some interesting conversations with yourself.

Tom Arbuthnot: 1:31

Yeah. So, I want to get into that because, yeah, you have a perspective on what some of the bigger customers are doing with Teams that like real scale. Where do you feel we are in Teams from like that journey of very early testing of phone system to default tens of thousands of users phone system? Where are we?

Alistair Pidd: 1:49

Yeah, I see. That's been across a number of years now, hasn't it? And what you've had since the inception of Teams or Teams Phone System has been lots of people saying it doesn't do this and it doesn't do that and it's not ready. It doesn't have a parity to an enterprise phone system. But I think the reality is that, what we need from an enterprise phone system has been changing and Microsoft seems to be pretty good at giving people what they don't know that they need. And then they take it up.

Tom Arbuthnot: 2:16

They're always slightly ahead of the market. I feel, they're like don't worry about those features. They're really important three years later. You're like, Oh yeah, it turns out we don't need 300 PBX features.

Alistair Pidd: 2:24

Yeah, or I guess a good example of that sort of stuff is when you move from a more traditional phone system, a legacy type phone system with lots of different hunt groups for departments and stuff like that, tends to fall away in Teams. But hunt groups and pickup groups, they were something that people administering those are legacy phone systems like must have this in some cases you need it. But yes, it's some of those things that have fallen away. But I think that particularly, maybe the last 12 months, there's really been quite a big push, and you've seen Teams maturing much more. There's all these different features that come in. There's been some great features this year, with SIP gateway, shared calling with administration of auto attendance. There's been some migrational waves for some legacy stuff to the getting rid of the 3PIP stuff. So what you're seeing now is, a much more mature product, but it's also being deployed at scale and you're seeing sort of real scale involved. Which means there's all these negotiating or all the sort of change that occurs with Office 365. So I'd say it's now a parity state with some of these old phone systems in terms of what you want to get out of the system. I'd also say it's a mature product now, but needs a lot more management. And it's that management, I think, that's now coming to the party a little bit more in big enterprise and especially partner spaces.

Tom Arbuthnot: 3:47

Yeah, the management thing is interesting. Like you say, SIP gateway brought us in initially, just felt like an option to hang on to your existing SIP phones. And then suddenly it was like, Oh, we can do DEXT as well as SIP gateway. We can do intercom and paging, now we can do ATAs. When it first came out, I felt like it was just a transitory gateway. Now it feels like a core part of the service. They just recently released the PowerShell for managing devices at scale on SIP gateway as well.

Alistair Pidd: 4:15

Yeah, there was a kind of interesting sort of enterprise partner sort of space on that, because a lot of people were holding back from that 3PIP to SIP gateway move, or even 3PIP to Teams move, because there was, A few challenges with managing large volumes of handsets. You had these old systems that were managing all that though, the Poly systems and various other different third party systems for managing that state. And then you came into Teams and Teams wasn't quite up to the, task of managing. Also, a lot of people holding back. And then you had that dynamic whereby Microsoft said it's going you've got to move. So you were faced with the with the task of either migrating that old legacy estate across the from 3PIP into SIP Gateway, which had quite a lot of work involved, or refreshing your estate, but then the other side of it is, some people were trying to minimize that estate, but the timescales that were involved, even when Microsoft released it, seemed like it was a long time away But the reality was, yeah, it was still, there was still plenty of people still looking at it,

Tom Arbuthnot: 5:16

Enterprise does not move fast. And when you let them know something 24 months in advance, they're like, okay, that's miles away. We'll be fine. You know, what a typical project timeline is for you guys.

Alistair Pidd: 5:26

Yeah. But I think SIP gateway, first of all, SIP gateway almost felt like it was, pushed on us a little bit in terms of, it was taking stuff away because 3PIP was going. Like you say, it's then now opening up, especially this year.

Tom Arbuthnot: 5:39

So we've talked about Teams, getting some real scale enterprises. Let's talk about that pace of change that you mentioned earlier because I think that's one of the challenges in our space is Teams moves so fast and there's some real tiny changes and there's some huge changes. How are you finding that with the big customers?

