Telstra has announced the global launch of Telstra Calling for Microsoft Teams, a fully digitised cloud solution that enables telephony services through Microsoft Teams on Office 365 for multi-national corporations.
The solution will be available in Hong Kong and New Zealand in August, Singapore and the United Kingdom in October, before being extended globally from December.
As COVID-19 continues to change working environments, around three quarters of organisations globally are introducing new or expanding existing investments in cloud-based collaboration applications such as Microsoft Teams*. As organisations move more workloads into Office 365 – usually starting with Outlook, SharePoint and others – telephony is the next logical workload to move into the ecosystem.
Telstra Calling for Microsoft Teams supports organisations looking to adopt Microsoft Teams as its primary unified communications tool by expanding and improving the depth of their enterprise telephony capabilities. For example:
- One dedicated phone number (DID) – for 1:1, team conference calls, local and national long distance calls
- Supports remote working –quickly scale users, add new phone numbers, top up calling plans; each user receives a DID linked to Office 365 with full number portability
- Enhanced employee experience – boosts productivity by combining voice and collaboration tools in one familiar application
- Offload IT management – avoid the headaches of managing and supporting disparate on-site private branch exchanges (PBXs), physical phone handsets and a dedicated voice network
- Enjoy full voice functions – including traditional PBX call-handling functions like call, hold, transfer, forwarding and voicemail all in the cloud
Telstra Calling for Microsoft Teams uses an organisation’s existing Teams capability, without needing to worry about buying, installing, provisioning or managing on-premises infrastructure. This results in a huge cost saving giving users the ability to make and receive calls with a single business phone number from any compatible device
“A staggering 98 per cent of enterprises believe there will be a far greater reliance on remote collaboration, replacing face-to-face meetings post COVID-19 recovery*, which means from now on, organisations need to empower employees to work wherever they are. From our initial launch in Australia, we found customers had a clear preference to move away from phones-on-desktops, to integrated telephony capabilities and collaboration tools, and we are thrilled to be able to extend this great product to our global customers,” said Oliver Camplin-Warner, Telstra International CEO.
“Telstra is a trusted partner of Microsoft and we are glad to take our collaboration to a new level. Telstra Calling for Microsoft Teams will help our customers collaborate and communicate effectively across devices and networks, by leveraging the modern experiences in Teams and the Telstra network,” said Mahendra Sekaran, Executive Director of Product and Operations at Microsoft.
The offering provides an intuitive deployment model that allows enterprises to select:
- Telstra Calling for Microsoft Teams using Telstra SIP Connect services, or
- Telstra Calling for Microsoft Teams using SIP trunks from the organisation’s existing telecommunication provider, Bring-Your-Own (BYO) Carrier (future release)
