Future-Proofing Voice with AI: Insights from Alistair Pidd

Scott Kinka (00:09.56)

Hi. By the cloud communications market is projected to double, with the UCAS market alone expected to reach $172.7 billion, according to Global Newswire. Yet despite this growth, Enterprise Voice remains, I think, one of the most understood and under-invested parts of the modern tech stack. My guest today says that voice isn’t dying, it’s just evolving. Welcome to the Bridgecast.

Today I’m joined by Alistair Pid. He’s the professional services director at Pure IP, a company trusted by global enterprises to power voice across platforms, regions, and cloud environments. We’re exploring the hidden complexity of enterprise telephony, particularly in the Microsoft ecosystem, how Teams phone is maturing in the enterprise, and why voice remains a mission critical application in the hybrid workplace. Alistair brings 20 plus years of experience.

leading technical operations and enterprise voice strategy at companies like Server Center and Azuri Communications. But at Pure IP, he helps organizations modernize global voice architecture while keeping things simple, adding control and user experience and keeping that front and center. He was also involved as a development partner with Microsoft and his team on Operator Connect. And Pure IP also boasts the largest reach globally amongst the partners within the Microsoft.

Operator Connect ecosystem. we’ll tell you a little bit more about what that means in a few minutes. Alistair, we’ve just shared your impressive resume written by our team. I’m sure you were blushing. But before we dig in, tell us a bit about you personally outside of work, outside of enterprise voice. What do you do outside of PYP?

Alistair (01:40.96)

I hate.

Alistair (01:51.629)

Sure, so I’m a family guy. So I’ve got two kids, both teenagers, they’re both finishing school and the other one’s at catering college. We’ve got multiple pets in the house. We’ve got a couple of British Bulldogs, if anyone likes those. And we’ve got a bearded dragon as well, so a little bit eclectic.

Scott Kinka (02:14.264)

Do the bulldogs and the bearded dragon get along? Because they’re not small, a bearded dragon, right?

Alistair (02:19.881)

No, it’s not small but it’s not very angry and the Bulldogs are very passive also so yeah I think they’re all just fighting for a space in the sun really so but yeah no they all get along quite quite well.

Scott Kinka (02:25.71)

Okay.

Sounds like an interesting dinner table in your home. No, I appreciate that. Alicera, let’s talk about Pure IP for a moment. So for those of you who may not be familiar, just kind of exactly what you do, the strategic role you play, this is your opportunity to give us a little bit of an elevator pitch on Pure IP.

Alistair (02:34.913)

Exactly.

Alistair (02:49.491)

So yeah, where PRIP works really well is that we’ve got a global suite of voice or PSTN services that allows flexibility and scale. So you can come and pick from our suite of different voice services to align to your own strategy and really run that yourself, like pick our operate connect services or direct routing or WebEx or any of the other various ones.

or you can really come to us and we can fully scope, deploy and manage the environment for you. We’re particularly good in a multinational sort of environment, so a global reach sort of scenario. And also probably also equally as good where the cloud meets the on-premise. So the on-premise, it hasn’t gone yet. We still need to keep things on-prem, but how you balance that and how you put some things in the cloud, some things on-prem and make the whole thing work together.

That’s the key and that’s where we do well.

Scott Kinka (03:50.892)

And while I sort of teased Microsoft Teams in the open, the reality of it is you’re in the Teams ecosystem, you’re powering WebEx as well with Enterprise Voice Solutions. Are you engaged with any other platforms like that?

Alistair (04:04.461)

Yes, so where this all starts is with what we call our global voice network. And what we’re able to do is consolidate PSTM replacement services around the globe. So we’ve got around 50 different countries where we can do that PSTM replacement. But then we’ve worked quite heavily with Microsoft, with Cisco, with Zoom.

to consolidate those services straight into those cloud platforms. Because it’s immediately available for customers who want to go to that sort of single platform, UC cloud platform, and they want to go with PSTN services, they can really do that quite seamlessly. It varies a little bit between say Teams and WebEx and Zoom as to how that’s been achieved, because they’ve gone down different paths. But yeah, it’s all sat on the same network. So really just interfacing at different points.

Scott Kinka (04:56.962)

Gotcha. So really what you’re helping companies do is sort of rationalize in a lot of ways this post-COVID move to online collaboration systems and the enterprise voice that they historically had, merging those together, making those platforms, know, enterprise voice tool, not just a meetings and collaboration tool. Fair description.

Alistair (05:16.151)

Yeah, exactly. think we’re particularly helping companies with the reach of the PSTN, if they want to consolidate it. then secondly, probably dealing with the complexities that moving from old to new really throws up.

Scott Kinka (05:33.56)

So before we jump, we continue on the tech. Let me finish one more on you. And I always ask this question of all of our guests. So you’ve worked in operations, you’ve worked in engineering, you’ve worked in consulting, you were kind of almost on the, I may be overstating it, but operated on the launch team, if you will, with Microsoft for Operator Connect, and you were involved in that. mean, you’ve been involved in lot of things, but if you had to distill it down to one thing, what’s your superpower as an IT leader?

