Mark Herbert: They see this as a, a really, uh, interesting way to innovate and a good model to use where they can have inspired and driven individuals working in an extremely agile way, not encumbered by the big business way of doing things.

Tom Arbuthnot: Hi, welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. This week we have Mark Herbert, and we're looking at Teams phone, and mainly what's going on in SMB and mid-market and how partners can help. Customers get to team's phone, but also some of the manageability challenges. I talked to Mark Herbert, who was one of the founders of the company that created Call2Teams, which is a service that connects SIP trunks into Teams.

Was very popular with some of the UCaaS vendors. We talk a little bit about his journey and also his current solution, which is Haptap Call Manager, which is a management interface for Teams Phone aimed at partners managing multiple customers. So really thinking about the kind of partner that is managing lots and lots of customers with Teams phone.

Really interesting insights from Mark. Thanks for his time and hope you enjoyed the show.

Hi, and welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast, uh, this week, first time guest on the pod, but someone I've spoken to quite a lot over the years in terms of teams and teams integrations in various roles. Mark, welcome with the podcast.

Mark Herbert: Yeah, great to be here, Tom. Yes. Uh, first timer on the, uh, on the Tom Arbuthnot podcast, but looking forward to it today. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. So Mark, for people who don't know you, give us a little bit of a kind of background and current role is now changing, so, uh, let's, let's talk about that as well, but like the, the journey story for you kind of coming into the Teams world.

Mark Herbert: Yeah, so we've been in the Teams world a long time. I mean, many people may have heard of a product called Call2Teams, which is, um, a Dstny integration, very powerful and, uh, extremely successful. And I was part of the founding team, which created that along with Richard and Martin. And, uh, yes, we, um. We as, as three, have come together really to talk about and create a, a new offering within the, you know, within the Dstny, um, kind of umbrella.

But, uh, yeah, this is, um, what we're here to talk about today, which is Haptap call Manager. Awesome. 

Tom Arbuthnot: So let's go back to call's teams. 'cause that was kind of bringing together the UCaaS like kind of players and the, the teams world at the time. And maybe talk through that. 'cause it seemed like it hit a, it hit a point in time as well where everybody was suddenly getting on the teams and teams playing bandwagon.

Mark Herbert: Yeah, I mean, it solved a problem really because everyone needed to be on teams, but also needed to keep using their existing phone platform. So it solved the problem of bridging an, an existing phone service onto teams and delivering the Teams end user experience, um, but without having to rip or replace your existing phone platform.

So yeah, it's experienced good growth, like I say, during COVID, um, and continues to do today. I mean, it is still a, you know, a valuable product for our customers. It's doing a, it's doing a good job, certainly in the sort of coexistence space where customers wanna use teams, but they're not quite ready to get rid of their old service or, you know, there's features on the old service they continue to need to use.

So it's, um, yeah, a really valuable addition to, uh, yeah, as an integration to, you know, sort of Telecommunications within the Teams, um, ecosystem. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Nice. And you built that and then that got acquired by Dstny, and that's how you came into Dstny Group, is that right? 

Mark Herbert: That's correct, yes. Yeah, I mean, we've, um.

Yeah, we met Dstny, when was it? I can't remember. 2021, I think. And, uh, we, yeah. Came together really, they've, they're a very sort of innovation centric group and they saw the value of Call2Teams and how it matched within their portfolio. And they, you know, brought us in. We've, um, yeah, they're, they're a great company to, to be with, really some, some lovely people.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. And part of your role back then and now is kind of keeping an eye on what's going on in this kind of, uh, almost kind of new world and traditional telco world and, and everything in the middle, both. From a partner point of view and from a customer point of view. So what are you seeing at the moment in kind of, in terms of teams phone and, you know, migration and traditional phone?

Like, it's, it's, it's, it's still a kind, an evolving space, isn't it? 

Mark Herbert: Yeah, I think it's, there's still quite a lot of different dynamics at play, I think. Um. Teams, phones obviously growing at a pace and becoming fairly dominant. Certainly as Microsoft's additional, uh, workloads come into play, things like Copilot and so on, they, they're really pulling customers into teams more.

