Tom Arbuthnot 0:00

Hi everybody. Welcome back to the Teams Insider podcast. I'm really excited about this one, a really hot topic. I've got Vandana Thomas and Vandana. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Vandana Thomas 0:10

Hey ya, Tom, thank you for having me. I'm Vandana I am the teams phone, mobile product owner. So I basically work in the teams carrying an operator integrations team. We mainly focus around calling. Yeah. Awesome.

Tom Arbuthnot 0:26

Yeah, so we last we last did something together. We on Teams fireside chat, and I think you still hold the record for the most number of people turning up to a teams fireside chat. I think it was like 150 people or something, although Ilya doing it in April, so I think he might beat you potentially. We'll see. But yeah there was so much interest and we lasted did something together and it was pre-launch and everybody was really interested. Can you just recap for everybody what is Teams Phone Mobile? Cause it was still operatic Connect Mobile at the time.

Vandana Thomas 0:55

Yeah. Very simply put, its the ability to integrate. Your mobile number into teams. That's the most oversimplified way of talking about what Teams Phone Mobile is. Yeah. But it's not just that so that Teams Phone Mobile allows you to take. the cellular communications and calling that you are used to as a business user, and a business customer, and take it to a whole new level. Today you, you are used to going to your phone and making, cellular communications over the phone. If you want business communications governing that governs all business policies that the corporation or the enterprise or the business wants to impose on you. You typically would go to a unified collaboration product like teams. And there are others, that you would choose to do that. This is an attempt to integrate the two, like to bring the two worlds together to recognize that there is a real problem in the enterprise world, in the business communications world where these two silos exist and don't talk to each other. So this is our attempt of blurring the lines between cellular communications and unified collaboration

Tom Arbuthnot 2:20

Awesome. this is quite different. We've had fixed mobile convergence in the past, but this is quite different, isn't it really is a single number. It's not forwarding or forking, it's the operator would give you a cell or mobile number and that is also your team's number. And it's your team's voicemail and it's your team's presence. And I think you've got plans to deepen that integration in the future, potentially.

Vandana Thomas 2:43

Yes. Yes, indeed. So what you get with Teams Phone Mobile is you have a single business provided number. Stressing on the business provided numbers.

Tom Arbuthnot 2:54

Yeah, I was gonna call, I was gonna call. Very important. Yeah, it has to be a like it's not a bring your own mobile phone number and make it work with teams, you have to order a specific number from the carrier. That is a Teams Phone Mobile number. Is that correct?

Vandana Thomas 3:07

That, is correct. It's your corporate liable number, right? Like the, that's the important thing to, number that your corporation buys for you. Yeah. And then that means all of the communication that is being done on that line is for business purposes. Now, it's true that with mobile numbers, the lines blur a little bit between personal and business communication, and you oftentimes businesses are okay with you using it for personal communication. The important point is that's between you and your employer, right? Yeah. The business number, this is single business number, and the attempt is to make sure that this. the communication on this number is secure and compliant for your business. And there's a true mobile integration allows the admin of your company to have a streamlined management of all the services, devices and policies that would be, that they would typically, you to have for your business communication?

Tom Arbuthnot 4:16

Yeah I think a huge one there is the compliance recording. So that's always been a real pattern in the mobile space to have compliance mobile record, and you can do it, but you have to have special sims or special contracts. But now the fact you can take your team's recording product and it's recording both your team's, meetings and I don't know what do we call like SIP slash fixed line these days? I. Fixed line, but it's obviously not fixed line, but you are, you are capturing all your PSTN calls, be them completely native on the mobile phone dial calls, they'll still get captured or be it teams phone calls.

Vandana Thomas 4:49

Yes. Yes. So when you talked about the fixed line went through this journey a long time ago where it became a soft line and it's now, you don't really need a fixed device to, to have, your communication over that number provided traditionally by fixed line wire line operators. So this journey is now for the mobile line, which is traditionally provided by the mobile network operators. Yeah. Now it's making its journey to the cloud and freeing yourself from where you want to communicate So I, I often, I get, I, I get slapped when I say this, but it's productivity on your terms, like you you're bringing with the advent with the advent of all this hybrid communication that is going on the lines between what is a workspace versus what is a home space, versus what is an outside space has blurred anyway. Yeah. And the technology has to catch up with it in every way. So you feel, you feel productive wherever you are. And the tagline we have is online or on the go. Never miss a car. Uh, And calling has also again, come back to the forefront. There's a period of time there was a lot of just messaging, communication that was becoming front and center, but. with not having the ability to meet people in person calling has again come back to the full forefront, right?

