What does the report have to say?

The MetriNote covers the background to the program, which VOSS launched in partnership with Microsoft. It is designed for service providers and managed service providers that operate older UCaaS and voice hosted platforms in their networks, such as Cisco HCS, or support on-premises phone and collaboration solutions, and are faced with the challenge of moving that customer base to cloud voice, including Microsoft Teams.

Metrigy explains that the goal of the program is to help service providers manage this transition to selling and supporting Microsoft Teams and Teams Phone smoothly in order to retain existing customers as they migrate. That then opens up new sales opportunities including high growth segments such as SMB, helping customers get the best value out of Microsoft E5 licenses and accelerating deployment of Microsoft Teams Operator Connect.

How do Metrigy’s metrics support this?

Although various communication and collaboration tools, including meetings and team collaboration, have become widely adopted through cloud services, telephony systems have lagged in the migration to true multi-tenant cloud-based services. In Metrigy’s Workplace Collaboration Metricast 2022 global research study, 45% of the 935 respondent companies are still on legacy phone platforms, either on-premise or in dedicated hosted environments. This represents a sizeable number of businesses that could move to cloud-based phone services.

What’s Metrigy’s take on the news from VOSS?

In the MetriNote, Metrigy shares the view that for most businesses, moving phone systems to the cloud makes sense. Older, on-premises or dedicated/hosted telephony platforms are becoming obsolete with fewer software updates, and are less likely to integrate with other applications now being run from the cloud, isolating them outside of a company’s digital workplace strategy.

Service providers, including traditional telcos and managed service providers, have wrestled for years with the right mix of services to take advantage of the migration to cloud telephony. These services have included their own UCaaS offerings; dedicated, private hosting of telephony systems for individual customers; or SIP connections to UCaaS providers or the end-customer directly. In the end companies such as Microsoft, Cisco, Zoom, and RingCentral are winning the Business. Migrating to a new platform is not a simple undertaking.

However, service providers can partner with VOSS to manage the transition, creating a single management portal and view across the combined hosted and cloud estate, that makes managing users, devices and services very straightforward, and importantly, transitioning a customer or set of users is relatively automated and intuitive.

What does Metrigy recommend?

For traditional service providers and MSPs, the best opportunity is to work with the leading UCaaS providers rather than compete against them. That means partnering and working with those customers to help on the migration.

Metrigy concludes:

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