Alistair (06:02.913)

Yeah, I don’t know about, I’m not sure about one thing. I think my own, my own, I suppose, successes, if you like, are based in maybe a couple of things or two or three things coming together. I think when I, when I started out in the industry, it was in data, in Cisco data. And I kind of moved that in towards voice and did multiple platforms. So I kind of combine both a voice and data viewpoint of things, which

kind of worked quite well as I moved through my career because everything started consolidating, everything started becoming data one way or the other. So I kind of combined that with also hopping between multiple vendors. I never really stayed with Cisco or Microsoft or any of those. I sort of jumped about them. And then probably wrapping all around that in terms of like who I am is I’ve worked for a few different companies that were doing managed services, hosted services, but it…

Scott Kinka (06:39.136)

Yeah.

Alistair (07:00.973)

kind of meant that I got the full reach of different types of customers and different sized of companies and that kind of stuff. So I think it’s not necessarily a superpower, but that’s really what’s driven where I’ve gone with things. it sort of seems to set me up quite well for the industry as we know it now.

Scott Kinka (07:14.818)

Yeah.

Scott Kinka (07:18.786)

Yeah, I mean, it’s almost a direct correlation to what it is that pure IP does in a lot of ways, which is kind of the conversation that we’re going to get into now. So, you know, I quote this a lot, but there was a Gartner report. I don’t recall the exact one. It was sort of right after COVID that said that businesses increased their investment.

in the broader communications collaboration category to include enterprise voice, but also the meetings and collaboration platforms by 30%. And we meet with customers at Bridgepoint Technologies, we meet with customers every day to help them better procure, manage and implement services. And this is the question we get asked, I think, I personally get asked the most frequently, right? Which is like…

Now we’re back, but we’re sort of in hybrid. I still have a phone system that these people love. I have features there. got, I really want to make this work with team or zoom or whatever those platforms may be. What’s the reality on the ground like right now in terms of kind of unifying this, what’s, what’s happening with CIOs? Where are they succeeding and kind of where are the friction points still?

Alistair (08:27.373)

I think the reality is that some of the features that were used, maybe specifically with telephony, some of the features that were used in telephony have changed a little bit and people’s usage of telephony has changed a little bit. Back when you used to rely on your telephone system as a key armory within IT, people had limited…

ways of communicating with each other. It wasn’t so prolific with SMS and with IM, with channels and all these different platforms. But the reality is now that enterprise voice and voice generally is benefiting from the capabilities of all these different services that are all sort of sat at the same level. And so it’s less necessarily about an argument saying, you know, I’ve got more features on my more traditional telephone system versus Teams.

Scott Kinka (09:12.416)

Mm-hmm.

Alistair (09:22.303)

It’s more about actually, want them all sat side by side and I want to be able to just choose them more seamlessly between the different types of communications rather than necessarily always picking up voice, but having that ability to transition very easily. So I think that that is quite a compelling argument for getting people to use Teams in terms of making things easy for them.

They don’t necessarily have to jump to a third party app in Teams or they don’t necessarily have to jump to a physical phone on a desk or a different phone system to actually make that communications. It’s quite seamless and intuitive. Whether you choose like WebEx or Zoom or Teams, they do make things quite intuitive to get multiple things done and to converge things into people’s viewpoints so that they can just make those communications a lot more easily.

I think there’s plenty of people taking a viewpoint that actually telephony has changed and the feature sets are different. So, know, the cloud is very much ready with those kind of feature sets. But there’s also, I think, from a business perspective, know, companies like Microsoft and Cisco specifically have had these product lines and services into these companies growing for a number of years now. So if you were to look at Microsoft, it’s a no brainer for a lot of different companies because

They’ve been building up those enterprise license stacks, the E3s, the E5s, and it’s all been sat on directory services now for years and all that’s been building up and converging in the cloud. And now to really just activate Teams voice seems like quite a small bit to really just layer on top to take advantage of all those directory services and things that we’ve been running. And a similar thing from Cisco, you know, if you’ve spent your time

Scott Kinka (10:48.462)

Mm-hmm.

Alistair (11:10.689)

developing a Cisco strategy and making all your voice and data work together and utilizing certain bits of hardware together with the cloud. It just feels like you’re more naturally able to jump into those cloud services and get the benefit of consolidation, of scale, cost benefits. Those couple of areas I think are really making it very easy to jump into all of this now.

Scott Kinka (11:17.517)

Yeah.

Scott Kinka (11:35.608)

Yeah, I think you probably already answered my next question, which was basically, you know, how do you do this without with how do you move to a more consolidated platform without breaking what already works, what still works kind of in the in the legacy enterprise scenario? Is it that you try to replace those? Is it that, you know, feature sets is that you try to have them migrated to something new? Is that you try to have them live next to each other in this hybrid world? I mean, they’re still very much, you know, kind of legacy.

voice workflows, if you will, right? That can be, you know, pseudo replicated, but like we’re not doing squared key set emulation inside of Teams. You know what I mean? So like how best to sort of, you know, make the transition without breaking what’s still working in the business.

Alistair (12:23.661)

What we generally see with this kind of thing is that you’re right. If you were to look at the entire sort of landscape of unified communications, you might see the enterprise telephony system, you might see meeting rooms and AV systems, you might see call recording, contact sensors, wall balls, all these kind of things. And if you look at it all together, you almost never move.