Um, and obviously customers want to maximize their, their usage of the Microsoft, um, uh, sort of tool set. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I'm having he first conversations now with enterprise customers where they've gone down the Copilot route and they're a few thousand seats in, and that has boosted the phone conversation.

So it's like, oh, well we need to, like, the Copilot is the biggest fence. So it's like we're on the Copilot journey. We really just need to get phone over here because then it's all one story as far as where the, the data and transcription goes. So it is interesting to see that conversation come up for the first time.

And I think it's 'cause of the scale of the push on. Copilot and ai, part of the value is all your data in one place, so that actually pulls through the the phone conversation in some cases. 

Mark Herbert: Yeah, and I think we, we, it was almost as if we saw Microsoft take the foot off the gas on phone about a year ago and concentrate on AI actually was quite a clever plan because what they're doing is creating the pull factor now to to, to drive the take up.

So, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Some interesting, uh, an interesting take on it 

Tom Arbuthnot: and you've got an interesting perspective 'cause, um, like I'm, I spend most of my times with enterprise customers, but you've actually got a range of customers and customer sizes and actually. Um, kind of SMB mid-market, that's always been more challenging for Microsoft.

Like they dominate in the enterprise, but it's much more competitive at that kind of. SMB, mid-market end. 

Mark Herbert: It is, and I think, you know, they, they're relying on the channel heavily for this. So, and with an SMB, um, and phone, certainly there's, it's a relatively small, um, opportunity size for a partner. And how do they justify the, the cost and the time to set that customer up?

Many of the channel are it, um, focused. They don't really know voice stuff, so. And many of the, the Voice Channel don't really know Microsoft and that's always been the case up to now. I think we're seeing a much more convergence. Um, and really that was one of the drivers for creating the, the Haptap, uh, call manager service, which really is about enabling.

The rapid and simple activation of SMB, um, and listening to the operator connect, um, community, that was always a big challenge for them. You know, they, they, they can easily sell five or 10 numbers to a customer, but then what, you know, almost create a problem. You know, what does the customer do next?

And for a small business, how can they possibly afford to spend the time setting that customer up? If it's a large enterprise, of course they can. But 

Tom Arbuthnot: yeah, that's the challenge, isn't it? Like in a large enterprise, there's some budget for like. Pro serve, managed service like there, or there's an in-house team, so there's FTEs looking after the service, assigning the phone numbers, managing the policies.

Mm-hmm. As you scale that down, it tends to be on the customer side. It's more of a generalist. Like maybe they have someone who knows a bit about teams, doesn't know inside out, but by the same token, they're not looking to pay. Thousands and thousands for a managed service rep to manage, you know, 50 users on phone.

They, they just need the occasional move out and change. They need a bit of advice. They need an auto attend set up. Um, so as you say, it's trying to find that sweet spot of how do you scale. And this has been, uh, something Microsoft have been looking at, particularly with SMB. It is like the, the, the, the service in theory is great for them because they've got probably no business premium.

If they're below 300 seats, they've got a great stack of things. They can add phone into that. Um, but as you said, the, the, the phone centric channel is gonna cut their margin up, their complexity, and the IT centric channel doesn't necessarily understand voice, but it feels like. Voice has got so much easier with the advent of OC and, and stuff like that.

So then it's manageability, which is where this, you know, solution you put together comes in is how do we help like partners or potentially young customers manage in a more kind of. Phone centric way, I guess. 

Mark Herbert: Yeah, and it's, it is generally focused at the partner, although it's a great end customer tool. I think customers really, they don't wake up in the morning and say, I need a great tool to manage my Teams phone.

You know, they, um, they, they go to their partner and say, can you help me configure Teams phone? 

Tom Arbuthnot: Mm-hmm. 