Tom Arbuthnot 6:21

Yeah. And specifically PSTN calling is mostly for me when I'm mobile and sort about, cuz data in the UK is not bad, but it's far from perfect. So that's often PSTN and being able to have a single experience of people don't have to think, would I ring you on the mobile? You want the, on the soft phone, it's just one number is a nice feature, I think.

Vandana Thomas 6:41

Yes. And with that one number, the, what you touched upon there is the reliability of, voice communication. The reliability of volt calling or cellular calling is definitely far supersedes the reliability of calling over voiceover IP and other database voice communication. So it's an important cornerstone also of. Of what Teams Phone Mobile is, because it's combining the power of the cellular voice network and the internet connection and the pieces of the communication that need to be front and center on voice with guaranteed bit rate and all of that stuff. Yeah, quality of service, whereas the other part of it you want to maybe check in into realtime communication, like realtime collaboration and like richer collaboration, and then you should have the feature to do that. So for us, when we did, when we tried to solve this problem we said that this should be brainless for the user. He should be able to collaborate where he wants, how he wants and when he wants, right? You could start your call on your voice network. You could be on your train and then you could switch. Switch to data when you get into the office, you could upload Yeah. The call then or to a coffee shop, right? That's your journey today. You would start one place walk and nobody needs to know all the noise that is behind the scenes. And that's the seamlessness we are trying to attempt to deliver. It's far from perfect, the first revision of. Has actually surprised a lot of people of how simple it has been based on the feedback we've got from the first five operators.

Tom Arbuthnot 8:29

Yeah. That handoff hand on has always been a sticking point with traditional kind of fixed mobile convergence. Cuz often it was two different platforms that owned the number. So like you could hand off, but you couldn't hand on or vice versa. But the fact that it's a single platform makes that, a bit easier.

Vandana Thomas 8:45

Yeah. True. It's true. And this is something that when we were, when we started on this journey, And I must probably tell you this I was at previously background actually. Yeah. Cause I'd love to know a bit more. We jumped straight into the tech, which is my what I always do. But I'd love to hear your background cuz the, yeah, you were in t for quite a while, weren't you? Yeah. Yes. So I worked at T-Mobile before and I, I worked in multiple areas in T-Mobile, and a good part of my journey was actually the B2B transformation that we did for T-Mobile. We called it T-Mobile for business. It's very difficult in the business and enterprise world to have a one shop, a one, one stop fits it all type, product. So just understanding the difficulty of that landscape of how small businesses work versus how, mid-market or enterprises work and how customized some solutions need to be on the enterprise and how touch free, it moves to be on the small business end. Is the magic of that world when you're creating products for businesses. My background's engineering. Came from the network engineering team, went into business, product marketing, et cetera. But I came back to the engineering team T-Mobile has something called Digits, which is a very like small business, consumer focused, unified collaboration product. What I learned through that journey was an important piece and an important like epiphany Yeah. That I actually carried through into my professional journey at Microsoft when I was hired to do fixed mobile convergence. Yeah. At T-Mobile, what I learned is It wasn't by chance that only the sole proprietors and the smaller businesses were using the unified collaboration product because it was a fantastic product, like really awesome, But what was difficult was it wouldn't scale to the, to what the enterprises or the larger business is required, you need it to be on that specific network, and that by design itself prevents the scalability of that product for larger businesses. The operator has all the wears, the backend, the network, the pipe, and all the great of 5G infrastructure. They've spent insane amount of money. Yes. Rolling 5G out. But none of 5G can be realized without an application ecosystem and services that will actually leverage the goodness 5G Microsoft was convicted, that we cannot solve this alone. We need to solve it in tandem with the operator. Yeah, we have to let them be on the super highway of the 5G and the network that they are the best at our subject matter expert set, whereas our lane was clear. It's the hyper scaled cloud applications and services. Yeah, that makes sense. Combining our strengths is required to address the problem that the enterprises and the businesses have,