I think what companies have particularly been doing, and especially if you were to take the COVID years as an example, is assessing really the estate more widely, but identifying the quick wins. So if you were to look at sites that maybe have only really a sort of a base level of telephony function, it might be office or back office, it might just be simply people that don’t necessarily need to use physical.

handsets, they don’t necessarily have a factory with decked or analogs and really to sort of take the quick wins. So move that stuff across, but you are right. You need to keep a bit of a view on how some of this stuff is migrating or is coexisting at least. actually it’s not as difficult as you might think trying to make some of the old and new services coexist anymore.

There’s lots of different companies out there that can do sort cloud services for like SIP or there’s actually integration capabilities in Teams now that allow you to move to some of these different cloud services or actually just connect back and leverage your old ones. the best way is to develop a strategy of defining what’s out there so that you know what you’re gonna come across. But take the quick wins whilst you’ve got your sort of other eye on.

things that are slightly more complex that’s going to be a sort next step. That’s the kind of way that I think about it anyway.

Scott Kinka (14:14.382)

Makes sense. mean, you’ve mentioned Zoom, you’ve mentioned WebEx, you’ve mentioned Teams, right? Zoom, mean, Zoom is a service provider in and of themselves. They will talk to a customer and they will work with them. You know, I look at Cisco and Teams more like platforms, but you know, there were Cisco calling plans. I believe that there still are. Obviously, can get dial tone and a base calling plan from Microsoft.

You know, what makes a BCM one, you know, with Pure IP, which I should probably explain that. come back to that in a minute, but what makes Pure IP, you know, so important when these providers all, you know, frankly, if we’re being honest, can provide dial tone on their own. Where do you fit in and why is this a, you know, a healthy business for you and a solution for customers?

Alistair (15:05.783)

So I guess the starting point there, the calling plans, all the different platforms have them and I wouldn’t really knock them to be honest. If you’re wanting to do something quite easily, quite quickly, you want it to maybe limit the integration that you have to make with other companies and partners and things like that, then great. So they’re simplistic, they’re very easy to deploy.

But the bits where they maybe start to come unstuck a little bit is that you have a sort of limited or more limited coverage. It always expands over time. Microsoft’s have actually got quite a decent coverage with their calling plans. But it’s very much just sort of out of the box kind of solution. What you’re really trying to do is have something fairly bare bones and to enable it quite quickly and quite easily.

you don’t always get the flexibility that you might want. for instance, in terms of the Y, PURE IP and BCM, for starters, you don’t necessarily, if you work for a calling plan via Cisco or Microsoft, you don’t necessarily get that partnership with your carrier. So if you’re wanting to do anything that needs any kind of flexibility, then you might struggle a little bit. Calling plan will allow you to enable dial tone for your PSTN users.

but it’s not necessarily gonna start looking at how to integrate other things. If you’ve got anything else that might be doing or how to manipulate numbers, it’s normally done fairly simplistically. So then you don’t necessarily get the ability to be flexible with your solution. And then you also don’t really get the choice about any kind of different cost benefits either.

So you can’t necessarily go back to a provider that you’ve worked with for a long time, you’ve maybe got some good rates with, you can’t necessarily go and use those with those calling plans. So you kind of go in with Cisco, you go in with Microsoft and you point your numbers or you do your new numbers and you can get it going that way. When it comes to the operator connects or the direct routing as a service or the cloud connects with Cisco or even local gateways with Cisco,

Alistair (17:18.493)

You then open up the options and you provide yourself with a sort of wider set of features and a wider set of possibilities and probably also a wider set of possibilities for to make some cost saves in terms of aggregation and consolidation, that kind of stuff. if you were to look at some of these on the surface, they would probably show that they’ve got different levels of functionality and features. But I think the best thing that can be had is if you

If you want to do something that is even vaguely sort of scaled or complex, it’s probably a good idea to get a partner involved. When you get the partner involved, you’re then into your operator connect or direct routing space.

Scott Kinka (17:59.614)

And to some extent, I guess that speaks right to that migration plan we were talking about earlier on, right? Like if you’re already well positioned to just kind of say everything that existed can go away and now Teams, the dial pad is going to be active and you can make an outside call, not to another Teams user. But outside of that, everything else you’re accustomed to isn’t going to work the same way or isn’t necessarily available. when you’re getting into these other kinds of integrations, what we’re talking about, just so that I kind of can…

put a frame around this. is like…

I’ve got integration into a context, third party contact center solution. I’ve got integration in specific device requirements on site because we’re in a hospital or we’re, you know, we’ve got non teams user endpoints that are required to be powered in a warehouse. We’ve got devices, you mentioned warehousing. you’re talking like overhead paging, alerting, door unlocking, like all this kind of analog stuff that’s in there. Are there other use cases like that? That sort of.

Pop off the page as, you know, this is where you’re sort of disqualified from using the simple attached calling plans.

Alistair (19:05.389)

Yeah, I think the big one that definitely comes to mind, especially based on where people are looking at the moment, is contact center. But actually contact center has probably come on a little ways. So for instance, you can actually use some contact center with some calling plan type numbers.

But again, you’re a little bit restricted unless you can have a partner that can help you do some of that sort of stuff. There’s still manipulations that you might want to be doing it in the contact center world. Microsoft, for instance, has built up some good ones. So you can have contact center via API and you can have core recording via API. So it does improve your scope of what you can achieve for those calling plans.

