We already know Microsoft (News - Alert) Teams is a dominant platform for workplace collaboration – in 2024 it reached more than 320 million active monthly users. Still, it doesn’t come without its challenges. Specifically, turning that collaboration layer into a full telephony environment has been, at best, an uneven experience. While messaging, meetings, and file sharing are relatively easy to implement, enterprise calling is not. That said, businesses see value in using a single platform for voice and other collaboration tools – it makes sense – which is where Direct Routing can offer flexibility, carrier choice, and control. But, it isn’t always easy and deployment can be more complicated and slower than businesses would like.
Telesystem looks to solve that challenge with its new EasyRoute solution, designed to simplify and speed up Microsoft Teams Direct Routing deployments by automating the most complex parts of setup through a proprietary configuration approach tailored to each customer. The idea is to allow businesses to activate enterprise voice in Teams in minutes rather than relying on time-intensive manual configuration.
"Our aim is to revolutionize stressful deployments for organizations who have fully embraced teams as their communication platform and deliver them a best-in-class customer experience,” said Telesystem President James Maloney.
While many vendors focus on functionality, EasyRoute isn’t about changing what Teams can do – or what users can do with Teams. It’s about eliminating the friction that companies have had to endure when using Direct Routing. Despite broad Teams adoption, voice activation isn’t automatically easy, and even Microsoft’s own documentation makes clear that deployment involves multiple steps, including connecting a supported SBC, enabling users for Direct Routing and voice, configuring call routing, and handling PSTN connectivity design.
Direct Routing is attractive because it gives organizations more flexibility than a fully packaged calling option. It also offers tight integration with other collaboration features. But, that flexibility comes with a burden for customers or partners, who have to handle the telephony design, which is where Telesystem sees an opportunity, positioning EasyRoute as a simplification layer.
The idea is not that Teams calling is new – it’s not – but that the setup process should feel like a more standard software activation and less like a voice engineering project.
This matters because, with features largely being similar across platforms, businesses are increasingly judging platforms and making decisions bases on ease of deployment and management. With so many companies still migrating from legacy PBX (News - Alert) environments, simplicity is an important factor – they don’t want their cloud communications projects to become extended and unnecessarily complex projects simply because they require both Microsoft and telephony expertise.
Because so many companies have already landed on Teams as their collaboration solutions, they are looking for a way to make it work better as a comprehensive platform without adding avoidable implementation complexity and delay.
In addition to solving the complexity challenge, Telesystem also emphasize cost alignment and scalability. According to the company, EasyRoute can help customers avoid per-seat voice fee structures in favor of actual call path usage. That may resonate will with the SMB market and distributed organization, in particular, which desire enterprise-grade voice performance but don’t want to pay more for calling capacity than they actually use. For that matter, who does?
The challenge in cloud communications is not convincing businesses that collaboration belongs in the cloud – that discussion is effectively over.. Rather, it’s about reducing friction between the collaboration platform they already use and the carrier-grade voice services they still need, and combining that with a cost model that doesn’t mean over-paying for unneeded capacity.
With Teams is already deeply entrenched in business environments, vendors and service providers that can reduce deployment complexity may have as much strategic leverage as those that add new voice features – perhaps more. It’s the next logical evolution of the Teams ecosystem, which will focus less on features and more on deployment in practice. That’s where the value will lie.
Edited by
Erik Linask