Alistair Pidd: 5:59

I think that there's been quite huge changes this, year and each one of them on the surface of it doesn't sound like it's too far reaching, because we've had the certificates, we've had the SIP gateway moved to 3 PIP, we've had the extensions attributes, we've had the normalization changing. Like none of those sound that bad, but actually the, reality is, a lot of these kind of need to be unstitched in the background. And because of that scale that we were talking about They actually take quite a lot of planning even with certificates, there could be a lot of SBCs out there with SIP gateway migrations, there's a lot of handsets and extension matching. different sort of blocks of users to change. I'm hoping really some of these kind of really big changes aren't going to continue because it's quite a lot to keep up with, but I think it's been quite an eye opener for that enterprise space and the partner space of these big changes occurring. Because of that scale, they take quite a long time to plan and then authorize. And then everyone is very concerned around the impacts of it because service is all important. And now we've rolled this out to these big estates. We need to make sure that it is stable. So rocking the boat with these changes it isn't great. Yeah, I think Teams has met that maturity level, but it's being rolled out at scale. And hence it, all this big sort of change control is really required. There's a lot of overhead on managing estates. Now they've got to this sort of size.

Tom Arbuthnot: 7:24

Yeah. I think if you took a classic telephony team, they're not used to being on the treadmill of change. They, had a box you occasionally maybe patched the box, but mostly didn't. You just avoided it. And now it's Oh, in 180 days, Microsoft is changing how extension attributes work. So get yourselves together. It's what does that even mean? That's, where obviously your team come in with the enterprise customers and you can help them decode it. And it can scare people who don't understand. Well what certificates are changing on the SBCs? We have SBCs, do I need to do that? Don't I need to do that? How do I test that? It's a lot.

Alistair Pidd: 7:56

I think desk phones are a perfect example of, that sort of new era of, phone systems, aren't they? Because they were really something that were, quite easy to sit on desks, keep going. They connected to the phone system. They were dealt with by the phone engineers or the phone system team. But now they're a whole different ball game. These things are coming in with Android. Android's going to be subject to onboarding. It's going to be subject to conditional access. You get all these identity management type teams involved. And because of the brevity and scale of Office 365 itself and the adoption with these big enterprises you could have quite a few different teams just to roll out some phones. And it's not the easiest thing to ever do. You see a phone, you think that should be quite simple to roll out. But it's not.

Tom Arbuthnot: 8:44

Yeah, I'm swapping a Cisco phone for a Microsoft phone. Well the Cisco phone was on a VLAN and got nowhere near anything on the internet ever, and suddenly the Microsoft phone wants to bypass the proxy. And get updated automatically from the cloud and it's running Android. Who's responsible for it? Is it the phone team or the devices team? Because it's in Intune, like that kind of thing.

Alistair Pidd: 9:06

Yeah, exactly. The complexities are definitely out there. Even though there's multiple teams because of the scale, this sort of stuff, it really does require a fairly intimate knowledge of how some of these services pin together to really navigate some of the change and navigate some of the sort of direction some of this stuff is going.

Tom Arbuthnot: 9:25

How are you seeing responsibilities break down in those enterprise customers? Is it like, I think Microsoft often think there's an M365 team, right? First of all, they think that everything is Microsoft. So they're like, it's M365 and that there's different teams, but, phone used to be its own team, then it got rolled into network with the IP stuff. Is it still, there's a phone system team and a Teams collaboration team, or are you seeing those worlds merge?

Alistair Pidd: 9:55

I think like you say, when Office 365 first started around that there were 365 teams out there, but because of that growing you, even get down to being AD Identity Management teams. In the, UC space. You see a bit of an amalgamation in some cases of like network and voice or applications and voice, seeing voice as an application, so that it's merged there, but I think almost always you see it collapsed in with that kind of meeting room space. Again, meeting rooms weren't always the phone system.

Tom Arbuthnot: 10:27

No, it used to be facilities more often than not. They were responsible for that piece. For a long while, that was a huge pain because they would pick what they thought was prettiest and didn't even know what the platform decision was

Alistair Pidd: 10:37

yeah, I think it's not really a sort of a static thing. It seems to be changing quite a lot and companies and customers and partners are really reacting to that to try and make sure they can always kind of cover those gaps that we talked about because you need your people to understand all the different parts that some of these say phone systems are going to hit, you need to be into some of these different areas. And yeah, that's probably driving some of the teams. I think another interesting thing, again, probably relating back to maybe the maturity of the product is, there is definitely a drive for people looking at automation of this too. So in some respects that kind of takes it away from being a traditional responsibility for a team and kind of moves it into other areas to maybe development guys, maybe guys looking at API. That sort of stuff they're trying to deal with some of these onboarding of phones, maybe onboarding of users, maybe the moves has some changes, maybe even just a sort of general configuration, trying to roll out faster. But there's all these options now with a sort of more mature cloud platform and cloud phone system. So I think that will in time as well, start modifying some of these Teams too.