But there’s still a lot of things like legacy telephony systems that you might want to integrate. Like you mentioned, tannoy systems, speakers, radio systems even. And you’d see a lot of these kinds of things as you start to step out of like office environments. The minute you get into maybe some of the healthcare, some of the manufacturing, you start to jump into some scenarios whereby, yes, you’ve got these other systems and…

And it’s not necessarily that they’re deemed legacy, if you know what mean. They might be using analogs or they might be using ISDNs and those kinds of things, but they’re still very much active and still very much used and need to be a part of the solution. those ones definitely come to mind.

Scott Kinka (20:39.586)

Got it. So really anywhere where you’ve got employees and workflows that sort of fall outside of information work is generally where you’re looking for integration into other kind of endpoints, other devices, other workflows. Yeah.

Alistair (20:53.281)

Yeah, exactly. Like you say, you’ve got the ability to be offloading that via the cloud, via different partners. You’ve got the ability to integrate that in via direct routing. And you’ve got the ability to do some of that also via SIP Gateway on the team’s front, at least.

Scott Kinka (21:13.334)

Gotcha. So you mentioned two things that I, and you don’t need to beat these to death, but you mentioned operator connect and direct routing or direct routing as they say over there in pure IP land, right? 1000 Americans. Can you just describe the differences quickly for, for anybody who’s like, and these are teams, these are Microsoft integration opportunities, operator connect and direct routing. Can you just give me the basic high level?

Alistair (21:34.829)

Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. So we were just talking about calling plans. They were really the first that came out. Calling plans were even available back when it was Skype online before it even turned into Teams. The first thing to happen with that move from Skype into Teams was direct routing. It was quite a painful thing to be doing in Skype, but in Teams all of a sudden you were able to do more. as we talked about some of the limitations of calling plan, know, sticking with Microsoft, not having a PSTM partner, some limited functionality sets.

It’s like they ripped the lid off that with direct routing. They immediately said, right, you can have direct routing. It’s the entire feature set. You can do whatever manipulations you want on your SPCs. You can integrate those directly into the cloud. You can integrate with other systems, other phone systems, other contact centers, and you can have full control over the environment. So immediately you went from quite a limited feature set.

into direct routing that gave you the entire feature set really. And it’s kind of fairly limitless in terms of what you can do with that. But the downside of that was the calling plan was very simple to implement and direct routing was comparatively very difficult to implement. You kind of go from users contacting the cloud directly in calling plans.

to users potentially bouncing their media through SBCs on site and you’re having to control different networks and having to make sure that your SBCs were talking to the cloud. And so there’s lots of firewall rules and lots of different paths you can take to actually make that work. So a lot of people struggled with direct routing firstly from the perspective of the different media paths that came about and there’s different versions of direct routing as a result of that.

Scott Kinka (23:14.445)

Mm-hmm.

Alistair (23:24.983)

And then secondly, really in terms of their environments, their networks, their security, they really had to look at the full sort of stack on that to work out where that was gonna work. And then even back then, say sort of 2019 time, direct routing was quite new to the market. You had to do a lot of that in PowerShell. And again, unless you were from a Microsoft background, the PowerShell made it quite difficult. And really, if you were one of the sort of early adopters of direct routing, trying to do

Direct routing at scale was extremely difficult unless you really knew that PowerShell. People who did, it was great, but yeah, there were some fairly heavy drawbacks in terms of knowledge there. So what Microsoft did is, if you imagine calling plan first, which was limited, the second one was direct routing, which gave you everything, but it was quite difficult. But with the third part, they struck a kind of happy medium.

Scott Kinka (24:02.956)

Yeah.

Alistair (24:20.045)

So the third one was Operator Connect. And so it was based upon a little bit of calling plan and a little bit of direct routing. So as the two types of PSTM mechanisms have progressed, they kind of got closer to each other in terms of their functionality. And Operator Connect just slotted in there. But the benefit that Operator Connect had was that you weren’t limited by what Microsoft were offering you direct. You could now go to your partner.

but you weren’t limited by a direct routing knowledge and setup because the partner could now, via API, push all of this PSTM functionality straight into your teams. And so it gave you the benefits. So you were able to get the best prices for things. You were able to get the best availability of coverage, still work with the partners that you were happy with working with, but the experience required.

Scott Kinka (25:10.775)

Yeah.

Alistair (25:14.125)

really the understanding of teams under the hood was quite dramatically reduced. You sort of go into your team’s admin center, the partner pushes in your numbers and you need to attach them to various different accounts. So it’s quite a drastic difference to direct routing.

Scott Kinka (25:30.912)

Gotcha. And if you are there use cases, I mean, is this an improvement on or there are use cases that are still definitely direct routing because you need to do something that’s more complicated or sort of outside of the UI that you now get from Microsoft. So there’s still a place for for direct routing.

Alistair (25:50.541)

Yeah, so it was always deemed that direct routing was kind of here to stay and Operator Connect was really proposing another easier sort of option, whereas direct routing has always been known as the fully functional version of the feature set. So there are some requirements if you’re wanting to do things with extensions, to retain extensions.

Scott Kinka (26:03.501)

Yeah.

Alistair (26:17.249)

then you’re a little bit better off in direct routing. But there are ways around it in Operator Connect 2. again, if you want to do, if you want to have full control of your environment, I think is probably the best way of thinking about direct routing. You know, if for whatever reason, you know, you maybe have the IT team sat there, you maybe have some of the kits sat there that you want to sweat some of those assets.