Tom Arbuthnot 12:06

And working with multiple operators, as you say, like coverage is an important consideration there. So not just partnering with a single operator, but having a model that scales out for different operators in different markets. I guess that's part of the journey of getting coverage,

Vandana Thomas 12:21

yes, it is. It is. We are, we're the aim with Teams Phone Mobile now. We've launched with five partners, the Verizon in the US Yeah. Deutsche Telecom in Germany Swisscom in Switzerland. Rogers, who was our first launch was at in Canada. Yes. I tell you. And Telia in the Nordics. And the Nordics are, is like very special area. Not, yeah, not

Tom Arbuthnot 12:44

mobile. Mobile first. Anyway they back into a soft phone, don't they? It's interesting market.

Vandana Thomas 12:49

Yeah. And we'll soon launch in uk. Hopefully you'll get to use it on BT

Tom Arbuthnot 12:53

yeah, I'm waiting for BT to

Vandana Thomas 12:55

get to get, yeah that's will be launched pretty soon to, but what we've also learned is then now expanding this coverage. in various markets. It's very important so that we give people the choice of how,

Tom Arbuthnot 13:11

Like you say, at the moment, you're limit, like if an enterprise wants it, and enterprises are definitely interested that they're by definition in multiple countries. So at the moment, they can't get it everywhere they might want It's gonna be certain countries for certain operators right now. Yes, and it's something for the operators also to realize. I understand how hard it is sometimes for operators to reconcile to the fact that, okay, a piece of, something that they completely owned and controlled, and I'm not talking about just control from from a control perspective, but from the regulations and all of that surrounds, communications. Yeah. Mobile communications. It's a very, hard journey to step out of that comfort zone. It's trailblazing in a way because you are allowing a piece of your call control to be controlled by Microsoft Teams. And the great part is, with Microsoft Teams, the, it's front and center the regulations, the security aspects, the compliance aspects are very front and center for Microsoft as well. Yeah. It's been a slow journey to, to get the operators to think. Yeah, nothing goes fast in operator world. Yes. It's just part of the complexity, like you say, the legal, the infrastructure, the timing. It takes time for these things to get to market and it takes time for customers to be aware of them as well. Cause that all trickles down over time. I saw Verizon did a good job, actually made lots of noise around their launch and I think got a lot of attention around it, but it just takes a while for people to understand and then even there. their sales and their go to market and their channels. It just takes a while to trickle down.

Vandana Thomas 14:52

It does. It does, and I think it'll all settle. Over time there will be, I do think there is a place for the operator, uc products in the smaller businesses and the sole proprietors like the, very small businesses. Yeah. I think would still continue to use the operator.

Tom Arbuthnot 15:10

They're always gonna have a portfolio, aren't they? They're always gonna have options, so that's their business. But it's pretty unarguable to the numbers Teams is doing at the moment and the trajectory, like you, I think if it was me, I'd want to be in the mix to at least have that option for my customer.

Vandana Thomas 15:26

Yes. The, my favorite thing is this I won't say which operator, but one of our really like strong operators initially, they, it w it, it took a long while to convince them. and just two days ago I was talking to my counterpart there and he was like, you know what's my favorite thing van? to refresh my Salesforce dashboard and look at the number of lines that are new lines that are getting added every single day in the thousands. Wow. So it's pretty wild. When you think of that power, another one. this is crazy. The amount of interest there is around the product. I haven't seen something like this in my professional career for a very long time, and I've been in wireless communication for over 25 years is what the other my contract that one of the other said. It's amazing. It's. amazing. And I always tell my marketing team, we call it Teams Phone, Mobile, and abbreviated, it's TPM and I just don't like TPM and nobody likes to call it TPM but it's going there. And I'm like, you should, we should call it teams FOMO because people are having. FOMO more from nothing on it. And it seems four. Nobody so I'm throwing it out in the ether and let it stick somewhere.

Tom Arbuthnot 16:51

That's awesome. What are you seeing commercially? Cause I think it's interesting, like there was obviously talk about do you commercialize it with a license to the carriers pay for it? Are the carriers bundling it with Office 365 offers or are they selling it solo? How's that working?

Vandana Thomas 17:07

Yeah, I think it's a mix. It depends on the market and the operator, we decided not to charge for it. We went back and forth. I know when I, last time was on here, I said that license and for legacy reasons, there is a separate license right now because that's the decision to pivot happened a little later in year.

