Last week Metaswitch and Microsoft announced that the Perimeta SBC has been certified to work with Microsoft Teams. This creates a new revenue opportunity for service providers who use Metaswitch for their core network.
What is Microsoft Teams?
Teams is a Unified Communications platform focused on businesses (it’s an update to the product previous known as Skype for Business).
Each employee in the business would have Teams installed on their PC and the software would allow people to send instant messages and establish voice and video calls among employees. It does much more than that, but you get the general idea.
How does Teams integrate with the PSTN?
Microsoft Teams includes a feature called Phone System, which is basically a software-based PBX. Phone System can either
- place calls through Microsoft’s own PSTN interface – in which case the business would purchase a calling plan directly from Microsoft.
- configure Direct Routing whereby you configure Phone System with a SIP trunk connection to the business’s chosen service provider.
Obviously you want your businesses to use Direct Routing so they’re still purchasing voice service from you, but until now that was challenging if they used Teams because Perimeta was not supported by Microsoft.
However, as of March 25, service providers using Metaswitch Perimeta have been certified for use with Teams. So if you have businesses within your territory that use Microsoft Teams for collaboration, you can now offer them a SIP trunk that they can use for their PSTN connectivity.