Mark Herbert: So really, uh, this is something which does work for customers, but it's brilliant for the partner channel in terms of how do they manage multiple customers, uh, and just do the Teams phone thing, especially if they are a, a traditional telephony partner who doesn't really understand all the Microsoft stuff.

Um, this, what, what we've done is really bring together the, the control system or control panel of A PBX, which is effectively Teams phone underneath, but it's a very familiar environment for a, uh, someone who's used to just managing a PBX system. 

Tom Arbuthnot: No, so, so essentially a, a phone centric UI of manageability, but the ability to also kind of manage across multiple tenants and have a single, single experience for the, so if you are a, a, uh, a person at a partner.

Managing 50 customers and you just need to move ads and change phone numbers. You don't have to go to that like, oh, I need to have a different browser profile, have a local account, or deal with the kind of the, the, the account sharing stuff which the customer doesn't understand and the partner doesn't understand.

Um, maybe you could take us through like what it looks like and how it works. Sure. I think, um, 

Mark Herbert: I mean, shall we switch into a demo? Is that what you'd like? Yeah, yeah. If you wanna share, yeah, we'll 

Tom Arbuthnot: have people on audio as well, so we can talk it through as well. But yeah, let's, uh, let's have a look. And I'm interested in the API and, and how it works side as well.

'cause that's, uh, it's, it's quite a challenge to have something partner side work with multiple customers. 

Mark Herbert: Yes. And that was, um, obviously one of our challenges and with our experience around dealing with multiple customer tenants, uh, at scale, you know, this, uh, is expertise we have. So, um, yeah, I'll share the screen now, just, um, so we can see.

So what I'm gonna put you show you here is a typical, the, the entry point for a partner where they can see their customers. So. Using this service, we can manage multiple customers, um, through one screen and you can create new customers quite easily. 

Tom Arbuthnot: So this is web based, so you are, you are running it as a service for the partner.

So it's you hosted like as a SaaS basically? Absolutely, yes. 

Mark Herbert: Complete SaaS, they don't need, all they need is a, a Microsoft ID to log into this. So within the partner, they would use their own, their own Entra ID to log into this platform and for all of their individual users so they can control which of their staff members get access to this.

This particular portal, uh, to manage the customer. And what we'll see is that we can go and manage customer, um, services within team's phone, but we don't need to actually log into their, um, Teams, Admin Center and so on. So that's what, that's the sort of power we've built here, I think. So at this level, we can see, um.

That we have a list of customers and we can see, uh, whether they've got services attached. It also gives us the option to add a new customer and so on. So it's quite easy for a partner to simply add all their customers or create a new one as they, um, you know, if they, they bring on a new, a new customer.

So if we look at the, the top customer here, we'll go and see which services they have. And we can see listed here is the, uh, the first service, which is the call manager. Uh, service. Now we've got a plan to have several services, but our first one is the, the call manager one, and the important button here, and the magic is where we access the service.

So if when I click this button, it opens a new tab and effectively then goes, uh, it just confirms my ID and then goes into the. The customer tenant and pulls the configuration from Teams. Now we try to hold as little information as possible. Um, in our platform we do hold some data and we have multi-region.

Um, you know, as instances of the platform, so in this case it's the eu, uh, in instance, but we've got North America. We'll bring another Azure regions on as well. 

Tom Arbuthnot: So your ba your, your, your, you've, the customer has pre-auth your application on their side to say it can make graph API calls to get the relevant data to set relevant data if needed.

So the customers click some kind of, I agree, this partner can use this tool. And at this point now, on one side, I'm logged in. As a partner user, it's using graph to get through to Teams pool. Numbers, config, whatever it may be. 

Mark Herbert: That's it. Correct yeah. So when you create a new customer, you effectively email them a link and they click on the link and it opens a browser, and they accept that they, they grant access to our app really to go and manage their tenant for them.

So they provided that permission. And the result of that is that now as a, a partner, I can see the customer's, uh, phone service config, um, and along the left here is a, a relatively simplified. View of team's phone. So it brings all the key points to the surface, like call flows and users and groups, uh, as well as number management, but it's all in one place.

