Integrated ICT and infrastructure provider Vox has announced the launch of its Microsoft Operator Connect offering, allowing business customers to make and receive telephone calls within the Microsoft Teams application. By adding voice calling, Microsoft Teams presents organisations of all sizes with a complete, integrated unified communications and collaboration platform.

In simple terms, by subscribing to Operator Connect from Vox, organisations can easily equip every Microsoft Teams user with a telephone number, enabling these users to receive telephone calls within Teams and to make calls from Teams to anyone that has a phone number. And because it is cloud based, users only require a Teams-enabled and appropriately licensed computer or smart device, significantly saving costs and facilitating faster deployment times.

As one of the first South African telcos to be approved by Microsoft to provide the service, Vox can enhance organisational productivity and maximise the return on investment that organisations have already made in their Teams environments.

“With Operator Connect, organisations can retain their existing phone numbers and gain access to a fully managed, cloud phone system with zero hardware footprint. With Microsoft Teams and Vox’s locally hosted and managed cloud SBC infrastructure, employees can benefit from the collaboration tools and global voice services that help them stay connected and productive in a distributed working environment,” says Andrew King, head of division: voice, visual communications and gaming, at Vox.

The customer journey starts within the Teams Admin Centre, empowering organisations to request and rapidly deploy voice services throughout their operational footprint. By selecting Vox as a preferred telco in the Teams Admin Centre, an organisation can completely replace all existing PBX infrastructure with a cloud-hosted phone system, which is essential when designing and supporting a hybrid work environment.

“Vox has been providing the South African market with Teams voice calling for the past two years by way of a multi-tenanted direct routing offering called TeamsVoice. Operator Connect now supports a closer alignment between Microsoft Teams and Vox with joint service-level management and enhanced integrations between the two companies. This sees a completely granular pairing of the Vox voice network with the Teams environment,” adds King.

Ideal

Operator Connect is the ideal calling option for Teams users who want to choose their own telco, customise their voice services, reduce hardware expenses, improve the quality of their voice services and lessen the burden of technical support.

“In this new hybrid world of work, workspace no longer stops at the office and leaders need to consider how to equip all employees with the tools they need to contribute – whether they’re working from home, in the office or on the go,” says Colin Erasmus, director of modern workplace and security at Microsoft South Africa.

“Technology has a key role to play to make this hybrid environment work for everyone. Vox is well established in the South African market and provides the agility that Microsoft is looking for in a local partner.”

Added to this is Vox’s proprietary last-mile quality of service that provides digital voice quality that is far superior to any other service available in the market today.

“Vox has completed the rigorous Microsoft testing requirements of its infrastructure to provide companies with the peace of mind that the infrastructure is vetted to the highest world-class quality standards. Microsoft Operator Connect is the ultimate unified communications solution for the modern workplace,” concludes King.