I think there's a really large untapped opportunity in the SMB, SMC space. I think small businesses are really ripe for leveraging the value that we're providing in Teams Phone, especially with some of the innovation that you're seeing now that we're putting into Teams and Teams Phone Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. This week we're talking about Microsoft and Operator Connect and telco strategy. We had Taimoor actually met him in person at the Shure offices in London. So we recorded in person, which is really nice. Taimoor looks after telco strategy for Microsoft Teams and Microsoft. And we got into kind of the Operator Connect story Teams Phone Mobile, all the different telephony options where things are going and the the Operator Connect journey as well. Going from where it started to now closing in on 100 operators and 100 countries covered. So I really hope you enjoy the show. Thanks to Taimoor for taking the time out to do the podcast, and also many thanks to Numonix all for a great call recording solution for Microsoft Teams. Being the sponsor of this podcast and their support, everything we're doing. And with that, on with the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast, doing another in person, Shure have kindly giving up their office space, their podcast space in London. So I appreciate that. Got Taimoor who's in the country talking to various operators tomorrow. But I start off by do you want to introduce yourself and your role inside Microsoft. Cool. Yeah, absolutely. Tom, thanks for having me. my name is Taimoor. I work on our telco strategy for go to market on all things m365, which of course includes Teams, Teams, phone meeting rooms, Copilot and all the rest of it. Awesome. Like, I feel like, I've had fortunately got to know you for a while now outside of Microsoft, I feel like your role was a bit of a secret outside. Like, if I look at your LinkedIn, it's just like general manager. So how did you come to be in this role? And I was there was some Cisco in the past as well. Yeah. No, absolutely. I think, I've been doing something similar to this for about five years now. and essentially the, the need at that time was for us to work very closely with our operators to figure out what their go to market looks like. How do they how do we make our joint customers successful? what kind of solutions are they offering? And then when I took the role, actually, if you remember, we were in a Skype for Business world. We were not in Teams yet. and so that transitioned from sort of Skype for Business to Teams was super important. because a lot of our operators were working on Skype for Business hosted server, and this whole business model that they had, and so working with them to figure out how do they move their business model to more Teams and then course, of course, working with very closely with our Teams, you know, engineering products as well to figure out what works for a telco. So when you think about, products such as Operator Connect and Teams Phone Mobile and some of the very operator focused services that we now have, you know, there was a real need for it. So, that's kind of where I fit in. Awesome. And Operator Connect now we're in our 97 countries covered and 97 operators coincidently sticking up like operator country. I'm seeing where we get to a hundred first but that's been massive growth since that program started. for the audience. Take us through kind of what that is, how it came to be and and the growth story. Yeah. No. Absolutely. So, Operator Connect is a fantastic story, actually. When we were looking at, sort of the Teams calling space a few years ago, we were thinking about, okay, there's this, there's this whole ecosystem that's developing, which, where we see partners, predominantly operators who want to offer this as a service or direct routing as a service used to be the thing back then. And we were like, well, maybe we could just make this a little bit better. Maybe we should, put some sort of a governance around it, some foundational concepts that were that customers want, like security, like resiliency, redundancy, some SLA and all that kind of stuff. Let's program programmatic, knowing. Who the operators to choose is one of the big things for me. I feel like when we were in the direct routing as a service point of view, you could have Bob setting up one SBC in the cloud and calling himself a direct service provider. And you had the tier one telcos, and it was very hard for customers to know who was doing it legitimately. So I thought that was a good, good tick box as well. That's absolutely correct. And direct routing as a service still exists today. And there are the bobs who've got the direct routing stuff, figured out, but we wanted to provide some credibility to the space. And also provide some tools and processes and APIs for the operators to be able to scale this at telco scale. And so that's kind of how Operator Connect was born. and, you know, we've we've seen, you know, tremendous growth. So Operator Connect is growing 100% year over year. Wow. So if we look at the number of seats, the number of enabled users year over year, it's about 100%. We've just closed our year. So I can actually say that, and and we continue to just see the trajectory going up. Now, obviously direct routing has been around for a long time. So there's a lot of direct routing seats out there as well. but because as Teams phone grows, we're seeing a lot of Operator Connect