Microsoft have announced a new name for Operator Connect Mobile.
It will now be known as Teams Phone Mobile.
I’m sitting with Mark Herbert from Carrier Automate today to discuss what that means.
So Mark, why do you think they’ve changed the name?
I think it’s now no longer a program for Operators and more a service for customers. So, customers would not understand what Operator Connect Mobile mean. The Operators probably knew there was some sort of program, which was Operator Connect Mobile and that’s just about to go into into GA, and so they needed a name customers can understand really, and Teams Phone Mobile makes a bit more sense in terms of what this thing actually does. So yeah, I think that’s probably why they’ve change the name. It’s all about it going from a preview operator conversation into a customer conversation.
So in a nutshell, what is Teams Phone Mobile
Teams Phone Mobile is what we used to call FMC back in the day. Which stands for Fixed Mobile Convergence. Which is, again, another jargon phrase, but really, this makes a mobile phone at its native level, so right down to the SIM, act like a Team’s device, so in this case, the Team’s user’s extension. In that a call comes through, not across the data layer, but actually comes through directly to the phone in its basic way. So, you could even put a SIM into an old Nokia, and it would be a Team’s phone, and then you could do things you would do on Teams: answer the call, transfer it, put it on hold and those other things. So, it gives you an extension like behavior from a mobile phone device.
For Dstny Automate with our Carrier Automate solution, what experience do we have in this area?
Well, mobility and being mobile first, is one of the reasons why we joined, as Qunifi into the Dstny group. They bring a wealth of FMC experience. They’ve been doing this for decades in the Nordics, where Dstny for service providers have most of their heritage they have been using FMC in business for literally decades. There you can see business penetration at 90% in FMC, so people use their phone for their extension, mostly in business. It’s kind of just the thing you do. So, we have a wealth of experience in the team to bring know how to Operators on how to implement Teams Phone Mobile. Because there are challenges. Microsoft’s program around how they want you to integrate the IMS Core of the Operator, which is the back-end systems into Teams, which is non-trivial. Dstny as a group, with our colleagues, we can take a lot of experience and know-how, into the Operators and obviously, Dstny Automate has a wealth of Teams integration experience. So together we probably sit as one of the world leaders in terms of expertise in FMC and particularly the Teams domain.
With our Carrier Automate solution, which is geared towards Operator Connect Accelerator, how are we using our experience there?
Carrier Automate will have FMC and Mobile dimensions.
There are up-coming announcements. I’m not going to do any spoilers today, but look forward to not only how we would bring fixed line Operators into the Carrier Automate platform but maybe also mobile Operators and what that could mean for FMC, and how we could then reach geographically, on a global basis with FMC solutions. So, we already have plans there and certainly, we’ve been given a lot of experience from Dstny group on how we’re going to deliver that as a global leading platform.