Telephony is old and boring. Right? Wrong. That may have felt true five years ago, but today—post-pandemic—the telecoms industry is undergoing another major transformation that could be its most significant yet.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced organisations to rethink how work happens. Social distancing and remote-work mandates pushed businesses to adopt new ways of operating. As a result, many employees now work from home, remotely, or in hybrid arrangements instead of exclusively in the office.
The appeal of seamless communication
Many companies have already started virtualising telephony through cloud technology, and those that haven’t are almost certainly considering it. In today’s global business environment, uninterrupted communication across locations is more important than ever.
Large enterprises were sometimes slower to switch to cloud telephony because of prior investments in on-premises equipment, but among small and medium-sized enterprises it is now unusual to find phone numbers tied to a single desk. Numbers increasingly follow people, not places.
Analysts estimate that by 2034, over 75% of businesses will rely on cloud-based telephony rather than on-premises systems, and the market size is projected to grow substantially in the coming decade.
The first wave of cloud telephony
Several years before the pandemic, major network operators such as BT, Gamma, Colt, AT&T, Verizon and Lumen Technologies began offering cloud-based voice services. This first wave shifted Private Branch Exchange (PBX) functionality from on-premises hardware to cloud servers run by carriers. Calls could now be received wherever a user had an internet connection instead of ringing only at a desk connected to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).
That development started to end the era of calls arriving into a building and being routed to a fixed desk phone.
At the same time, collaboration tools were gaining traction.
The rise of Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams, with hundreds of millions of daily active users, has become the dominant collaboration platform, especially in larger multinational organisations. Following earlier Microsoft products like OCS, Lync and Skype for Business, Teams emerged before the pandemic and became essential during it, supporting remote and hybrid work as a core Unified Communications (UC) platform.
Teams is Microsoft’s fastest-growing business application. The pandemic accelerated its mainstream adoption, with Microsoft leadership noting that organisations experienced years’ worth of digital transformation in a very short time.
The unification gap in Unified Communications
Despite the rise of UC platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Cisco WebEx, and Zoom, a persistent gap remains: traditional telephony often remains a separate implementation.
Many organisations don’t realise that simply deploying a UC platform doesn’t automatically create truly unified communications. For example, out-of-the-box Microsoft Teams does not natively enable making or receiving calls from regular mobile or business phone numbers directly within Teams without additional integration.
Demand for a seamless experience that combines telephony, audio/video conferencing, messaging and collaboration has driven further industry restructuring. Telephony has moved to the cloud and is now being integrated into UC platforms. When telecoms are fully integrated with Teams, a business phone number functions as part of a single, unified experience for placing and receiving calls across all numbers.
Limits of geographically bound telcos
Operators such as BT, Gamma, Colt, AT&T, Verizon and Lumen participate in Microsoft’s Operator Connect program, which lets organisations route external phone calls into and out of Teams through operator-managed services. While this approach may cannibalise some proprietary cloud telephony offerings, it allows these carriers to combine traditional telecom capabilities with Microsoft’s collaboration platform.
However, these large carriers still have roots in physical network infrastructure—copper and fibre laid into buildings—and their businesses remain, to an extent, geographically defined. That can be a constraint for multinational enterprises that operate across many countries and need consistent, centrally managed communications services.
The case for multinational consolidation
Multinational organisations often wrestle with a patchwork of in-country carriers, contracts, pricing structures, and equipment. That complexity makes global telephony management costly and administratively heavy. With centralised deployment of UC platforms like Microsoft Teams, enterprises increasingly prefer to consolidate telephony procurement and management on a global scale.
Single-vendor service providers that can deploy, support and manage Teams-integrated telephony worldwide offer compelling advantages. These providers enable equipment-free implementations of Teams cloud telephony under one global contract, accessible via a single management portal, using unified tariffs and backed by a single global support team.
For enterprises, this consolidation delivers cost savings and operational efficiencies. For users, it delivers the long-promised goal of truly unified communications, where voice, video, messaging and collaboration function seamlessly together.
Photo by LoboStudio Hamburg on Unsplash
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