Tom Arbuthnot 17:28

Yeah. zero license, isn't it? So it's more. A feature flag.

Vandana Thomas 17:31

Yes. Yeah. So long term, of course it'll be baked into phone system. We think it's a mobile number. It shouldn't be very different from any other number because it's part of Team's phone system. So yeah we reconcile to that. And the operators actually are also depending, because we have relationships with the operators who are like cloud service. Who actually sell and resell our products along with theirs. Yeah. But there are others that our enterprise sales teams go get and they have a different yes. Volume licensing and things like that. So there, there are some. Tactical mechanics around it that prevent the operator from fully always selling it in one package, but wherever they can, they are trying to sell it as one package where they sell the feature or the calling plan. It's whatever your business calling plan would be picked with this feature.

Tom Arbuthnot 18:23

And are you seeing, can you give us any insight? Is it SMB, is it mid-market, is it enterprise? Who's picking it up initially? Kind of. It's been a few months in market now. What are you seeing?

Vandana Thomas 18:34

We're seeing a lot of enterprise interest. We are not surprised. The product Teams in general Is, very well penetrated in the enterprise world. And we've seen a lot of interest with. Smaller businesses and mid-market as well.

Tom Arbuthnot 18:50

Because that was my initial expectation was that actually it'd be those that quite often are more leaning towards mobile would be like, oh, this is perfect for us. We already heavily use mobile. We'll integrate the two. I think I expected enterprise to be a bit slower, but maybe that's just may. Maybe they have sped up now in terms of. Kind of ideas and aspirations.

Vandana Thomas 19:12

Yeah. The, so here's the thing with enterprise, their decisions are slower, right? A lot Teams Phone Mobile launched towards the end of last year. So a lot of the business decisions on what their collaboration products, et cetera, or just beginning to happen. It's a slower sales cycle of obviously for enterprise. So the ones that are already on the product, Might be smaller businesses and mid-market who are actually using and providing us feedback, whereas enterprises have taken a few numbers and are trialing it out and have the sales pipeline. That's how Yeah, it typically works. So you're right in that, that with smaller businesses it's a very logical, natural solution for what they need. Smaller businesses need to think about teams a little bit more as part of their portfolio, and that's happening now. It's a lot of good headway like in into smaller businesses that we've been having with teams lately. So we've launched Teams Essentials, for example, which is like a just G eight. but that's

Tom Arbuthnot 20:18

Yeah. It feels like a really good opportunity for those operators to be selling to those smaller organizations as an all up bundle. Pick up your mobile contract and your Office 365 from us, and it is all, all nicely tied together. That's a great upsell opportunity for them

Vandana Thomas 20:33

It is. It is. Definitely. We'll have I think I'll ha I'll be better positioned to answer it, like maybe six months down the lane on where there's like real actionable numbers and metrics to, yeah, to talk about. It's too early in the game, but I do think the enterprises will adopt this quite a bit.

Tom Arbuthnot 20:52

I'm definitely seeing a come up in conversation. It's definitely a consideration. I've even seen some organizations that are going down team's phone that are like, oh, maybe you'll hang on to see what's happening on the Teams Phone Mobile side, which is interesting.

Vandana Thomas 21:05

Yeah. Yeah. That's it's interesting and scary enough in a little way for us when we look at teams phone overall. But yes it's amazing. It's amazing how many. How many enterprises, how many businesses are out there actually willing to move to Teams phone and even willing to move to the carriers that have this solution yeah, it was, I'm surprised with the number of new acquisitions that carriers are saying that they're having because of the product. So it's definitely. Definitely. Cool.

Tom Arbuthnot 21:38

Yeah. So what are you thinking? You can't project too much in terms of future carriers and stuff, but I guess the anticipation is more carriers will come on board to get you more country coverage. Is that the broad plan? Yeah,

Vandana Thomas 21:50

I would look it, look at it as less is more carriers and more markets. We're focused on getting more markets. We're definitely trying to leverage our existing carriers to increase their market coverage in other markets that they're present. It's is logical.

Tom Arbuthnot 22:07

They're all Doing their own local market at the moment. Like you, Rogers is doing Canada, Verizon's doing the US BT the UK they're all deaf. I guess they're home market First.

