David Renfree: AudioCodes have always understood this and worked well with us in this environment. So we have relationships with other CCaaS providers. We have relationships with other teams, Contact Center Providers, but we work very closely with order codes to facilitate all of those customer interactions and getting that voice path into not just Microsoft Teams, but also things like Cisco WebEx.

Tom Arbuthnot: Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast This week we are going deep into the world of operators or carriers. We've got David from Colt giving his perspective on the space and how they're serving Microsoft Teams customers and beyond. And also Jay from AudioCodes, talking about AudioCodes and live platform.

Colt have been an early adopter of AudioCodes live platform. We talk about customer use cases, where it fits, and also where live platform is, are used alongside other solutions to meet customer's needs. Really interesting to hear the perspective from David at Colt from an operator perspective, and many thanks to AudioCodes for sponsoring the podcast.

On with the show. Hi everybody, welcome to this briefing. Excited to get a, a perspective from an operator this time. This is, uh, we've got AudioCodes and Colt and we're gonna talk about how AudioCodes have been partnering with Colt and customer journey and customer perspectives, and also David's perspective of the the market at the moment.

Uh, first off, let's get some intros done. So, uh, Jay, if you could do your intro first, please. 

Jason Wyatt: Sure, Tom. Um, hi everyone. I'm Jay Wyatt. I'm the, um, EMEA Marketing Director for AudioCodes. Awesome. And 

David Renfree: David. Hi, I'm David Renfree. I'm manager of UC, sales specialists supporting enterprise sales for Colt Technology Services.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome, thanks. So Jay, maybe you could set the scene for us. 'cause we've had some previous conversations and Colt have actually won some awards from you guys recently, which is exciting. 

Jason Wyatt: Absolutely. So, um, you know, we'll cover the cover. Well, yeah, let's cover the awards first of all. So, you know, we're absolutely delighted, um, that, um, uh, Colt were awarded the global, um, live platform Partner of the Year award.

I mean, that's hugely significant. I mean, it's not, wasn't just recognized by us in the uk, but recognized by, um, AudioCodes as you know, the best. Live platform provider. Um, and then of course with all the, the work that we, we do with Colt in the uk and, and let's not forget Colt uh, Pan-European for us. Okay.

And actually now reaching into Global. Um, but they also won the Service Provider of the year awards, so two real significant, um, awards. And, um, I said they're absolutely delighted that they've gone to. What we see as kind of being a UK partner, even though they've got global reach now. Um, you know, and to kind of set the scene.

Um, I mean I've been working for AudioCodes now, I think it's coming up seven years actually. And in that time I'd been working with, with Colt and, um, col were, they were instrumental to us actually. Being the forefathers of kind of live platform. Back then we called it Live Cloud and it was when, you know, we had that transition from physical devices to more virtualization, virtualization technology.

Technology got a bit better and Colt were the first, um, partner to really kind of embrace that and deliver out what we call Live Cloud. Uh, which then obviously transitioned into the Operator Connect and obviously live platform as we see it now. And you know, it is just such a moving beast. And now with all the diverse clarifications you get with, with Live Platform, um, it's incredible.

And we've, you know, and initially we, we kind of looked at, um, this has been, you know, for, for Microsoft Teams, but now we are moving away from that and it's now very much a multicast platform, which I'm sure David can go into to more detail with. Um, but that kind of sets the scene and, and like I said, it's been working closely with, with Colt, which has really helped us to, to develop these solutions.

Um, because it's the feedback that we get from them, we get from their customers that, you know, it, it then helps build the next generation of, of what's needed. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. And David, uh, a lot of people will know the Colt brand, but to, but to set the scene for everybody listening to the briefing, can you give us a little background on the, the, the Colt journey and, and, and where you are now in terms of the types of customers you serve and, and the op the office you have and, and then we can jump into this kind of what you do with AudioCodes conversation.

David Renfree: Absolutely. So Colt is a digital infrastructure company providing network and voice solutions around the. AudioCodes has been instrumental to us on the unified communications side. As Jay's already said, we experienced a big shift, um, with people moving away from traditional on-premises, sip trunking, analog ISDM, and moving more to cloud applications such as Microsoft Teams.

