Where does Microsoft Phones rank amongst other Cloud Phone Systems

Microsoft Teams is a trusted leader in the Unified Communications space, the phone space. Unified Communications, for those that have not heard this term, it’s a newer term and it talks about voice and the ability of things like voicemail that can be delivered to your inbox, voice to text and text to voice and all those other types of communication mediums.

Teams has over 250 million active users per month, that’s quite a lot. So, hundreds of millions of users using Teams and the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. And then a lot of them using Teams voice for their voice solution. A lot of collaboration with Teams, 30 billion collaboration minutes in a day. So it’s a very robust ecosystem, a very strong product.

Teams is also a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant in 2021. Gartner published their typical Magic Quadrant and if you’re familiar with this or not, you always want to be in the upper right and as you can see, Microsoft is in the upper, upper right which talks about Teams being a leader here in Unified Communications. There are other well-known companies up there as well. And it’s pretty impressive that Microsoft got to this point. I remember in 2017, which was just 5 years ago, some critical features came out, auto-attendant – “Hey, thank you for calling Big Green IT, please press 1 for sales, 2 for tech support”, things like that. And then call routing and call queues, they were released in 2017 timeframe and that’s when a lot of us decided to move our phone systems towards Teams because it had all the key features that were critical to any business.

So for a product that is relatively young, it’s become very mature and has become a leader in phone systems. I have administered many of these other phone systems in my past and it’s sometimes hard for me to believe that I would have everything in Teams for a younger product but it’s very mature. We use it every day, so many of our clients use it every day. And for someone who administered these systems for years, I love using Teams. It’s easy to use, flexible to use on any device and very straight-forward to administer in the Teams admin center.