Like if you were looking at A PBX, you'd expect to see these menu items there as well. So we've really tried to make just a PBX control panel for team's phone and. You don't get access to anything else. So from a customer sort of security concern perspective, they're not granting their partner access to anything other than the Teams phone configuration elements on this.

So what we have here is an this, this is a, say, a new customer. So we've just put a new customer in, we've sent 'em some numbers, they're ready to go and we've created, and that 

Tom Arbuthnot: sending the numbers is out, out of band of this so that, so they might be using OC and the numbers will also appear on tenant. They might be using direct routing, in which case they could up do the old CSV upload model or whatever it may be, but like this is augmenting that already existing process? 

Mark Herbert: Yes. I mean, calling plans and d and oc the, obviously the, the numbers go straight to the tenant. Yep. For direct routing, we have a fairly, uh, comprehensive API, which we can integrate with a DR provider so that it will effectively pull the numbers across as soon as they're provisioned on, on those.

Tom Arbuthnot: Oh, nice. Okay. Yeah. 

Mark Herbert: So that's, um, something we've, uh, worked on. 'cause obviously there's a lot, there's still a lot more direct routing partners than there are OC partners, you know, so we need to really simplify that journey for them. So as a customer, as a, as a partner, now I want to set my customer up and so, uh, you may be probably on, on a call with 'em whilst you do this, but it, this is kind of how long it's gonna take to configure the customer's kind of initial call flow to get them up and running on Teams phone.

So we're gonna set up our first, our first number here. We do a few pre-flight checks. We check things like the customer's got resource accounts. We do actually, uh, create the, uh, resource accounts during our initial setup so we don't have to go and create any of that stuff. Check they've got licensing and permission.

Nice. 

Tom Arbuthnot: So that, that's another thing that like often. And the, the partner will be talking to the customer and the customer's con the content on the customer side doesn't quite understand if they've got licensing or not, and their partner doesn't really understand how licensing works. So the fact that you can just do those checks and, and give flags is really useful.

Mark Herbert: Yeah. And also we do actually, some of the, we do actually fix that in advance as well when they do the initial setup. So, um, having that done we'll just create what would be the main number now. So we give main number and we choose one of the. Phone numbers we've given them. So here's a list of numbers from actually calling plans, uh, which are in the tenant.

And so we'll choose one of those for the customer and as their main number. And then we go ahead and actually set up their, their incoming call disposition. So effectively a customer would want to possibly root cause differently during office hours, out of hours and, and, you know, public holidays. So, uh, we allow them to set effectively that on this panel.

So this sets the office hours and we can see. Sort of regular nine to five 30 there, but maybe this customer's open on a Saturday so we can easily add in an extra kind of open hours option there. And in terms of their holidays, then they, um, they, you know, we, we select which country they're in and then we also configure the public holidays into the tenant.

And that's often quite a big piece of work. So, uh, for this one we might say that, uh, in the United States, they're not gonna have, um. 4th of July off, you know, 'cause we are, that's the day we're recording this and why shouldn't they have the day off and we don't. So that's, um, that we're gonna get, make sure that they're open on 4th of July and click next.

So that's, um, created effectively the three dispositions that are open hours, closed hours, holidays now. So for open hours, we will now set the call flow. So we're going to set a relatively straightforward call flow. Um, first thing we're gonna do here is have a greeting. We're gonna use the text to speech within Teams.

I'm gonna put a short message in,

uh, welcome to my company, and then that's that. Then the next thing, once the greeting is we want to put the call into a, um, a call group. So we might say, uh, ring a group and then we're gonna choose the sales group. Now we bring across multiple groups from the customer tenant. Um, so, um, that, you know, the, uh, various, well, we're going into groups.

I mean, I'll show you. Yeah. 

Tom Arbuthnot: But this is, this is the same. This is. Call queues and auto attendance, but you've, you've just made a really simple one page UI to kind of do that config and reconfigure essentially Exactly that. 