Yeah, direct routing could work well with you, and especially if you want to then control that interface maybe between, you’ve got a certain type of contact center, you want to control that interface between your enterprise voice and your contact center. Then again, yeah, direct routing is your mechanism there. But as direct routing matured a little bit, there actually became different versions of direct routing too. So, direct routing on premise, it would be if you had your own SBC,

Scott Kinka (27:05.525)

Yeah.

Alistair (27:09.995)

and you were using it however you wanted to use it for PSTN, for analogs, for whatever integration you wanted. But along the way, you became almost like a forerunner to Operator Connect, which was direct routing as a service. So many different carriers and partners started putting direct routing into their clouds and offering it as a service back to customers. And really, if you were to take that service side by side with Operator Connect, there’s very little difference.

We were running that service for a long time and now we predominantly run Operator Connect because people like the easy ability to turn it up quickly. But some people tend to move from Direct Routing as a service across to Operator Connect more for just a consistency perspective for their IT. But there’s really no service benefit of doing that. There is from on-prem with the hardware but…

Scott Kinka (27:38.467)

Yeah.

Scott Kinka (27:49.006)

Sure.

Alistair (28:04.91)

But those two versions, there’s not a great deal of difference.

Scott Kinka (28:08.622)

Got you. So in my background, I’m waiting to a chance to talk about this at the, at the open of the call, but I was one of the founding partners of a company called Evolve IP back in 2007. And they, there’s some presidents in the UK. you may know them. But you know, when we were at the early days of hosted VoIP, you know, host of IPPBX, whatever it was, you know, there was a couple of use cases that were just always troublesome, right? And the one that always comes to mind.

literally is like the receptionist that’s been at the business for 10 years or the assistant to the CEO is the one employee with the opportunity to derail the entire project. Are these use cases that are that are still somewhat problematic kind of in the in the teams or Zoom, know, or or, you know, Cisco WebEx ecosystem? Like, how do you account for that seat, the call coverage position?

Alistair (28:50.935)

Yeah.

Alistair (29:07.457)

Yeah, so I suppose focusing on Teams, there’s a couple of different functions that kind of fill that gap. Is it still a scenario? Yes, I would say what it is, but maybe I can explain a little bit. like in Teams, you have like a boss admin function. That’s what everyone used to call it. It’s called delegation in Teams.

Scott Kinka (29:16.994)

Yeah.

Scott Kinka (29:24.568)

Sure.

Scott Kinka (29:30.444)

delegation, yeah.

Alistair (29:31.605)

So you can quite successfully, if you were to combine delegation in Teams for the voice side of things, you can control someone’s number, both calls in and out, and you can see their call histories and kind of control their phone like a sort secretary manager’s sort of scenario. And then because it’s a Microsoft ecosystem, you can combine that with other exchange mechanisms to control their calendar and their outlook. And so it kind of becomes a pretty decent kind of boss admin type function.

Where some of that is a little bit challenged is that if people are in the mindset that they want to achieve that on a physical phone, it does it. It just doesn’t really do it quite the same as the traditional phones. I think they had a of a foresight, if you like, in terms of some of the hardwares that they created here. They created lots of phones with lots of side cars and buttons and things. Teams has been getting there, but

but never really is quite focused. I’d say boss admin’s great if you want to switch into the software side of things and, you know, get a headset and try and control things that way. But some of those people that I think are then not quite so willing to make the jump struggle a little bit with that side. And then that kind of also goes on for the front of house. That has definitely been an area that was a little bit more of a challenge because you can say to some front of house type roles,

jump to a headset, you you can get a wireless headset. It’s probably, you know, you can walk around whilst you’re on the phone. You’ve got various touch options on the sides of the headsets and it’s great. But if you’ve got, so it probably is more into how many kind of calls you’re fronting via that service. So if you’re sort of a low to medium sort of touch point in terms of the calls, probably what Teams offers you is okay.

The phones are all right if you want to have one there. They don’t quite light up in the of the busy lights. Yeah, not quite as good with, from that perspective, from, you know, being able to field calls, you can do it quite successfully with Teams, but it sometimes struggles a little bit if you want sort of a medium to high sort of touch point, you’re wanting to move through those calls really quickly and get drag and drops and push them around very quickly.

Scott Kinka (31:32.224)

Yeah, front line, back line, busy, yeah.

Alistair (31:54.669)

But that space did open up a little bit. So for instance, there was a lot of third party systems back on Skype. Some of those same providers came through into Teams and now there’s actually quite a few different types of or different companies providing those services. They effectively do like an overlay. So rather than necessarily use your Teams client, you can get a new overlay for your front of house. They can customize it how they want.

they can get their drag and drop, they can see things happening and they can make it work a little bit better. But still software orientated, I still feel like if they want to stick with those physical phones with rows of side cars, they might be a little bit hesitant to kind of jump into the solution. Interestingly, those guys that then started doing those kind of solutions,

Scott Kinka (32:26.829)

Got it.

Scott Kinka (32:39.628)

Yeah, 100%.