And we are close partners with Microsoft excellent partners with AudioCodes. And it made sense. It was such a synergy to come together to use the live platform to facilitate our Microsoft Teams direct routing offer. And then we expanded that, as Jay already said, into Operator Connect. And we've been doing more and more with the vertical applications now, the AudioCodes live platform stack.

Gives us such control and makes it easy for us to deliver our enterprise enterprise grade Sip Trunking directly into customers, teams, tenants. But also, as Jay said, with the multicast, uh, changes that we're seeing in the marketplace, it's giving us that flexibility to be able to route traffic where it needs to go, whether that's Microsoft Teams, whether that's to third party applications.

Whether that's still to the on-premises environments where you might have gateways or, or niche requirements that are beyond something that you can always offload to a cloud service, such as Microsoft Teams phone. Jay also mentioned Cisco WebEx. We're working much more closely with Cisco these days, and we're seeing a bit of a resurgence.

In WebEx as well. Um, lots of customers talking to us about WebEx calling, and we also use, um, the intelligent Communications platform, which we deliver with Colt to connect up to leading cloud providers such as Genesys and Twilio and Zoom. 

Tom Arbuthnot: That's awesome. And you, you've got a lot in your portfolio and, and obviously you work with different, uh, providers.

What was it that kind of brought you to AudioCodes? The live platform and, and which pieces of the puzzle are you using in that? Like how's that work with, with your backend and with customers? For us, it was 

David Renfree: the flexibility and the scalability, and that's something that AudioCodes have demonstrated throughout our years of partnership Now.

And allowed us to deliver that truly exceptional customer experience, which is why Colt receives such high NPS scores. And this means that we can scale as our customers require, require it. We have other partners that we use who have historically, through different parts of the business, provided some integrations for us where we have our.

In SBC infrastructure, we have our SIP trunking, and now we are enabling 21 countries to connect into Microsoft Teams through intelligent communications using the live platform and we can scale it as we need to. Now live platform gives us lots of automated features in the portal. For control and observance and making sure that we've got complete control over our environment so that we can serve our customers without having to log support calls and the like.

So Colt is in control end to end with intelligent communications. And that's so, so it's live, 

Tom Arbuthnot: it's it's live platform and your partnership with Audio Coach, but from a customer perspective, you are the, the, the, the frontline of that service. 

David Renfree: Absolutely, it's Colt all the way with the service desk, the integration, the Sip Trunking, and the connectivity to the tenant.

And then we can take it beyond that with professional services on premises equipment, which we also source from AudioCodes, and having those gateways that allow us to do the complexity on, on, on site. We've also been working much more with some of our larger organizations, larger enterprise customers in the complex stack.

Like the complex stack, like we said with uh, multicast, we are seeing customers using CCaaS. So Contact Center as a Service, they might have different Contact Center as a Service requirements. So we work closely with AudioCodes and their voca platform. But we might also be using external, um, market leading contact centers for like customer experience centers that go beyond um, the requirements that we deliver through their Teams estate, and getting that sort of integration.

Within ranges of DDIs, which is a big challenge within Europe because once you've got a range, it has to go somewhere. You can't just split numbers off to different places. Yeah. We can then use the AudioCodes platform to do routing to individual applications and also to premises, and then dynamically change that as well.

And we are. Huge focus on disaster recovery as well because of the, uh, the nature of having everything in the cloud, being reliant upon internet connectivity or your SD-WAN, for example. And we are helping customers with that too, being able to de-risk those sorts of situations. So we're seeing multicast is the big story for us at the moment, as well as vertical apps as well.

Tom Arbuthnot: You touched on a few things that are really interesting. So one is there's so much in the, the live platform. I think there's an assumption, uh, in the market that if I use audio Coast live platform, I'm then kind of tied into using AudioCodes, recording AudioCodes, SBCs Audio Vodka. But there's such a, such a big stack.

But as you said, there, you have the opportunity to mix and match and, and choose what works for the individual customer. 

