Complex Voice Strategies for Global Organisations

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In this Teams Insider podcast, I talked to Zach Bennett of LoopUp. He's principal architect there. Zach's done some great briefings for us in the past, and he's really knowledgeable around Teams Phone. In this pod, we get into some of the more complex countries for porting. We get into PBX interop, analog connectivity, generally the trickier end of Teams Phone. Zach's got a wealth of knowledge to share and he brings some really great insights to this pod. Many thanks too to LoopUp, who are also a community supporter of Empowering Cloud. Really appreciate their support. On with the show.

Tom: 0:34

Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. I've been looking forward to recording this one. I talked to Zach a fair bit offline around complex voice and finally decided to get him on the pod to talk about it on the pod. Zach, do you just want to introduce yourself and give a little bit of background about you and LoopUp?

Zach: 0:48

Yeah, sure. Hi, everyone. My name is that Zach Bennett. I'm a solutions architect at LoopUp LoopUp. We consult with truly global organizations and we help them migrate from there, existing PBX, whether that be a 25 year old, Panasonic PBX in a corner somewhere or something more up to date, like a calling plans or a Cisco and we move them over to our cloud telephony platform, which, we have a operate to connect offering. Which I'm sure you've seen us shouting about somewhere across the internet. And we have a direct routing and as a service platform as well. For me personally, I've been around Teams for a long time now. Starting and Microsoft itself, but starting around Teams doing consulting at modality systems where I

Tom: 1:32

Yeah, obviously. Yeah. We know ourselves from previous lives

Zach: 1:34

Yeah. And then coming over to LoopUp doing the consulting for them and helping organizations move over. But you can also find me writing blogs or, hosting webinars for LoopUp that sort of thing,

Tom: 1:47

speaking now, Zach and speaking at Southcoast.

Zach: 1:49

definitely and speaking now. Yeah. But, anything around Microsoft Teams phone. I'll hopefully be around.

Tom: 1:56

Awesome. Cool. Yeah, like you said, you guys are on Operator Connect. We're now up to 79 Operator Connect operators. So I feel like that's the kind of easier side of Teams Voice these days. Like it's all cloud to cloud pick your provider. We can argue over differences in providers, but it's relatively easy being cloud to cloud. What I'm keen to dig into is you pick up on a lot of the conversations around the more complex scenarios, tricky countries, analog, tough porting. So what can we get into there? Maybe you can pull on some of the projects you've done and customer examples of the Teams, like we've done the easy knowledge workers. Now we're into the harder stuff.

Zach: 2:36

Yeah. Especially around the customers that we deal with when you're talking to global organizations, you'll of course come across, we've got an office in the UK, we've got an office in the US, those countries that we consider, fairly simple or easy. One thing that you will. Find as well is these sorts of companies, they'll have what we call, problem offices, and they are locations that are even forgotten about all the, there's only a few people that sit in Dubai. So they just get along with whatever, whether that be mobiles or. That they're just completely left separate than the rest of the organization. So we like to let's bundle that all together and get that all into one, one proposal or one organizational rollout for you. One company that comes to mind that we dealt with recently was a consulting company with Just shy of 10, 000 users. And they had a lot of disparate kind of PBXs around the globe, they had contracts coming to an end at random times, they weren't all slotted together to go, at one point. So we work with them to

Tom: 3:41

And that's super common, right? Like who these global orgs, lots of M& A, different sites went live at different times and bought different kit. Like it's very unlikely a global org is going to be like all our PBXs and our voice contracts nicely finish on, 18th of April, like it's a, it always ends up being a messy combination of kit and dates.

Zach: 4:03

Oh yeah. 100%. And one thing we always say to organizations as well is you don't have to wait. Let's not, okay let's wait and then go month by month on, X number of locations until we can all move to Teams at once. As you've rightly said, Tom, the majority of places can be, covered by Operator Connect. And that, that's a very compared to some of the locations, a very simple rollout. We see organizations, they'll move when ready in each location, but when you come across a particular hard location, let's say something like Dubai, for example, which it's not a very open or regulated market for cloud telephony. That's when you're going to have to start having conversations around, we may need a session border controller to sit locally on site to provide Teams to these users.

Tom: 4:52

So what so for those not familiar, obviously, when we talk about tricky countries, we talk about UAE, we talk about China, what's making them tricky?

Zach: 5:02

One thing is regulations. So for example, in Dubai, it's considered what we'd called a closed market, although it's not necessarily closed, there's just a very high. financial investment needed to become, a fully regulated cloud carrier in, in that location.

Tom: 5:21

So what would you do in that scenario?