Mark Herbert: Yeah. So we'll add in the sales and marketing group, and then we'll also cascade to maybe the operations group if they don't, uh, answer.

So then we've created cascaded in call groups, in teams, in like. Three seconds, you know, which is a non-trivial task. I think if you had to do it.

Tom Arbuthnot: Just, it's only about 70 lines of PowerShell, I think. Yeah. 

Mark Herbert: So at this point, if, maybe we'll put it through to the executives if, uh, if they don't answer. So we've got three cascading core groups and you can vary the, the various sort, like the visualization.

That's cool. Yeah, so we make it very friendly to use. And then the final action, I guess it goes through to, um, the voicemail of maybe the sales group. No one's answered by then. So that's created now a reasonable call flow for the customer. We'll press the button to complete. And effectively now, the customer's on the air, they're using Teams' phone.

They've got the main number configured. It's, it's cascading around the business to various, um, users to, to manage that. Uh, other than that, now we may con, you know, just go and add some DDS to a user, so. We might go and choose, um, someone like, uh, I know Christie has, Christie got, uh, no, hang on, let's choose one with a license.

So we've got very various status here to say whether cus uh, they've got a license and whether they're enterprise voice enabled and so on. Um, so for someone like Deborah, we could just go and set a, uh, set a number as well. So. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, so classic moves, ads and changes stuff is just, uh, making it simpler. And if you are, uh, maybe you're an IT centric partner and it is just a ticket.

It's like, uh, new starter, please give them a phone number. Yeah. That kind of thing becomes like a couple of clicks rather than having to go into their tenant, like work it all around and come back out again. 

Mark Herbert: Yeah. So there we go. We can choose a number for, um, for Deborah and. Yeah. And then we click go and she would have that number.

I think. I can see she hasn't got a calling plan, so I can't assign that anyway. Um, but yeah, so you can see what licensing they have. You can assign numbers At that point we can also then go and say manage, um, the existing call flow. So we've got a concept of the wizard call flow. Now that thing I showed you where we set up the main number, although we call that wizard call flow 'cause it's quite a.

Macro, um, kind of setup. But we do also allow you to manage the underlying auto attendance and queues, uh, there as well. So if the customer do, does have an existing configuration, then you can manage that here. Nice. So you can just go and manage the, 

Tom Arbuthnot: and there, there's presumably no hard dependency here on the partner being the telco because presumably different.

They might have different telcos in different regions, different agreements, like you are just configuring Teams really. 

Mark Herbert: Yeah, I mean this is turn up level access and I'll, I'll quickly show you here where the, um, if you want to, you can actually add in extra users so the, the customer themselves could invite their, i, you know, their phone guys in straight to the portal to manage this.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. I think there's a, there's value in that for like an for, for a customer to be, maybe the, some cases they can do their own, the partner can add some value by offering this to, to the customer to do as well if they're very phone centric Admin, that's it. 

Mark Herbert: Um, we also do a sort of a single number management portal as well, so you can just see where all the numbers are, who they're assigned to, and do various things like, uh, unsign them from a, a user if you wanted to, and things like that.

So you can go from the numbers aspect rather than the user aspect. Um, call login's quite interesting. Now Teams call login is somewhat complex to get to, but we have really surfaced that in a, in a simple way, so that if you are an administrator and you want to go and look at, you know, what calls have been made, or if you've had a problem call, for example, then you can open up a call information dialogue here, which shows you the.

Various, um, kind of route of the call around the business also show, you know, if you want to go and look at some of the complex stuff, we do the full sort of JSON there as well. But this allows you quite simply to, to view a call. Now, if that call was problem call, maybe I'd like one way audio or something, you wanna report it, then at the click of a button you can actually report that and send it, um, directly in an email to your, um.

You know, to your provider, and then that'll pop that to an email. It's got the important call ID here, which is what everyone needs. So that's all sorted. You're ready to go. 

Tom Arbuthnot: And does this have a concept of knowing what the. User at the partner has done something. When we used to a lot of managed service was, um, like plausible deniability of who, 'cause the problem is the customer has Admin and the partner has Admin.