David Renfree: Absolutely. And AudioCodes have always understood this and worked well with us in this environment. So we have relationships with other CCaaS Providers, we have relationships with other teams, Contact Center Providers, but we work very closely with order codes to facilitate all of those customer interactions and getting that voice path into not just Microsoft Teams, which of course when we talk about a lot of the time, but also things like Cisco WebEx.

Tom Arbuthnot: And Jay, how much is that? Uh, like, uh, I think we're gonna say the same thing there. How, how much is that? Uh uh, where's the jump off point for operators with the platform? Because I imagine there's different pieces of the puzzle that brings 'em to the platform first and then it expands. Is that how it works?

Jason Wyatt: Yeah, well, so, you know, obviously touching on what David said there, you know, we'd be delighted for, um, you know, all of our live platform, um, partners to, um, really advocate the use of the first clarifications that we provide in, in terms of Contact Center with, um, VOCA Meeting Insights for the business productivity, Virtual Assistant, um, Interaction Insights for call recording.

But of course, we recognize that, you know. Every customer's different and they've got different requirements and they, they all, they, you know, they may have a be set with an existing contract. They, they might be legal regulations that mean they've gotta use something else. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. Just lifecycle as well.

They might be halfway through a contract 

Jason Wyatt: on a certain solution. Absolutely. On another. Yeah. So, um, you know, the first touch point is always gonna be connectivity. You know, you know, I'm currently on premise. I wanna go to the, you know, to, to use a UC Platform. Um, and, and that's where Live Platforms jumps in.

It's great, you know, you might have one organization that's spread across many Geographies and they might be using teams in, in one Zoom, in another Cisco WebEx in another, and it means through that one platform they can use. All of those, all, all those different uc providers, because at the end of the day, it's coin a phrase from one of my colleagues.

Um, you know, everybody's kind of fishing in the same pond, aren't they? It's just, and, and as we transition more and more people to, um, those sort of hosted uc platforms, it, it is gonna become more apparent. And so people will change around. Um, and then once you've got the connectivity piece, there's obviously a kind of cross-sell and upsell saying, okay, well, you know, have you considered this as a, an application like.

Roca, um, which, you know, ultimately it's a contact center solution, but broadly can be used across an entire, uh, uh, um, establishment, you know, is a, is a better way to get customer experience and employee experience. Um, so I. You know, there's lots of ways that a, a, you know, a partner can grow their business other than just going for the connectivity piece.

As you know, with, with obviously the vertical applications and that stack will grow as time goes on. It will get more, more featured, more functions, um, and obviously through working with, um, partners like Colt, um, that allows us to gain that, gain that knowledge and, and, and information to actually build in the next generation of apps.

Yeah, 

Tom Arbuthnot: and you mentioned, you both mentioned On-Prem there, which is interesting like, like a lot of Operators, I feel like, particularly in the OC world, I keep a close eye on that are moving away from supporting on-prem, SBC and, and local kit. David, you mentioned actually part of the offer is actually using some of the on-prem SBCs to for customers as well as the cloud service.

David Renfree: Yeah, and I think it's fair, Tom, they, people are moving away from it. We're seeing it less and less, but there are still niche requirements. Now, Colts Enterprise, um, team has a large number of customers in high tech manufacturing. High tech manufacturing sites require complexity on premises. You still have gate, you know, uh, barriers for entrance.

You still have. Deck deployments, you still have the need to be able to have OID systems and the like, and you don't necessarily want to run these in silos. So why should your Unified Communications estate be run and operated completely separately from your facilities estate, which still requires voice delivery.

And I think people forget some of that stuff out there peril because there is. Lots of complexity out there. There's a bigger piece of the pie. As Jay was saying, we want to do as much as we can for these customers, and if you're saying, oh no, we don't get involved, sorry. We can't help you with your barriers.

We can't help you with your, yeah, we'll take, we'll take, we'll take 

Tom Arbuthnot: the easy stuff, but not the hard stuff. 

David Renfree: And then again, on the smaller side, like Jay mentioned, meeting insights, which we haven't really talked about much today, but so far. But the AI piece, you know, everyone's talking to us saying, AI, AI, we need to be doing something with AI.