Zach: 5:24

So in that scenario, we would leverage an existing relationship that a customer has. There's two major providers in Dubai, that's Etisalat and Du. So they're going to be getting numbers in some fashion from one of those two carriers. What we would do is look to deploy a local session border controller on site. So let's say they've got PRI lines coming in, which it was for this customer. For example they were still on that. We effectively deployed a managed session border controller on their site. And LoopUp came in, deployed and configured that and they effectively were able to offer Teams to those users in that location.

Tom: 6:03

Yeah, I think that's one of the things that I see is often those sites get avoided because they're more complicated than the OC or calling plan site. So they're like, you need some local care and I'm seeing a division of some carriers that are willing to do the onsite kit to do the management and some that are just want to be 100 percent cloud. And I think for large customers, you need that capability to. Either manage SBCs in house yourself and terminate them or have someone manage them for you.

Zach: 6:33

Yeah,

Tom: 6:35

Nice. So that, that's tricky. Are there any other tricky countries that are worth talking about? Right,

Zach: 6:43

Mind is China. Everybody always talks about China. That can be slightly tricky for, different reasons. There are effectively three national carriers in China. You've got China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom. And one of the things is China is porting is just not available. So that's one of those locations where if you want to move to another service in China, so something LoopUp, we offer a direct routing and as a service offering in China you wouldn't be able to port your numbers over. And even between, PRI to SIP, for example, or analog lines to SIP through any of those national carriers, porting is just not a thing. So one thing to always keep in mind in that location is we're going to have to offer new numbers to this, to these users no matter what.

Tom: 7:30

right. So whatever you're migrating away from, I guess if you've got PRI, you could theoretically put local SBC there and carry on with that.

Zach: 7:37

exactly. Yeah. If you wanted to if we have customers, that say. I need to keep my numbers or I have to keep my numbers for X reason. Then yeah, with the conversation we have is very similar to, like we said in Dubai, local SPC onsite to serve those. One conversation we always have as well with customers is, it's not a perfect solution. But one thing we do is if we do provide new numbers, let's say in China, but we did this for a customer recently they had a site go live in Shanghai. Where we have to offer new numbers, but what they did was they spoke to their previous carrier. And effectively put a forward on for six months. So during those six months, they forwarded from their old carrier to their new numbers with LoopUp. And then effectively what LoopUp did was we checked when we were coming up to that end of six months, how many times those old numbers were being rang because we can see those hitting, our network. So we say. No one's ringing those old numbers anymore. You've given out your new numbers to everyone. You can drop them, they can go. And then that's a nicer way to move from effectively move to a new set of numbers without missing out on that business from the old numbers.

Tom: 8:50

Yeah, that's interesting. That's a really old school approach, isn't it? We used to do that in way back in like the Lync days when people didn't yet trust putting an SPC in just as a proof of concept, like forwarding numbers. So it's nice to see it's still got a use case there. That's cool. You mentioned on the pre call LATAM was another area where that people don't always think of as awkward, but can be quite tricky.

Zach: 9:15

Yeah. So it's one of those locations the LATAM region where, people. I tend to forget that it can be quite complex there. And it's not really providing service that makes it complex. Like it does in China, like we mentioned, or, somewhere like Dubai. It's more the logistics around LATAM lead times are very long. As soon as we get into conversations with customers that say, Oh, I've got a site in Chile, I've got a site in Columbia, something like that. We always bring that to the forefront and start discussing that as soon as possible. Just because of long lead times, porting, for example, can take an awful long time to actually go through. And to mention there's some countries, let's take Columbia for your example, where you can't port, porting is not regulated. Like China, people keep China in the mind of I can't port. In that location, but there's maybe countries that you wouldn't think of, like you say, like Columbia, you actually can't port there either. That's not regulated. It's a new number only country.

Tom: 10:15

I feel like as you talk, I feel like there's an Empowering Cloud map coming along here that you can help us with to be like, here are the easy countries, medium countries, hard countries, because it's definitely knowledge that not everybody has when they're thinking about the Teams projects.

Zach: 10:28

We're really lucky to have a number management team. Who's, their whole day to day is dealing with number port requests or new number requests. So they have that real key information. Oh, by the way, in Germany, if you're ordering over 100 numbers, you need X, they have that real key niche information to be able

Tom: 10:48

Yeah.

Zach: 10:48

if you're rolling countries out, you're not slowed down

Tom: 10:52

And there's all the fun around do you need a local billing address? Does it have to be a physical address or can be a virtual address? And certain, regulatories around having an entity to have numbers as well. I guess very complicated, very quickly, this kind of telco world, doesn't it?