Alistair (32:47.597)

were back in the sort of traditional systems, they were different companies that doing that to contact center. But what you saw was that with that space kind of combined a little bit. they’re using the APIs, similar APIs into Teams. And so there’s companies out there that doing the contact center side because they also need a slightly different overlay into Teams for a contact center or an orientated role and the front of house for those roles too. So it’s kind of an interesting space that.

kind of combined a little bit in teams.

Scott Kinka (33:20.046)

In the interest of time, let me rapid fire a couple questions just around some features that are still in my mind on this. You mentioned Contact Center. There’s some basic stuff that you can do in Call Cues and Teams. So the question simply is, is that a capable product or are you looking for an integrated third party? And if there are integrated third parties, is there a certification program that Microsoft goes through with that, much like Operator Connect?

Alistair (33:45.623)

Yes, absolutely. to start with, on the team side of things. So, sorry, with the queue side of things. So, when it comes to queues, the, the thing that was missing a little bit in teams was, the feeling of, of being part of a team. So you could create home groups in teams for a long time now or to attend. So you could fire calls at different people, but it was quite hard for them to understand, you know, who picked up the call. and, and, you know, why is the call ringing me and not someone else?

Scott Kinka (34:05.603)

Yeah.

Alistair (34:15.913)

you know, what is the status of my team? And those ones, back on Skype, they always used to get called informal contact sensors. It was like the first step on the ladder towards contact sensor. And that’s really the one that they’ve taken out with Teams Qs. So Microsoft have leveraged all the capability that was already there, but just reworked the interface a little bit so that…

Scott Kinka (34:26.978)

Yeah.

Alistair (34:40.365)

so that users can have that feeling of a team. They have another little app on the side of teams. It shows them the calls that are coming in, who’s taking them, who’s online, and how the sort of team is operating. it gives you a different interface into the queue, but it also gives that sort of supervisory type function. It starts to bring that in a little bit. So you kind of get an agent, sort of supervisor view because you start to see some statistics. So it’s the first time really that you could start to have some

Scott Kinka (35:01.198)

Okay.

Alistair (35:09.911)

some light SLAs and some light core reporting. It’s never gonna be like a full on contact center seeing, know, times in various different queues and that kind of stuff and a lot of heavy inflation on drop rates or answer rates. But it gives you the first part of this. I think it’s quite perfectly pitched for internal teams, for instance, within companies, maybe like IT service tests, that kind of stuff that.

Scott Kinka (35:34.967)

Yeah.

Alistair (35:35.213)

They’re not customer facing. They don’t necessarily need all that. They don’t even really want to run agent software to get the full contact center experience, but they do need some OLA’s and they need to see some information and need to work as a team. And it makes that kind of brilliant. And really for the price point that you pay for your license uplift, there isn’t really anything else out there that would really sort of go toe to toe with it. The thing where that stops is

it’s definitely not an omni-channel contact center. It’s calls only, it’s never really been identified or being pointed at being anything other than that. So the minute that you get into omni-channel contact center, so you’re wanting to kind of fold in all these different workflows for maybe SMS, for emails, for IM, kind of web chat, those kind of things.

you’re immediately getting into like a third party space. And there are multiple third parties out there because Microsoft did set up a framework about how you can go about that. So using their APIs. And then additionally, I think as well as the omnichannel part, there’s definitely a functionality that I think starts to breach that gap and push you over that gap. And I think it’s skills-based routing.

Scott Kinka (36:36.429)

Okay.

Alistair (36:52.661)

You can kind of fudge a little bit skills based routing, that’s mostly at the heart of a lot of contact centers. So getting into that sort of space, you definitely need to start looking at third party tools. And so what Microsoft did is they had a sort three tier system, if you like. They had the first tier on that, it’s called Connect Extend Unify. It’s just really recently changed it. I it used to be called Power at the top. So from a Connect perspective.

Scott Kinka (36:52.93)

Yeah.

Scott Kinka (37:17.966)

Okay.

Alistair (37:20.395)

Where they started with that is it’s a combination of being a SIP-orientated contact center and some API. So it’ll be looking between the contact center that you’ve got implemented, it’ll be SIP-trunked back into Teams, whichever mechanism you do that, but it will use some of the API to start looking at the presence of your Teams users back and forth to be able to have a more seamless integration.

And it still comes with having an app in Teams, which is essentially a web app that goes into Teams that gives you your agent sort of supervisor functionality. But it does give you the ability of being at that level. If there’s anything that the API from Microsoft doesn’t support, you can do it in SIP. So it’s kind of leveraging direct routing, if you like. You’ve got the full feature set. You can do all your modifications in direct routing that you want to do. But then if you were to take that the next step,

Scott Kinka (37:52.843)

and that, yeah.

Alistair (38:14.733)

which is the sort of area of the market that expanded quite rapidly, particularly maybe in the last 12 months, 12 to 18 months, I think, is the extend level. And that one is getting away from a SIP or integrated contact center directly into API. So you’re utilizing calling plans or operator connect or direct routing. It doesn’t matter how you’re getting your numbers because your contact center is picked up for the first time when the call hits Teams.

So the call gets into Teams, the API grabs the call and it can start processing it. You can send it off to your IVRs, you can do whatever you want to skills-based route it, that kind of stuff. And that area expanded quite rapidly. There was lots of different companies coming to the fore with that. Some of the ones that were there in Skype, Contact Center came through. As I mentioned, some of the companies that were looking more at operator consoles came through into Contact Center too.