And I think there's a lot of noise around that and we are seeing that it's the application and how you are using it for the business outcomes. It's really important. And meeting insights is a valuable tool for us, which we're now bundling with our Operator Connect in Direct Routing offers. So that customers can, if they choose for a low fee, and these are the less complicated environments, they can have the recordings of their meetings, they can have, uh, the ability to find out who was saying what when transcription, um, and get those, those insights and summaries and transcription at a very low cost whilst bundled into the license.

So, so that's 

Tom Arbuthnot: allowing you to differentiate your PSDN offer. So like, I mean Exactly. Direct Routing in OC there's obviously, there's, there's, there's. Coverage. There's brand, there's pricing, but there's similar offers. You can start, say, actually we have options for additional value. 

David Renfree: Yeah. And because it, it can get commoditized and this is where complexity and on-premises as we were just talking about, differentiates.

It's not just how much per user per month or how much per phone number, et cetera. And we're also now making it simpler for organizations 'cause we saw such an erosion in, in voice. Tariff charges. For example, how much does it cost to call a UK mobile or a German landline, and how much does a telephone number rental cost?

And so that's, that was always getting commoditized and we saw it. It got to the stage where procurement teams for telecoms in customers would spend more money on the procurement process and they could ever save in the reduction you got from the call charges. Yeah. It's like we've spent a month and we've managed to get a reduction of 3% on our, on our call spend, which is negligible anyway.

But what we, we, when I speak to the financial teams in these enterprise companies, they're saying to us, we just need predictability. We don't like the fact that our inbound bill on toll free numbers goes up massively. Um, at Christmas, we don't like that our outbound calling goes up massively in January.

We want to see that it costs the same thing all the time. So with the Colt voice services intelligent network with VOCA for the IVR with AudioCodes, like Jay was saying, you can use that across an organization where you have the IVR sitting in front of maybe a very complex contact center and then maybe an internal vocal service desk, and then teams, Operator Connect users.

You're starting to. Be able to offer the complete solution to the customer rather than the transactional or how many users of operator connect do you want? Because really if you're just doing that, you're just doing cheap calling plans. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. Yeah. And that, and that's the key thing I'm hearing from a lot of operators at the moment.

It's, it is a providing additional value of yes, we can deal with the complexity, we can bring value, like you said, in in the context, in the ai, in the recording. And you're not having to go to lots of different people for these different parts of the puzzle. And because they're, they're kind of signing off on.

You and AudioCodes in this case as a platform, adding things on are not a whole new conversation about, oh, where's the data? Who's the platform? All that stuff. 

Jason Wyatt: Exactly. I mean, for, for us, I, you know, I. It's, it's a significant d differentiator as a, as a vendor. Okay. Now, you know, we, we talked about a little bit about the, the AI element there.

'cause everybody's talking about ai. Everybody should be using ai, but I think a lot of organizations still don't, don't really, really understand how it's going to, um, uh, affect their business. How they can really utilize. AI from a practical use case. And, um, you know, as, as a vendor, you know, we go out there and we're probably just as guilty shouting about voca being, you know, ground up, written from, with, with around ai.

It wasn't an application which we just suddenly bundled AI into and went, Hey look, this is ai, which I know a lot of vendors have done because they've jumped onto that. AI bandwagon. Um, you know, these are ground up recent applications and, you know, significantly this year we launched the AI summaries, which, um, we, we went to ISE and we were talking at ISE about, um, because it, again, that's now democratizing AI within the kind of hole.

Teams meeting experience. Mm. Um, you know, what we're saying is look, you know, we rec recognize that within many organizations there's gonna be a need for, you know, your power users. There's gonna be knowledge workers, there's, you know, so it's going back to that, you know, profiling. Individuals within an organization.

And what AI summaries allows you to do is actually bring that into the meeting room through an AudioCodes meeting device at a single fee per month. And you can have a hundred users utilizing that license, which is $25 per per meeting room per month, um, which in simply is free for the first six months.

Um, so this is what we mean about the whole democratization piece. And then actually organizations can see how that will. Sit alongside perhaps other AI technologies, um, including meeting insights, a full blown application and Copilot. So, you know, what we're trying to do is, is provide that environment where you can actually have the best of breed, depending on.