Zach: 11:07

exactly. Yeah,

Tom: 11:08

Awesome. So what about like more back to physical stuff? Analog lift phones, legacy PBXs, or maybe not legacy. Maybe they want to keep that kit. Do you come across those scenarios?

Zach: 11:21

we definitely do. To maybe hit on the. Keeping kit aspect, first of all we had a customer recently who had a lot of Cisco gateways across their estate. And that was

Tom: 11:33

Was that like CUBE, like CUBE modern stuff or like old school ISR type

Zach: 11:38

yeah, old school, more old school kind of voice gateways, not CUBEs, not session border controllers or anything. These were just, gateways that were had their analog devices, plug directly straight into them. The, this customer, they, effectively because of an internal policy and, sometimes you're going to hit that, during a project, they were like, we cannot lose or replace these Cisco VGs, we spent too much money, we need to keep them around for that reasons. One thing that we were able to do to help them was to offer SIP trunks directly to those devices. We didn't have to push back and say, these need to be replaced or anything like that, or even put a session border controller between it. We're able to offer trunks directly from our environment, terminating on those VGs themselves.

Tom: 12:23

Yeah. So again, that's the ability to offer like OC DR, DR as a service, but like classic native SIP trunks that I guess at that point in the customer takes on the business risk of it's their SBC, it's their gateway, but you're providing the service. Is that right?

Zach: 12:39

100%. Yeah. And, we say. And you guys do a good job at this at Empowering Cloud of trying to differentiate Operator Connect providers. Like you said, there's 79 of them now. So apart from country coverage, how else do get in there and differentiate differences between those providers making sure you have a provider that can do those sorts of things, not just Operator Connect, but can do Operator Connect and then. What you have, an on premises requirement, we can give you a trunk, and fill in that gap.

Tom: 13:11

Nice. Cool. And then analog, that's an interesting topic at the moment because we're now we have formally have ATA support on Teamsip gateway, which has been in beta slash worked for months and months, but now is legitimately supported and all that good stuff.

Zach: 13:25

Yeah, that did not come soon enough for me, the amount of conversations that we've now been able to, spin in a much more positive, direction because of these ATAs come into Teams just one example. I had a chemical manufacturer who, as you can probably guess, they've got lots of factories. They've got lots of large spaces with analog phones that were currently sat, across those estates. And the conversation when we first started was, okay, we might need SBCs. We might need, voice gateways. How are we going to work out these different types of devices and how are we going to get them calling? When this ATA support came out, it turns out with the different features that Teams is offering, common area phones, we found, a lot of these, we can, let's replace this with a common area phone just by, a Teams phone. Put the license on it, that sits on a desk somewhere and it completely negates the need for that analog device anymore. And then if there are that more specialized voice scenario, like we talk about Lyft phones, that sort of thing, we can lean on the Microsoft SIP gateway and use those ATAs that are now certified and working.

Tom: 14:35

Yeah. It's interesting conversation that one, cause it becomes a a TCO conversation to support conversation or all those things, because you can obviously, like you say, you could click in a classic SBC and you could terminate your own SIP Trunk to it. And it could be parallel Teams. Now you could have the SBC or the ATA registered to Teams. You've got the licensing implication from Microsoft. But I think. Often people jump to, I need to deploy loads of kit to support this analog. And as you said, like maybe there's a use case there where actually, if you think about the total cost of kit management deployment, can you just go to a more cloud solution for it? Like a common area phone is often a good answer.

Zach: 15:15

Yeah, 100%. And we find that, I've had a couple of customers that have come to me and said. I want as little on premises kit as possible.

Tom: 15:25

Yeah, that, I think that's the theme these days. If you're going to the cloud and you're putting your PBX in the cloud and all your data in the cloud, why would you want to keep the most complex bit on site and I do see customers doing that. And often in FinServ, maybe they've got turrets as well, and they've got classic PBX and they have a use case, but I'm always happy to challenge that use case. It's why are you keeping hold of the hard bit?

Zach: 15:49

exactly.

Tom: 15:51

Yeah, that's cool. Awesome, Zach. Thanks for sharing that with us. It's really great to get insight from you, and what you're doing, hands on with the team there. If people want to find out more from you or from LoopUp, what's the best thing to do?

Zach: 16:03

Definitely head over to LoopUp.Com. We have a great resources section where you'll find, the webinars we're currently going through a six part series at the minute. So you can jump in and have a look at those titles, see if anything jumps out to you. But me, find me on LinkedIn. I'll be around and hopefully helping.

Tom: 16:21

Awesome. Thanks, Zach. Appreciate the time. We'll talk again soon.

Zach: 16:23

Cheers Tom.