And so there’s a lot of different options out there for you to be able to do that. And then more recently, the third tier in terms of the contact center framework has been unified. So that generally was not only an API based contact center, but was sat right in the middle of Azure utilizing all that Azure has to offer it. And then that’s the bit that’s changed a little bit lately because Microsoft have made some announcements about being able to…

Scott Kinka (39:31.445)

Okay.

Alistair (39:39.053)

to start connecting contact sensors into Azure rather than necessarily into Teams. So it opens up some different mechanisms. That’s the path that Dynamics, for instance, would take going into Azure rather than necessarily into Teams. So again, it adds another option. So out there, you can go to SIP, can go to API into Teams, and then potentially API into Azure.

Scott Kinka (40:02.638)

What were the three names again?

Alistair (40:04.277)

So you’ve got connect as the SIP, extend as the API and unify as the API into Azure eventually.

Scott Kinka (40:12.366)

we should think about connect as basically this is the upper right magic quadrant, CCAS providers who have an integrate. Many of them have an integration into, know, via SIP into Teams. Your second category on the extend, these are sort of the native tools and you’ll correct me. Maybe they’re in the third category, but this is like Content Guru Anywhere 365 and…

writer or they would be names people would know. And then as anyone sort of achieved this. So basically I’m looking at the third category, the Unifi as basically an extend partner who happens to host that solution inside of Azure. Largely.

Alistair (40:50.861)

Yes, yeah, largely. There’s a little bit more to it, but I don’t believe I could be corrected, but I don’t believe there’s any unified partners just yet. It’s always been one that’s been coming. The model’s been around there for a long time, but really that extended version took a long time to get off the ground. There was a lot of work by Microsoft and the partners getting all those APIs ready for that kind of environment.

Scott Kinka (41:01.122)

Gotcha.

Scott Kinka (41:13.984)

API is going.

Alistair (41:16.981)

I think that the other point that’s maybe interested on those three different options is that the connect level. You might be able to see that kind of level being not only connectivity into Microsoft, but you could see that connecting into other platforms too. So if you are running different platforms, that might be why you would choose a SIPA or Intake Contact Center rather than something that’s API into Microsoft specifically.

Scott Kinka (41:32.664)

Yeah.

Scott Kinka (41:41.998)

We’re almost out of time and I want to get to some fun. So I’m gonna ask you super quick. One, I’m a mess as a Microsoft administrator and my directories, you’re talking about directories being at the basis of this. Like is cleanup something that has to happen before you get this done?

Alistair (42:00.077)

Not necessarily. You might find that you kind of have a more painful time when it actually comes to your kind of go live migration days. So I think there’s a few things that you could do that will make your life a lot easier. The first one of those is if you ever had any Skype for Business, be very careful. Skype for Business and Teams use the same attributes.

Scott Kinka (42:04.718)

Okay?

Alistair (42:27.297)

So if you’ve still got Skype knocking about or you never removed Skype fully from your environment, you could find that you’ve got those and you can’t put Teams and Skype in at the same time unless you go through quite a lot of other different, more complex sort of processes. So something to be careful of. The second thing is, and that’s for an IT admin, the second thing is…

just for your own sanity when users start seeing Teams. If your directory services have got lots of cosmetic numbers sat in it that aren’t, that are going to be incorrect based on what you’ve deployed, what you’re about to deploy in Teams, definitely change that because it just, causes a lot of, well, it’ll cause a lot of pain to your service desk. They’ll get all these calls coming in saying, I’m ringing these numbers and they’re not working, or I see these numbers and I’m not working. It can be cosmetic, but still cause you quite a lot of pain.

And then the third one, think is the biggest one for me is usage locations. If you say, for instance, if you’ve maybe not kept up with the correct usage locations to match where the users are in terms of their country, when you come to try and associate a number to a user in like an operator connect scenario, if you haven’t got your user locations corrected, it just won’t, it won’t show you the list. It won’t allow you to associate the number.

Scott Kinka (43:18.616)

Gotcha.

Alistair (43:46.017)

That’s definitely a big one. They’re all easy to fix those.

Scott Kinka (43:49.408)

Yeah, yeah, it’s just hygiene at the end of the day. But these are the kind of things like if you’re not leveraging the directories for anything other than authentication, then all of sudden you’re like, wow, I have to start thinking about where people are, you know? So the other thing is this introduces you into the ecosystem. So this will kind of be our last question before we get to the fun, right? Which is, know, what I mean.

Alistair (43:51.403)

Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Alistair (43:57.217)

Yeah.

Scott Kinka (44:08.406)

Everything’s about AI right now and obviously Microsoft has their own play now. And I know we’re over here having a very kind of practical, how do we get legacy communications into this enterprise collaboration platform? But co-pilots floating out here. Are there use cases where you’re starting to get asked like how co-pilot plays with enterprise voice? Is there a path or is that a coming? how do I think about rationalizing these almost like two ends of the Microsoft team spectrum, right?

Alistair (44:35.391)

Yeah. So within Co-Pilot, is some functionality that works with Teams Phone. It kind of feels like a bit of an evolution from what people have been enjoying with meetings. So it’s the ability to kind of like take notes on, know, PSTN calls, the same as you would do on a meeting and get the summaries and stuff like that. So I haven’t seen many people want to take a lot of decisions based on that alone.

