Launched last year, Teams has become one of Microsoft’s fastest selling products. An upgrade to the Office 365 Enterprise license, it offers collaboration, screen sharing, voice, video, IM and a whole bunch of other cool features. If you upgrade to E5 you also get Phone System, Advanced Security and Analytics, for £30.80 per user per month. If you have E1 or E3 and only want Phone System, you can just pay an additional £6 per month. Microsoft do not currently offer Phone System as an upgrade on their most popular Business Premium licence, but this is a logical next step.
However, if you want to connect Microsoft Phone System to the PSTN (you will, if Teams is to replace your PBX or hosted telephony system), the Microsoft Calling Plan product is a little clunky. It’s also quite expensive, compared to SIP bundles available in the market.
Instead of using their Calling Plan, Microsoft will allow customers to connect Teams Phone System to an alternative network provider using Direct Routing. However, setting this up is complicated and expensive and there are only a handful of companies in the UK offering Direct Routing as a service.
According to Jola, nobody is offering an effective channel programme for Microsoft Direct Routing in the UK – until now.
Jola Direct Routing for Teams is built on a Microsoft approved platform, offers numbers in 167 countries and every area code in the UK. Jola claim their unlimited wholesale UK call package is a lot cheaper than Microsoft’s Calling Plan and they claim to offer very competitive out-of-bundle rates.
Due to the level of technical expertise required in setting up Direct Routing for Teams, only resellers with the appropriate Microsoft certification and administrative access to their customers’ licenses, will be able to buy direct from Jola.
Adrian Sunderland Jola’s CTO commented:
“For the first time the channel will be able to sell a viable white-label alternative to traditional PBXs and hosted telephony. Jola partners enjoy healthy recurring margins on call bundles and out-of-bundle call charges, whilst still offering compelling prices to their customers. Ordering and management is all self-serve through our well-established SIP Manager portal. Alternatively, we can provide an API if partners prefer their customers to be able to place orders through an existing portal.”