Zoom Phone Adds New Features; Announces Beta Program in the UK and Australia

Does your conferencing service and phone system work together? If you’re like most companies, you’d probably say, “Not always.” Several conferencing providers have attempted to solve the interoperability problem by launching their own phone service. San Jose, California-based video conferencing provider Zoom is one of those companies.

Zoom Phone is a modern cloud PBX offering launched earlier this year. It’s available as an add-on to Zoom’s Meetings service. The offering provides users of the conference service support for inbound and outbound calling through the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and integrated telephony features that enable customers to replace their existing PBX solution and consolidate their business communications and collaboration requirements.

Existing features include the ability to elevate Zoom Phone calls to Zoom video meetings, the Zoom Contact Center Partner Program (native integrations with charter members Five9 and Twilio), the Zoom Phone Salesforce Integration, and zero-touch provisioning service integrations with Poly and Yealink. Zoom Phone was released for North American customers in January 2019. The expansion of Zoom Phone will undergo a beta trial in the United Kingdom and Australia.

In addition, Zoom Phone has been updated with some new features:

The Bring Your Own Carrier (BYOC) feature allows customers to bring their existing PSTN SIP trunks to the Zoom platform, a flexibility bonus that will benefit large enterprise customers in particular that do not wish to switch from their current phone carrier. BYOC will allow them to use Zoom Phone service powered by another carrier. Users can remain with their carrier or move over to Zoom as their carrier over time. The feature also allows Zoom to provide the Zoom Phone service in any country, even in those where Zoom provides no localized service.

Zoom phone is also offering 10 additional certified desk phone devices from Poly and Yealink. The Zoom Phone device support portfolio now has over 50 certified traditional VoIP desk phone endpoints from these two hardware partners.

Ciena, a customer of Zoom Phone, had praise for the feature.

“At Ciena, we love Zoom. It transformed us into a video culture, but the missing piece was external phone calling,” said Henry Ku, Director IT Infrastructure - Network, Unified Communications, and End-User Computing Services at Ciena. “We wanted to make communications easy by consolidating into one tool, so we were excited when Zoom Phone debuted in January. No surprise, it has Zoom’s trademark reliability, quality, and analytics. Most importantly, our users are already familiar with and love Zoom, so it was an easy decision to stay on a single platform for video and voice. It's great to see that Zoom is continuing to innovate quickly on this new service.”

Edited by Maurice Nagle