Tom Arbuthnot: 11:44

Yeah, I think you're entirely right. Like you think about like how you set up a user account these days, usually there's some kind of HR business, XRM system where they create the identity, then that kicks into AD Office 365 Azure AD. And you wouldn't think about a different team provisioning them for SharePoint and Exchange etc. They have a Microsoft 365 account, but then it stalls at Teams Phone where they're like, Oh it needs a phone number. And there's a whole bunch of questions. I don't see many organizations genuinely having that end to end automation yet where it's someone new gets on board in Paris. They automatically get assigned a phone number and they get an email for their first day saying, Hey, welcome. This is your phone number, but it's definitely achievable.

Alistair Pidd: 12:29

The feature sets in office 365 that you'll probably see in, most of the different options. Now, there's options for sort of group policy assignment, that kind of thing. Microsoft had definitely had it on their radar and in their sites, and they're working towards it, whether or not it's a finished article without a fair amount of kind of know how at the moment is probably questionable, but it's probably again, where it's heading just to have that optimized onboarding and that fast kind of creation of service, which is good.

Tom Arbuthnot: 12:58

That's cool. There's something else I wanted to get your view on, because I know we're doing quite a lot of managed SBC customers now, like more and more, obviously with the push to the cloud, you might have argued that would start tipping downwards, but it seems like a lot of customers want to outsource that kind of responsibility now. Is that a fair assessment of what you're seeing?

Alistair Pidd: 13:19

Yeah, I suppose you could look at it that Operator Connect finally gave companies the ability to simplify things and a lot of companies were crying out for that. They didn't necessarily want to get into the weeds with direct routing. They didn't really want to have to understand it. And Operator Connect gives them that perfect option. And again, talking back about automation, if you are going to look at automation, then Operator Connect is going to be a bit easier for you to actually achieve that. But then there are definitely areas that you can't hit with Operator Connect. And hence, the company's driving for this kind of global single platform need this direct routing. So it makes sense that these on site type of SBCs or these SBCs that need to connect you into various different carriers are managed because they have this complexity. All of a sudden when Microsoft changed the certificates on you, you don't have to run around and figure out how to do it. Your partner will fix it for you and it will get tested and you'll be fine. And again, with the attributes, if Microsoft change an attribute, you don't have to get into the weeds of all this and figure it out. You've got a partner there that can actually fix that for you. People used to having cloud services that don't need that kind of feeding and watering of various different bits of kit. The SBCs kind of still need that. Even though they're a little bit more out of sight, that sort of specialist person who can, or team that can work on those, I think it's still pretty critical.

Tom Arbuthnot: 14:45

Yeah. And it's like you say, they need feeding and watering and they're a security endpoint that needs patching and monitoring and particularly because it's edge of network. Now it's edge of network into sometimes ISDN, sometimes SIP, but if it's edge of network and it's SIP, then that's a real thing that from a security standpoint, you haven't outsourced that problem to Microsoft. Is somebody looking at the activity on that box? Is somebody patching it?

Alistair Pidd: 15:11

Yeah, definitely. I think really a lot of the partners that take out that kind of like managed service of that kind of area, they're wanting to get that single platform, that global sort of coverage, but not really wanting that some of the complexity that go with it and wanting to make sure that all those kind of different problems are dealt with. Like you say, security is definitely one of them. Maybe even some of the different regulations trying to make sure that some of that is covered.

Tom Arbuthnot: 15:38

We're coming to time, but a last question I want to ask you, if I gave you a magic wand and you controlled Teams and the development priorities and what you could do with it from your point of view, what would you add or change to improve either your life or enterprise life?

Alistair Pidd: 15:54

That's quite an interesting question. I think that, there's a, vast sort of feature set involved with Teams and with phone system now and, I would say it meets 90, 95% of most people's requirements. But there is one thing that, that does crop up quite a bit. It is the reporting and the information you get maybe from from a sort of semi realtime in Teams Admin Center. Or even reporting whereby you're looking at historic stuff and what, tends to happen is enterprise customers roll out these, features and functionalities. They have various kind of informal type call queues that they're using for maybe support desks and that kind of stuff. And they're wanting to try and get to almost like a next level on their visibility of them. They're wanting to see the calls better through the queue, maybe graph them and dashboard them, maybe see some of the wait times and all that kind of stuff.

Tom Arbuthnot: 16:47

Alistair, thanks for sharing. I always appreciate jumping on with you. You've always got a really good perspective It's good to hear what's going on in those large enterprises