growth. So we're very bullish on it. Yeah. So we're up to 20 million Teams phone seats active. So that's not licensed. And we'll talk a minute about the the white space there. But like 20 million is actually has some kind of PSTN connectivity that could be Microsoft coating plans. Could be DR could be OC could be TPM. There's a split there obviously, but there's kind of a mix of options for customers depending on what's right for them. That's right. Exactly. so you know, we started off, you know, there was the only thing that we were doing, and then we had calling plans and then we also had, Operator Connect now and then the latest one is Teams for mobile. So the idea is to give the customers choice not only of the operator that they use or the service that they wanted to use, but also now between fixed and mobile, the ability to choose based on their users what they wanted to do. Awesome. And what do you see with customers? Do you see them defaulting to one type of connectivity, or do you see them mixing and matching those connectivity depending on their their use case? You know, it's. A really important question. I like a lot of people ask me this like, should we choose Operator Connect, should we choose direct routing? And and there isn't, a black or white binary answer that I can give you. I will say that it really depends on the customer segment as well. So smaller customers, you know, typically tend to just go with a single solution. It's less complex and so on. So they'll be like, oh yeah, I want Operator Connect for all of my users. All I want calling plan for all of my users. We're talking about, you know, the sort of small to mid-sized customers. as you go up that chain, though, you know, we find that, customers are starting to look towards a hybrid solution where they'll have a bunch of Operator Connect users, but they might have some DR requirements. and so they'll do DR as well. the leverage a partner like an SI or an operator to be able to do both. and then now, especially with mobile, we're starting to see, you know, the larger customer say, yeah, I would like mobile, but I want mobile for like half my organization or a third of my organization. The rest will still stick with fixed line. So it really just depends. There's no right or wrong answer there. The good news is that the way that we've architected these services is you don't have to make a either or choice. and I think that's where a lot of people usually get stuck is like, oh, which one should we choose? And it's not really an exclusive choice to make the choice. You're making is Teams phone, and then how that gets delivered to Teams is kind of like based on your requirements and users and all that kind of stuff. And with the exception of Teams for mobile, which we talk about in a minute, the functionality is the same whether you're calling plan DR or OC, so you're not picking, a user experience mean you're just picking an IT choice of connectivity. Really? That's absolutely correct. I mean, DR does have a little bit more flexibility on the networking side. Like there's local survivability and there's a bunch of few things, but it's very and then there's obviously some regulated places where, you know, DR might be required or some security SCIF environments where DR might be like, you know, you need to have an on premise thing. and so there's some corner cases where DR actually serves a purpose. Yeah. and then of course the rest of it. But yes, you're right, the end user functionality for somebody who's opening up a Teams client, making a phone call or receiving one is no different. And, two things I hear sometimes from customers in that decision making process, they're like, surely Microsoft would rather sell their coding plans because that's theirs. And there's been margin opportunity for them there. And also, is there going to be a drive to have just OC and I think you've touched on the answers there. But let's just to kind of spell it out. What do you say to those things. No absolutely not. I mean I don't see for us any reason to, you know, ask. We want to provide choice to the customer because we understand there's all kinds of customers. our entire Teams ecosystem actually leverages choice, right? Whether it comes to our devices or the way that service connectivity works and so on. calling plan is, again, a, something that we have to be able to, to provide to the market because customers ask for it. Yeah. there are certain niche of customers that actually need a calling plan, and they want simplicity and they want to go to a single vendor or whatever the reasons are. and it works really well for that purpose. But there's a lot of customers who have, you know, deep relationships with operators or contracts that are longstanding or whatever the reasons they are. They want to be able to choose a telephony provider for that. They can do that as well. Yeah. So in coverage of course, I think we're up to 35 countries on coding plans. So if you want to if you're on those 35, you're going to then have to choose DR or OC for the rest of them. Yeah absolutely. Absolutely. Again, it's about providing choice. we have customers today that have OC in country X and calling plan in country Y Because they can you know they may have an IT team that manages and support is supports the US. But they've got an office in I don't know Vietnam that they don't want to have to do anything with. So they might get a calling plan there. I don't know if Vietnam's one of the. We’ll