Vandana Thomas 22:17

Yes. But yes, we are in talks with carriers across the world and some of them are further along. The others it's not an easy product, to just spin out for operators, it's not like operator connect where there's a little bit of configuration to be done above and beyond what they did in direct routing or things like that to to move to this. This is the wireless network. Many times, first time breaking out of their core into the big, bad world of the cloud.

Tom Arbuthnot 22:50

Yeah. Yeah. It's a home world. Yeah. That's awesome. And what about on the feature front, obviously again, it's only just to market, but you talked previously about the ideas of having that 5G connectivity and getting even more integrated. Have you had any further thoughts? SMS is another one that I find comes up, all the time in conversation. It's so funny cuz some of the other UCAS platforms have tight SMS integration. We have it on teams consumer, but not on teams enterprise. So that comes up all the time that people wanting to bring SMS into teams.

Vandana Thomas 23:20

Yeah. I think the next logical step is to integrate messaging, it's the biggest asked feature and by anybody who's been on the product. But messaging is a little complicated with respect to, how much of messaging needs to be integrated. SMS is simple, MMS is maybe simple. Yeah. And so trying to figure out how much of, chat and messaging to come into the negative and crossover on both the sides is definitely an interesting problem to go solve and figure out what's the best solution. RCS Sort of took off and then didn't, yeah, and it's it's

Tom Arbuthnot 23:59

And Google keep hitting Apple over the head to adopt it, but Apple aren't even slightly interested. I guess I'm thinking that through. That's a challenge, isn't it? Cause it isn't really on, on the Apple to Apple because it isn't SMS at all. So the operator doesn't even have the chance to grab it, to bring it into teams. I hadn't really thought about that until you just said that.

Vandana Thomas 24:16

Yeah. Yeah. So of course messaging from a 5G integration perspective we're trying to leverage quality plays. Like how can we bring better quality into teams calling and like the whole idea is when this user is on one endpoint, which is a native dialer or or a native device versus another. It has to be an equitable experience across the world. Yeah. And that's one thing that we are trying to solve. We are trying, today we are able to uplift calls from the native data up to Teams we're doing the reverse as well. So that's one. If you're on a teams call, you could, you know that you are, network connectivity, data connectivity is falling. So be able to go into the native dialer, better call queue integration for the native dialer, because today the call queue integration is mostly on on Teams applications, but bringing a lot of that into the native dialer and delivering that capability. Then additionally, I think, this whole. This whole BYOD, which is a terribly abused term. Yeah. I almost hate saying BYOD. We support BYOD off the gate. That is if you have your own device, that is not company. provided.

Tom Arbuthnot 25:38

Yeah. We have to define what it is. We talk about BYOD in Rooms as well, and it's bringing your own laptop to a USB device. So yes, it's an ill-defined term, isn't it? But yeah if someone ships a business sim or a guess an EIM that you could apply to your phone, you mobile phone, you bought a retail, it would still work. But you can't bring your own consumer mobile number. Service can.

Vandana Thomas 26:01

Correct. And also, yeah, so that's an important piece I want to touch upon because it's something that's often confused that your consumer number to be inside teams. What's the value that anybody is looking from that specific number Being in teams? Yeah. These teams for work or things for the, your work teams. The right place for your personal number to be in, in the first place, right? Those are of course problems that we are looking at on what should be that personal versus business differentiation and separation. There's billing implications. Compliance implications, there's privacy implications. So that's a tough one. So we will support we, we already support BYOD. Let's say you had your own device, that's not company paid. You could have your own personal number on there. And the second number could be the eim, which has your company owned number. And it could be vice versa. It could be your physical sim or the primary sim could be business and your E-sim could be. personal number doesn't matter. Yeah. So we do support that, but what we are trying to do is to make sure that's a better, tighter integration. Because, today with devices running dual sims, it's not as cool as it's, sounds to be. Yeah. Cause you don't wanna miss your business call because you were on a persona. Yeah,

Tom Arbuthnot 27:23

it's a bit, it's a little bit fiddly. If you are, if you're a pro user you can be like, I want to dial this person with this number always. And this person with that number it, it's interesting. In Europe, certainly in the customers I work with for a while, bringing their own device was in, and then with all the rules around. Data and data control and all that kind of thing, it went out again cuz people were just like that. It's easier if it's a fully locked down corporate managed device end to end cuz then we can control the app ecosystem and everything else. And there are, containerized launches and all sorts of things you can do on bring your own device. But it seems like the customers I work with are like, net, net. This is not worth the hassle. We'll just issue a device and we can remotely wipe it. We can do whatever we want with the, our device. We can't remotely wipe. Your device, we can remotely wipe our device. That kind of thing.