Yeah. Something gets reconfigured. There's always a bit of a who, who did it and it was, it, was it the company? You know, was it the customer in Australia at at three in the morning UK time or was it the partner doing it? That kind of thing. 

Mark Herbert: Uh, very good point. Now, everything we do in this portal is completely logged, so we have a full trans, you know, log transaction of every move, size and change, which we do here.

Um, we are bringing in kind of a new module, which is to do with configuration management so that you will be able to have regular snapshots of the customer's teams' phone config, you can roll back. Also, you, when you log in, you can see if there's any changes and it'll show you the, the delta as well as to what's changed against your last login.

So you as a managed service provider, you could log in and say. When I logged in, I saw you changed all these things, you know, um, so we'll, 

Tom Arbuthnot: nice, I want that. But as an automated, uh, email to me and the customers to be like, FYI, we're aware you've signed a bunch of new numbers, or you removed a bunch of new numbers or whatever, that would be really nice.

Mark Herbert: Yeah, those sorts of things. So that's kind of in development at the moment. So yeah, obviously, uh, we're looking for great ideas, but certainly fundamentally having some configuration management with roll back, um, we'll see that as important. So if you had to change something for a weekend, maybe you had a building move or something, then you could change something and on the next week you could just roll it back to the previous config, things like that.

Nice. 

Tom Arbuthnot: And Haptap is. Out outside of Dstny, but Dstny are involved in backing it. How's that? How's that work? 

Mark Herbert: Yeah, so Dstny, um, we're looking for ways to, to build innovation within the group. And so, you know, Martin, Richard and I went to them and said, we've got this great idea. It needs to be done really quickly.

And the best way to do that is in kind of the body of a small business. It needs to be done like an entrepreneurial startup. And they said, well, that's a really interesting kind of approach to do this. And so effectively this is a, this is a startup business we're running. Yeah. Um, but it's also backed by Dstny.

They, they have a, you know, a stake in the business. So they see this as a, a really, uh, interesting way to innovate and a good model to use where they can have inspired and driven individuals working in an extremely agile way, not encumbered by sort of the big business, um, way of doing things. Um, also, you know, set up.

With its own, its own mission as well. So it's, yeah, from, from that perspective, we're really enjoying the, the, the, uh, the way that Dstny have taken a view on that, I 

Tom Arbuthnot: think. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's a very, uh, very supportive view to be like, yes, you can move faster at the innovation stage if, if it's to own entity.

Yeah. Um, and, and for partners who might be interested in this, what are you thinking in terms of commercial model? Like, is it. Per customer managed per user, like fixed cost. What's, what are you thinking for that? 

Mark Herbert: That's a good question. Um, we are, we're going through some evolution on pricing. I think we could fairly say, I think what we're heading towards is almost an all you can eat model.

I think that's what we want is for the partners to, to give this to everybody. We don't want barriers in the way of, 

Tom Arbuthnot: yeah. The value to the partner is the same experience every time. Right? Because that's their training overhead and their manageability overhead. If you have only a percentage of them are on it, you've still got the, the challenge on the other percentage.

Mark Herbert: Hmm. Yeah, so we're looking for a combination of, you know, it's obviously it has to have some relation to the number of users under management, but ideally we want them to not have any barriers to just giving this to everybody. So, yeah, we're looking at that. So, uh, yeah, watch this space, but I think in the next, um, you know, week or two, we will have that really nailed down, um, as a partner offer.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Well, thanks for taking it through that. It's really interesting. This is a space I'm watching as we go into the new Microsoft FY. There's a bit more focus on. SMB and mid-market is a growth area, and it's an area for Teams phone where the people who use phone in that space really, really use and need phone.

Like it's not going anywhere. It's, it's a, a core business requirement. So, uh, yeah, keep, keep us, keep us up to date Mark on how that's going and what you're seeing in that space and, uh, maybe we'll talk in the future.

Mark Herbert: I'd love to. Thanks Tom.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Thanks a lot.