check the report. Awesome. So, like I mentioned, the 20 million. So like Microsoft have been on a tear with phones. Really impressive. Great end of year as well. Congrats on that. What's your thoughts about where the opportunity is? I guess for, for operators, for customers. What do you see for this FY and beyond? Yeah, I think, you know, I think that there's, there's a really still a massive opportunity, right. There's a couple of thoughts on that that are on top of my mind without going into a big monologue on a soap box, but in general, I think there are, you talked about this white space, right? So we've got, we've got a white. It's no secret that we have a lot of people who have invested in, an M365 solution that includes phone, but they necessarily haven't yet moved to phone or whether it's, operational reasons or whether it's, you know, whatever the reasons are that they or turned it on in the enterprise space, we have a large opportunity there. and I think that's what's most exciting to all partners, operators and system integrators, etc., to be able to go in and have that conversation with the customer. So that's the first one. the second one, I think there's a really large untapped opportunity in the SMB, SMC space. I think small businesses are really ripe for leveraging the value that we're providing in Teams Phone, especially with some of the innovation that you're seeing now that we're putting into Teams and Teams Phone for example, you know, the Queues App that was announced earlier this year is a really great way for small business to be able to figure out how do we do a lightweight contact center like experience. Yeah. and then if you think about some of the additional capabilities we're providing, like being able to do, oh, I don't know, embedding Teams into your website, like we give you all the pieces of information that you need to do to be able to do a B2C experience where your customers can come onto your website and then talk to you while you have just Teams open, right. And then be able to leverage all of the CX capabilities in there as well. Yeah. And, the thing I love about cloud and SaaS and in particular 365 is those small customers. those ten seat customers getting access to the same features, capabilities and resilience that the biggest finserves legals in the world are getting. Like like it's a really democratizing effect that they have access to that level of phone system As you say Queues App all the capabilities. Absolutely, absolutely. And because it's all powered by Azure at the back end, you get all the sort of AI capabilities, which we'll talk about as well, which is the third Segway. Right? So we talked about the white space in enterprise. We've got some white space to turn on phone there. We've got a really large untapped, base of SMB, SMC customers that use M365, but they're not really using Teams phone. So that's a big one as well. And the third, I think growth opportunity, which, you know, we're going to focus on very, very highly in FY 25 is going to be I, when we think about Copilot, as sort of the, AI engine that powers collaboration and communications, that's going to be a pretty compelling story to tell. you and I were chatting about this before we started talking, but essentially, you know, the thing I talk to, talk most about to operators as well as customers is that before we were talking about a value proposition for telephony that involved moving over from sort of a legacy environment, and maybe leveraging different devices, but moving over for agility, flexibility, cost, perhaps, and maybe increased productivity. Now we're talking about a whole different thing. you know, Copilot, any AI is an extremely compelling reason for you to bring your telephony workload into a canvas like Teams. or because simply because AI and Copilot are only effective when they receive a bunch of signals in terms of the work that you're doing or the data that it has on you. and so your telephone communications, whether it's inbound and calls or calls that you're making, are a big part of that signal data. And the more you feed it, the more intelligent decisions it can make and inform you about the work that you want to do. So I think Copilot AI by itself is really amazing in the work that it's going to be able to do, but then it makes a really, really compelling case for bringing telephony into the Teams environment. Yeah, I'm definitely seeing that with some of the enterprise customers I get to talk to, which is they've started on their Copilot journey and now they're actually reversing into Teams found. So Copilot was the driver. They were like, oh, we're going to do Copilot. We're really excited about AI. And then they're like, oh, exactly. To your point, they're like, why don't we get this on our phone calls? And so they're switching from their legacy IP, PBX. They never bothered before because they were like it's good enough. But now they're like, oh, this is a feature we can only get if we move to cloud telephony in Teams phone. Yeah. No. Absolutely. And the use cases are incredible right? I mean you were talking about this earlier as well. But imagine just, you know, taking a phone call on a Teams client or on your mobile device eventually, walking around, you know, from train station to train station or on the streets, walking to the office or driving in the car, and having that phone conversation, but getting to your desk and seeing the summary, the action items, the transcription, everything