The requirement for the individual within the organization. Okay. Um, and that's true for VOCA, that's true for meeting insights, true for AI summaries. Um, yeah. I like, I like 

Tom Arbuthnot: the confidence of having a platform and not saying, if you buy our platform, you have to take everything on it. Like, no, that's like, if it's a fit, it's a fit If, if, if it's something else.

And because audio code is obviously. From day one has been in that, that voice space and the SBC space, these things can work together because of all those standard space stuff of the Yeah. And let's platform, let's 

Jason Wyatt: forget, you know, as, as David pointed out, you know, if you're using a gene platform, five nine's platform or um, nice platform, it's not a problem.

Okay. Because we, we've working with those guys for many years also and allowing them to utilize teams, um, as a client and then using the voice AI connect technology, which is again, one built into the live platform. You know, you can spin out to multiple large contact center solutions and, and there's other applications as well where we can do the whole Chatbot piece, Chatbot, to Voicebot, um, or Voicebot to Chatbot

Sorry. You know, so it's endless. It really is. 

David Renfree: Yeah. It was 

Jason Wyatt: really 

David Renfree: interesting what you say there about AI, Jay because I think it's got to stage now that we've got such saturation, it's like people saying, I need software. Have you got some software, please? I desperately need to run software throughout my organization.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So AI for meeting insights is transcription, summarization, and being able to get to the point, right. And Copilot does that very well as well, but for more money. And Copilot is doing different things at the same time. So you are saying if you don't need that full stack of Copilot, here's meeting insights, which we think has some other benefits.

For example, the public sharing, et cetera, et cetera, of recordings. Now you've also got chatbots, which you mentioned. Now chatbots use AI because of the LLMs behind them, which can give you the answers and have a more natural language interface with with a user. This is why Chat GPT and Copilot have turned into search engines for many people except for the hallucination.

But you know, Google Gemini is doing that. Now. When you type in a Google search, you'll get a Google Gemini summary. That's a different use case. Again, in contact center is a massive thing for agents with knowledge management because knowledge management integrations in in contact center has always been a really complicated thing to do to feed the agent the right information to be able to give.

To the caller in the Contact Center or the, or the, uh, customer of the Contact Center 'cause it might not be a phone call. And that knowledge management stack is understanding the customer's internal resources and what they might need. The client, sorry, what they might need to feedback to the customer. So there are so many different use cases.

And then we can go onto things like sentiment analysis, you know, is someone getting angry on the call and being able to pick up on that slight change in tone. And the dynamic or the pauses in conversation that might need to flag that to a supervisor or a manager in a contact center. So once you start, and I've barely scratched the surface and, 

Tom Arbuthnot: and, and isn't, isn't, isn't it exciting that from a Carrier perspective you are involved in such more line of business conversations and just as you said at top like Trunk channels, minutes.

And I think that's what, that's what. Part these partnerships can bring to Operators is now you are in the conversation around business solutions, business impact. 

David Renfree: Well, that's totally it, and that's one of the things that we've gone on a transformation journey at Colt, because Colt was very much known for selling to other.

Providers like resellers, we have a huge reseller, strategic Alliances partnership. Um, teams that resell Colt voice services, they resell Colt data networks. And our enterprise team, historically was very well known for great customer service and. We'd like to buy some data, please. We'd like to buy an internet connection.

Oh, here's how much it's going to cost. Whereas now we're talking about value-based conversations with our value propositions and our go-to market strategies around business outcomes, like you said, rather than talking about minutes and feeds and speeds, we are talking about what's good look like. What's the end goal?

What do you see now five years from now, and how do we put the building blocks in place? Coming back to the live platform, we've been able to do that saying you're not trapped anymore. Like there's so much migration, fatigue. And Tom, I know you've seen this the whole time, Jay, we talk about it regularly, but where people want to move, the big barrier is porting of phone numbers, often porting of phone numbers changing of Carriers

Now, AudioCodes don't restrict us as to which other partners we use. But we don't restrict customers as to which other carriers they use. If they're using intelligent communications on the live platform. So we can do Colt voice services where we can do Colt voice services. But if there are countries that we can't do, for example, Bulgaria, and I'm just picking one at random, I'm sure we'll added to the portfolio soon.

