Courtenay Snell (L) and Rodney Cox (R) (GenNet)
Making the most of the platform
Once partners and end customers overcome that hurdle, however, there’s an awful lot of functionality for them to discover in the Teams platform, especially when a deployment is backed up by the right communications infrastructure. This, in turn, can deliver plenty of choice and capability for end users.
“One of the most important points and an element that I really like and this is one of the key areas where I think Vocus is building some incredible value into Microsoft Teams is the ability to bring your own SIP [session initiation protocol] services or bring your own telephony services inside the Teams stack,” Snell said.
Credit: Ashley Mar
Moreover, for organisations that don’t want to, or can’t, tap into the default Teams cloud hosting environment, the platform can enable what is known as Teams direct routing.
According to Snell, this offers the ability to take a cloud infrastructure environment and connect that with something that might be physically on-premises, or potentially located in an Azure data centre, or perhaps an Equinix data centre. or somewhere else where there would be a SIP service or more traditional integrated services digital network (ISDN) services delivered.
“The session border controller is on a physical piece of equipment or virtual piece of equipment,” Snell said. “You've got the option to do both these days. And one of the really innovative options that we've seen more recently, working with Vocus, is that we have the ability to deliver SIP services both over the internet, known as SIP OTT [over the top], or through a private network as well.
“It gives us a great flexibility in that we can start to get creative about where services are located, as long as we manage the quality, we manage the network links between the endpoints.
“Those session border controllers can be potentially in multiple Azure regions or multiple data centres depending upon what your particular customer network architecture is looking like at that particular point in time. So there's an enormous flexibility,” he added.
Vocus and interconnection provider Equinix have a strategic partnership to support Teams services for partners’ deployments, with GenNet leveraging Vocus Cloud Connect, which is underpinned by Equinix Cloud Exchange, to tap into the benefits of the low latency the network offers.
This infrastructure combo presents a useful basis from which GenNet has been able to build and deliver some compelling solutions for customers.
“We recently did a proof of concept for a customer that we were able to set up within a very short period of time, within a week, putting session border controllers in Azure, using Vocus SIP services over the internet and presented this to a customer and the voice quality was fantastic,” GenNet co-founder and head of sales and marketing Rodney Cox said.
“And one of the reasons why we could do this is because of the partnerships that Vocus and Equinix have, and also Microsoft, have in terms of being able to have high quality infrastructure, all within very close proximity to to each other, and therefore latency, etc...didn't come into it from a voice quality perspective,” he said.