that you need, it's archived is discoverable. You can search for it later on. Yeah, it's in context. that's really, really powerful. and, you know, that's just the first use case for Copilot that we have for Teams, one that's exist today. we're probably come up with a lot more as well. So that's really, really exciting to be able to have this. AI sort of layer on top of all your communications. Definitely. So let's talk about that SMB kind of mid-market, because I feel like Microsoft dominates the enterprise. And the enterprise is really adopt relatively fast SMB and mid-market to definitely feel slightly different. What are your thoughts on kind of that and the go to market there? Yeah, I think it's I think it's really challenging for Microsoft. and this is kind of the challenge that we have to overcome really. we, you know, the SMB, SMC go to market is completely different than enterprise and enterprise. We've got sellers, we've got, you know, customer success people. We've got all kinds of support to be able to help a customer guide them through that journey from beginning to end. Yeah. but we don't have to we don't have that scale at the SMB, SMC level. so we really rely on our partner ecosystem to be able to do that. and, you know, in our partner ecosystem, especially in my world, in the operator world, you know, we've been we've been looking at solutions that, operators have been selling for, you know, decades. They're hosted PBX is they're brought soft based solutions. They're, you know, some of the newer generation solutions as well. And so we really haven't done a great job of making sure that, customers are aware that Teams provide this capability. Yeah. In that space. But also helping our are not only our partner channel in the operators, but also all of the other resellers and distributors and CSP partners. Everybody who's involved in making SMB successful, to be to be able to transact, to be able to operationalize phone in that channel. So I think we're going to focus a lot on that, in the upcoming, couple of years. Yeah. That Transact one is tough, isn't it? Because quite often in the smaller customers not to have that much experience with them compared to enterprise, but they'll get their office three, six, five, either Web Direct or CSP. Their telephony is a completely different provider, and the platform doesn't know anything about 365 and 365 doesn’t know anything about telephony. So you're going to have to bridge that gap one way or the other, potentially. That's exactly correct. And you know that SMBs SMCs don't have a large IT arm, or even a lot of patience just sitting around waiting to figure all of this stuff out. Right? So we've got to remove a lot of that complexity. and like I said, you know, we're going to have to lean on our partner channel a lot, which is the big opportunity for partners to be able to fix this right, is to figure out what the customer journey looks like and what the management journey looks like. Awesome. So do you see that being a very partner led motion, that it's either either the operators or the CSPs kind of helping that those customers. It's got to be a partner led motion. And in fact, I would even say I'm encouraging a lot of partner to partner integrations right now to figure out, okay, you know, we've got, you know, set of partners that do this really well. We've got, of course, the operator partners that do network really well and connectivity and enablement and customer. Yeah, journeys. So we've got to figure out how to bring them together. and ultimately the goal is, you know, the more automation, the more digital journeys you build for the SMB, SMC market, the more successful you're going to be. So customer experience is going to be key. Awesome. Yeah. So we touched on a little bit early. But let's talk about Teams Phone Mobile because how long has that been out. Now. It's a decent amount of time I think. Yeah I think we've been about a year and a half a little bit over a year and a half is when we had the first market go live. Yeah. So I'm super excited about this. Maybe we should start by defining if people. I'll let you define it. Kind of. How's that work? What's it look. Like? Yeah. You know, everybody talks about it, you know, kind of in the same way. But in general for me, it's basically it's it's around identity. I like to start this particular page with the identity piece, because the idea here isn't that you're bringing some new groundbreaking experience to, or capability life, but we've never had the, mobile phone identity be part of a corporate sort of, identity platform. And that's kind of what we're doing. We're taking your phone number, which is your mobile phone number associated to you by your SIM card or whatever network you have. now be part of the M365 experience. And what that means is, now that that's assigned to you as a user, the policies follow you, the discoverability follows you, all of the capabilities that you would have as an enterprise. UC solution now also exist for your mobile phone number. so that's really powerful. And compelling in itself because of security reasons, compliance reasons, etc., which are kind of boring really. But then when you think about things like making your presence sort of available for all the enterprise, when you think about a single voice mailbox, a single call history, when you think about being able to move calls simultaneously from cellular network to UC and UC network to cellular, depending on where