Scott Kinka (44:55.627)

Okay.

Alistair (45:05.165)

I guess if you had a lot of different roles in your company whereby that was a thing where people were spending a lot of time on PSTN calls that needed some of that summarization to help their role, then it could be. But I think the bigger play really for copilot at this point in time is probably the meeting orientated stuff. That tends to be the stuff that people really look at.

I’d say from a team’s phone, it’s more about the team’s premium license, which was the queues element that we were looking at. And probably the AI in terms of team’s phone, I think would come in more when you see it in play on core recording of the team’s policy-based core recording and the contact centers that you’re bringing in via API. Those two, I think, are the two areas to watch on this. I’ve seen some.

Scott Kinka (45:32.206)

It certainly makes sense.

Alistair (45:58.189)

pretty impressive things, particularly on core recording that’s out there right now on its ability with AI. But maybe the AI is also, you know, emerging on Teamsflow.

Scott Kinka (46:09.847)

Fantastic. All right, two fun questions and then I’m to let you go because I promised I was going to have you up by the top of the hour. Number one, what’s on your end table? What are you reading right now, business or otherwise? Do have a book recommendation for our listeners?

Alistair (46:24.973)

I have got a book recommendation, I was just seeing if it was behind me. But it’s basically about, I don’t know you’ve seen on television about ancient aliens, the whole, yeah, so it’s one of those books and I forget the title now, but yeah, I kind of read.

Scott Kinka (46:29.502)

sorry.

Scott Kinka (46:44.61)

Well, you can email me afterwards. We’ll put it in the show notes. All right. So I love that. Let’s stay with the aliens. All right. We’re going to have even more fun. This is a question I ask everybody. There’s some dystopian future that happens to us, whatever that is. And maybe it’s an alien takeover, whatever that is. But at the end of it all, you only have one functioning app on your mobile device, but you get to choose which one is it.

Alistair (46:47.275)

Yes. Yeah.

Alistair (46:51.915)

Yup.

Alistair (47:11.841)

Ooh, I would say this kind of depends upon how life looks as we move forward.

Scott Kinka (47:19.532)

The good news is you get to choose your own dystopian future. So you can tack it together.

Alistair (47:26.381)

There’s a few different apps that I use a lot and I think I sort of go two ways. So if life is going to be good and I can keep my one app to do something that I love, then I’d probably go with the snowboarding app. So I can check out the snow and things like that. If life’s going to be bad, I’d go for the torch.

Scott Kinka (47:31.086)

Mm-hmm.

Scott Kinka (47:45.421)

Okay.

Scott Kinka (47:51.968)

Amen. That’s a really good one and I like it. Well thought out sir and we’re right up against it. This has been a lot of fun and I really appreciate your time Alisera, I appreciate it. This has been a master class I think in Modern Voice and but just so that people know how to connect, know, where can listeners go to learn a little bit more about you, Pure IP, you know, can catch talk you may give, how do they find out a little bit more.

Alistair (48:18.017)

So a couple of places, you can obviously go to the BCM1 Pure IP website. There’s a full rundown of all the services that we offer, some of the ones that we’ve talked about today. Same goes really for LinkedIn on the BCM1 front. But also for me personally, feel free to reach out to me, me a request, we can catch up on LinkedIn.

Scott Kinka (48:40.056)

Fantastic. Well, Alistair, I thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. That is a wrap on this episode of The Bridgecast. If today’s conversation gave you something to think about, please hit subscribe, leave us a review, share it with your team. And obviously, if you found Alistair as interesting as I did, please check up with him on LinkedIn. And we will see you soon on another episode of The Bridgecast.

That’s it. Thank you so much. I appreciate the time. You did great.

Alistair (49:06.263)

Yeah, no worries. I was madly trying to think of what that book title is. It’s like, completely gone out of my mind. But hey, hey,

Scott Kinka (49:13.504)

No, no, it’s okay. It’s okay. The episode was great. And that’s what I was hoping to do. think people are still…

It got, we probably got a little bit more detailed than I think, you know, than our marketing team had in the notes, but I wanted to, I told Andy Stanky from BCM one, like I need somebody on your side to just literally be like, yes, you can know, you can’t, you shouldn’t be thinking about this. You should be thinking about that because we’re getting the con we’re having the conversation all the time, you know? And I wanted a piece to sort of be like for our sellers in particular, as they have opportunities. And we’ve had a couple of decent sized.

Alistair (49:40.865)

Yeah.

Scott Kinka (49:49.898)

We’re in the middle of actually a few decent sized opportunities with you guys right now. You know, I wanted something where, you know, like our sellers could sort of like drop the episode to the decision maker, you know, and be like, these guys really know what they’re talking about. You know what I mean?

Alistair (50:03.435)

I think I’d be interested what the uptake is on this. The only reason being is that when we do topics on the PUR-IP coffee club of this kind of ilk or with Empowering Cloud or even the live ones, we always get the biggest uptake on the basics, like this kind of stuff. It’s not on like the really fierce things that come along. It’s always like, how do I scale it or what do I need to think about first? And yeah, so.

Scott Kinka (50:21.943)

Yeah.

Alistair (50:32.181)

So yeah, the big topics are still seem to be quite popular. I think is when you’re living and breathing it every day, you sort of forget that a little bit, but people are maybe a little bit more.