But we could, if a customer has a requirement there, we are not gonna turn them away. They can bring their SIP Trunking from their Carrier with those minutes and charges, connect it to the live platform. We will manage that interface and then route the calls where they need to go. And so that's the sort of conversation we're having now.

It's like, what does it need to look like eventually? Customers often want a single vendor solution. We all know that's not possible. There is no single global vendor who can do every single country and can do every single thing for every customer in, in those countries, but we are trying to get as close as possible to minimizing the complexity of those customer relationships.

Tom Arbuthnot: Love it. And Jay, as, as we wrap up, like what, for obviously great partnership with Colt here, things going well for other people listening in who are interested in what they can do with live platform. We've probably got other operators. This, we probably got end customers listing. How does that journey begin?

Is it with you, is it with the Operator? What happens there? 

Jason Wyatt: Well, I mean there, there's, there's two folds to this. Um, one is if, if you are, uh, a, you know, a another large operator that's got traditional business like Colt had, okay, where you sold lines a minute. Okay. Um, then as Colt you, you'll see degradation of that business.

Okay? People are moving, people are naturally transitioning. So, you know, you can then reach out to AudioCodes. You can talk to us about how you can become a live platform or Operator Connect partner. Okay? There's, there's roots for you. Um, if you are just a traditional partner where you buy from a service provider, then obviously what we'd actually do is say, okay, well where do you operate?

Where, where, where's your, your main, um, um. Uh, geography and then we'd obviously point you in the direction of a partner that's, or sorry, service provider, like Colt that is operating within, within that region. Okay. Um, you know, first step was always, you know, I'd say just reach out to AudioCodes and we'll, we'll help you where we can, um, you know.

Like, and, and we did touch on this on, on the, on the conversation, um, you know, there's still a lot of people that are buying physical, SBCs, physical devices. There's still PBXs out there. There's still big, big, the, the, the majority of voice seats 

Tom Arbuthnot: are still PBX out there, which is crazy with where we are.

Jason Wyatt: Yeah. Okay. But there we are seeing this shift. We, you know, as a vendor, we are seeing this shift where, you know, at one point, you know, I would say 90% of our business was selling SBCs. You know, that's, that's now down to sort of 60% because we're seeing that transition to live services. Okay. Um, if we're seeing it.

Our part, you know, partners are seeing it and, and they really need to jump on board with this and, and, and actually add that to their, their, um, portfolio of products and solutions. And then they'll also see how they'll transition from, you know, being a CapEx to an OPEX organization and how that changes things monumentally.

Okay. And, you know, if we're talking in the IT world, this is nothing new. I mean, it's been around for 15 years, buying things from the cloud, operating from the cloud, but actually to the comms industry. This is still quite new. Okay. I mean, we've been doing it with Colt for six years, six, it must be at least six years.

Um, but for some geographies it's, it's kind of completely new. It's, you know, talking about Germany or France or Spain where they just haven't made that shift yet to, um, you know, uh, uc in, in, in the cloud. 

David Renfree: One of the things that we can help with there is that we have lots of, um, strategic alliances partners, so resellers of ours that are selling Colt voice services, and we have used that and we've partnered with AudioCodes and the live platform with their operator to connect, um, solution because it's already built in.

And we've launched Operator Connect for resellers within Colt. So if you're in the Colt countries and you have a relationship with Colt, that might be the easy button for you to have a teams operator connect, um, offer straight to your customers. Um, and we can help with that as well. 

Jason Wyatt: And let's not forget your engineering skills as well, David, to help those partners through that early transition.

So Absolutely. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. Awesome. Well, thanks both appreciate the, uh, the perspectives and the insights of how it really works and, uh, yeah, it sounds like a great, great partnership. Maybe we, we loop back around again at some point and, uh, talk about the latest, but thanks for taking the time. 

Jason Wyatt: Thank you. Thank you.