Vandana Thomas 28:10

Yeah. Yeah. I feel I feel irresponsible if I go and say that, Hey, with this solution you can combine your business and prior personal worlds and you can get rid of both your devices. It's not speaking to everybody's needs. Yeah. And it's not speaking to, the responsibility that one owes to their corporation or their enterprise with how the corporate communications need to be managed and today's world increasingly so. Right? I don't wanna end up with a personal call recorded in the cloud that, that you ha, you as an end user weren't aware. yeah. You would be by that responsibility, by that action, so that's why that the corporate own mobile number is what we are solving for initially, and we will solve for the personal number over time, but once a good solution that can address all these, harder. Yeah.

Tom Arbuthnot 29:17

Yeah. Problems. only getting harder with the, all the rules around data and discovery and right to be forgotten and everything else. If you record the wrong thing, it's just as important to not store it is story these days. So knowing what you've got is really important.

Vandana Thomas 29:33

Yeah. Yeah. But overall, yes. I think we. we were fi having great feedback with the initial set of feature, that we launched with the, like you said, the presence is one aspect that everybody feels very excited about. Yeah. The ability to use your mobile number of, like your mobile device to make your corporate business calls and allowing the corporate caller ID to be surfacing to the end customer, letting your your number be visible for direct direct exposure to customers. The other one, of course, the financial sectors, like really eating up the compliance. Yeah. That recording.

Tom Arbuthnot 30:20

Yeah. Like we said, that recording problem was such a big challenge and it just having not just, the recording, but having it in one system now is really nice as well.

Vandana Thomas 30:29

Yeah. And then the ability to just, decide that, hey, end of the day I don't want any notifications coming to me. You can turn it off on teams and then you know that choice will.

Tom Arbuthnot 30:40

Yeah. And that's becoming a, that's becoming a legal requirement in some countries now as well. Things like France, where you can't be disturbed out of your work hours. So being able to centrally control, that's quite interesting. Both on Yes. Desktop and mobile.

Vandana Thomas 30:53

Yes. But then we also recognize that, it's a choice for the end user on what, whether they want to let the call come through or not in places that are regulations. Per labour laws, of course it would be admin controlled. But where it needs to be user control. Hey, you wanna, I maybe don't wanna work between three to five or two to five, and that's the time when I don't wanna receive the calls. Or like later on five to eight I want to work because, whatever reason. Our point of view there is we should let the user determine that choice and respect their choice. Yeah, makes sense. Sense. Market regulations allow that.

Tom Arbuthnot 31:38

That's awesome. Cool. If people wanna find out more about Teams Phone Mobile, what's the best thing to do? Obviously there's a few blogs out there listing the operators. Is it to go to the operators and talk to them first? Or is it to talk to Microsoft?

Vandana Thomas 31:51

I think wherever you buy the way we've done it is since it's like a combined service. Like it's a service that we are co-selling together. Yeah, you could approach, either the operator or our sales engine., if you wanna go get a new phone number, of course you would go to the operator to get the new phone number but if you just want to add. your current numbers to teams, phone, mobile. You'd work with Microsoft to bring on those numbers. And of course, simultaneously work with the operators. It's the same like operator Connect. The admin works with the operator to make sure that the numbers get uploaded into the teams admin center and they, they have, they are able to go into the teams admin center, assign the licenses, to the users and the numbers, and then that starts the routing,

Tom Arbuthnot 32:44

cool. Thanks Vandana I really appreciate it. It's always good to talk to you cause I always get a good insight as to what's really going on. And maybe we revisit and have the conversation again in in six months or so and see where it is in the market.

Vandana Thomas 32:54

Awesome. Really, it's always been a pleasure. Thank you very much for having me. For customers who wanna go try Teams Phone Mobile, like it's mind-blowing is what I'm hearing from everybody that's using it and it's it's great. And for operators, I think it's important to consider that doing this together, we will solve the customer problems together. Awesome. Thanks very much. Yeah, thank you.