you are and what you want to do, in which device you want to use, it's really, really powerful and compelling. So that's kind of what Teams Phone Mobile is. And the way we bring it to life is actually really, really hard. We've chosen the most difficult way to do it, because we do a really deep back end integration with our telco partners. and it's built on the Operator Connect platform. So all of the fundamental foundation that we put in together for Operator Connect all already applies. And then we build this rich IMS to cloud integration. Yeah. So you explain it really well there. Like I often when I talk to people about it, the first thing they're like, oh it's SIM Ring or it's forking. It's like, well no, you're deep, deep into the operator. And it is true single number. Like I said, my Teams soft client desktop and I make a call. It's it's my mobile and my mobile carriers providing that connectivity. And I make and receive calls on my mobile. And they're showing up, as you said in my Teams call history. Like, it's true, deep integration. Yeah. And you know what? I think it's I think it's super important to keep this in mind that maybe not everybody needs a, dedicated fixed line number or a fixed line device, but everybody ages ten and above has a mobile number. Yeah, right. Or 10 or 12. I'm glad. I'm glad you're having this conversation head on. Is I like having this conversation with operators. I'm like, oh, like, we can all agree on some timeline, like fixed. I'm definitely saying, oh like opera I sorry customers right side fixed like there like this. There's always going to be use case like telco incredibly long tail. But they are right sizing but they're not. Nobody's giving up a mobile. Right. That is forever as far as we can see at the moment. Yeah that's exactly right. And everybody has a mobile number. And so the question is do we how do we make that mobile number more productive. Right. How do we include that mobile number into whatever we're doing in the, in the work environment. Right. Versus it's sitting in some silo where when we use our mobile number, it's a whole different ballgame versus when we're using our, you know, collaboration suite like Teams. And so that's a that's a pretty compelling use case. Like even, you know, for customers, I don't think many customers are going to move away from fixed line into mobile. But I know several, several thousands of customers that, never actually gave a large part of their employee workforce a desk, phone or a fixed line because they never needed it. Yeah, yeah, but they had a mobile number. And so now being able to bring that mobile number into Teams as well is super powerful. And back to the SMB mid-market market story right there. Often mobile first. Like mobile only. Yeah. Yeah. Well yeah. Exactly. Exactly. It's more like you're adding an extra capability for them to sometimes do calls at their desk. I think that's absolutely fantastic. I was talking to somebody, just today actually, I won't say who. And they said, you know, a lot of the SMBs they buy the fixed line service. And the first thing that they do is forward it to mobile. Yeah. Right. And so I'm thinking to myself, like that is an absolute best use case scenario for, for Teams, for mobile is you don't have to have that extra hop. Right. You just basically just put mobile number. Into Well you mentioned Queues App like being able to bring that kind of routing to mobile scenarios is really exciting as well, because there have been some really bespoke solutions that could do that in a mobile cloud, but they were few and far between, whereas now that's going to bring a a really great experience to a mobile first organization. Yeah, absolutely. Like if you've got mobile first employees, having them part of call queues and all of the great stuff the Teams has as a, as a phone capability, it's it's it's pretty powerful. Yeah. So I was when TPM came out I was super bullish. I expected it to go faster than it has today. Kind of. What are your thoughts? I there's no public numbers. But like in terms of adoption, in terms of number of carriers, like it took a while to get the carriers rolling as well. Can you speak to that? Yeah, I think the the carriers in the market from our side is very intentional. we, we're, we're trying to make sure that, the markets that we are in are very successful so that we can learn and go forward with other markets as well. So you've you've already seen us go live in the biggest markets that we have, like, right. So the US, UK, Canada, Germany, all of the large markets that that Teams and Microsoft are available in. we're also now doubling up in some of those markets, right where we're having multiple operators in those markets to see. Yeah, I'm really I'm really excited about that because I feel like like my own thoughts that operators move faster when there’s competition. Right. So so seeing AT&T come into the US and we've got BT in the UK will have I think it's VMO2 and Voda are coming through. So UK in particular will be the first market with three providers in play which is really exciting. Yeah it is. It is absolutely really exciting. So we really want to make that successful. So it's been very intentional for us. It's not that we're moving slow, we're just moving very intentionally. And we are you know, adding more operators, adding more markets. We're very committed to it. we haven't announced publicly who's next, but in general, it's it is moving forward. it does because