One of the common frustrations I hear from businesses I work with in Australia is their need to rely on either on-premises or hybrid deployment models for voice calling.
Lots of our customers are now licencing in a cloud model, however that does not necessarily mean that all end users have been able to utilise telephony and conference services in a cloud-based environment. Hence where hybrid models come in. We are seeing “hybrid” apply to different tools/service. For example, Skype for Business on-premises for UC and telephony, but specific users leveraging Microsoft Teams for group collaboration and meetings. This allows a business to start consuming cloud services in a measured way.
Thankfully, this frustration is soon to be a thing of the past for Australian businesses. Telstra and Microsoft have recently announced a partnership to deliver native voice calling services from the Microsoft cloud with the launch of Telstra Calling for Office 365.
With the prevalence of Cloud technology, more businesses than ever in Australia are wanting to realise the benefits and value of adopting a Cloud-first model for their communications & collaboration technology.
Telstra Calling for Office 365, which will become available for Telstra’s Australian business customers from the middle of 2018, lets customers easily and securely access cloud collaboration combined with voice infrastructure services, directly within from Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams.
We have been fortunate at Modality Systems to be part of the Early Adopter Program, and have been working with one of our customers to take part in a trial of the new service. Initial feedback is that this service is empowering their users to adopt a truly modern way of working.
At Modality Systems, our emphasis remains firmly on enabling customers to embrace collaborative communications technology to facilitate business transformation, together with an unparalleled expertise in delivering Cloud-first solutions for Unified Communications through the power of Office 365.