there's such deep integration. it does take a little bit of time to, to bring on an operator in a market. But again, that's very, very intentional from our side. coming back to your question about like just momentum in general, like the demand is, is astronomical. Like, I don't think we talked to any customer who doesn't say, oh, yeah, I would like to hear more about that, or I'd like to figure out, I think what we're what we're doing right now is we're really assessing with all of our customers that are interested in what the user personas are. and, you know, you can think that there are some industry verticals where Teams Phone Mobile is just absolutely a perfect fit. and then there's some verticals where they're like, okay, where traditional desk workers, maybe we'll just stay. Yeah. but if you think about, you know, consulting and professional services organizations, government and public sector healthcare, even, some of the other places where you'll see a lot of more mobile. I've seen the police testing it over here, which seems like a slam dunk of a use case to me. Exactly right. Exactly right. So there's there's a lot of, you know, really, really interesting, compelling use cases. So we're fleshing that out. We're trying to figure that out. And and being able to position it. We're also leveraging some of the learnings we've got both from our operators and our customers to inform what we do in the product as well. Right. So some bringing some really cool innovations into the product. Not much. I can talk about it here. But we're all friends. It's all fine. But yeah, you know, I mean, so, you know, you can you can imagine when we think about, you know, things like SMS and things like all of these other things that are our capabilities that we've we've got a lot of customers asking for an option. Yeah, actually, I've heard that SMS request more than more than once. Right. It's kind of logical as well. Like you've brought mobile in. I'd love to have my SMS to turn up in Teams. Exactly. And eventually, like, you know, thinking about how this whole proposition affects, when we were talking about SMB and frontline worker as well, you know, frontline workers, again, mobile first mobile. Yeah. And you and like, was it now earlier this year last time why they discounted or reduced cost. frontline worker license came out. So there's no additional cost on the Microsoft side for TPM. That's I suddenly that makes TPM I think more accessible in that frontline first line. Exactly. And now we've got packages for both frontline workers with Teams phone, but also for people who don't have any m365. So Teams essential support Teams phone. So we've got all of these really great constructs for people to be able to light this up. And now we're again, this is in the smaller market segment. So we're really working on, leaning on our partner channels to be able to bring this to life. That's awesome. So what are your thoughts for, this FY You can't share features obviously with this work being done, but, which areas do you see being the growth areas for this year? Yeah, I think, you know, for our, for both of our, our cloud calling products like, Operator Connect and and Teams Phone Mobile, we want to make this a lot easier to, to enable a lot easier to buy, a lot easier to manage. and I think there's one component of it that we said with our, with our partners to give our partners more tools, to be able to manage to give them more incentives, to be able to position it. so those are both go into one set of programs that engineering runs to be able to build more APIs and more capabilities to manage it. Yeah. And then the second part is our go to market programs for all of our partners to be able to be incentivized to do workshops with customers and so on. So on both of those fronts, you'll see us positioning a lot of it. so that's a big priority in this FY, and then we're, we're sort of thinking about, you know, additional capability, like the Queues App was a big one, I think. Yeah. Yeah. So we had always been asked for okay. You know Teams just call queues and stuff. But there's really no visualization. There's no way for us to manage it. There's some really basic features like barging in and Supervisor Whisper and all that kind of stuff that exists in a CX space. Right. So we're not really replacing any partner based contact center solutions because they're excellent. They've been, you know, doing this for 30, 40 years and they've got so much intelligence there. But for a customers who just need kind of this basic capability of CX smaller businesses, maybe, I think it's a really, really great addition. Yeah. And a really, really good price point for the stack of features as part of Premium. That's exactly right. And Premium gives you a lot more as well. Like all the call transcription and and summarization call to action Teams phone actually sits in Premium. It's not even in Copilot it’s in Premium. And so Premium does give a lot of value from that perspective for phone. Awesome cool. Well thanks for taking the time to jump on the Pod I think whether you’re on air or off air. You're here fairly regularly, so I will I will have to do another catch up thing. Yeah, absolutely. I, you know, I'm in the UK quite a bit and so I appreciate the time and appreciate this. And thanks to Shure to bring this together as well. you've got a, you know, you've got a great audience. It's always great to be here. Awesome. Thanks very much. Thanks. So cheers. To