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Making Microsoft Teams More Secure and Performant: Ribbon Ties in Direct Routing

Last week, Ribbon Communications held its annual Perspectives summit, a gathering of customers, tech ecosystem participants, and channel partners for a week of presentations, demonstrations and networking.

A highlight of this year’s event was the showcasing of Ribbon’s collaboration with Microsoft Teams, specifically Direct Routing for Microsoft Teams leveraging one of the largest portfolios of Microsoft-certified Session Border Controllers (SBCs) in the industry. Ribbon was among the first vendors certified to provide a solution which connects legacy systems and endpoints for secure voice calling capabilities in Teams collaboration environments, eliminating the need for on-premises infrastructure.

Kevin Isacks, Vice President of Edge Engineering at Ribbon Communications, explained how much easier it is for managed service providers to roll out Microsoft’s real time collaboration services without having to “rip and replace” existing assets, while adding value through being able to fully control the SBC, the edge, the interoperability, and the migration “as a service.”

“It is very important for an enterprise to choose a provider who can provide the solution that is secure, robust and scalable,” Isacks said.

Why are the cloud, Microsoft Teams and Intelligent Edge solutions attractive to channel partners?

“Ultimately the role of channels has evolved,” Isacks said. “In the days of on-prem PBXs, the channel’s role was to always do the integration. They set up the devices, they set up the servers, and they all worked together. Now with Teams, it is effectively all in the plan. And when they went purely with the calling plans, the channel partners had hardly any role in it. They got reduced to being more of an adoption crew, so they would help with the actual user adoption and that kind of thing.”

With Teams Direct Routing channel partners have an opportunity to add more value, Isacks explained.

“With Direct Routing, channel partners can manage the SBC, the edge, the interoperability and the migration. This leads to a lot more control and value, which benefits Microsoft as well, given their dependence on channel partners.”

Ribbon also announced earlier this year that they’ve made Direct Routing available on the Azure marketplace. “Teams is in Azure, and our putting Ribbon’s e-SBC in Azure literally means that the two are running side by side. With the combination, you get the best possible quality because you don’t have to have the extra hops back and forth,” Isacks explained.

“By having it in the marketplace you just instantiate it, so it just cuts down the time,” he said. “It is a very quick and easy process.  That’s why it made sense for us to complete our Azure presence first.”

Isacks said Ribbon is also working with other marketplaces, including AWS where they are integrating with Chime, the voice connector. “The reason that we haven’t gone into AWS until now is because traditionally the product we’ve sold into AWS is our software edition (SWe), whereas on Azure it’s SWe Lite. SWE Lite is designed to be channel friendly, and channel focused. It can be brought up by channel very easily.”

Asked about Ribbon’s big announcement that their Kandy Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) is powering the new AT&T API marketplace, Isacks said, “Kandy is a product suite that provides APIs and intractability using WebRTC, versus what we’re doing in Azure which is more of an SBC is interoperability and security play. These are two very different functions but related in that we have a very broad portfolio in which we can provide pretty much everything from the applications to the SBCs to a full CPaaS.”

Isacks noted that KPN and other service provider are also leveraging Kandy CPaaS in what he described as a “very lucrative market.”

“Our channel partners and technology ecosystem partners are very much aligned with our vision to deliver more secure, more robust and more scalable real time communications and collaboration services,” Isacks said. “They appreciate the features we’ve built in, including voice integration, video interworking, and more – all functions which we have successfully virtualized, making consumption that much easier and managed services much more profitable.”

In March of this year, Ribbon announced that it is partnering with Yealink, a leading global provider of enterprise communication and collaboration solutions, to deliver enterprises with reliable, faster adoption options for Microsoft Teams. Ribbon’s appliance and software-based Session Border Controller (SBC) 1000, SBC 2000 and SBC Software edition (SWe) Lite have all been tested as a secondary registrar for Yealink T56A, T58A desk and CP960 conference phones.

Ribbon SBCs acting as a registrar provides Yealink Microsoft Teams SIP phones with the ability to make phone calls without being connected to the Microsoft Phone System. Yealink Microsoft Teams SIP phones run the Teams client, providing real-time communications through a familiar user experience. Now, Ribbon SBCs enable survivable calling whether the phones are not connected to the Microsoft Phone System.

“Microsoft Teams is one of the fastest growing enterprise collaboration tools in the world – now Ribbon and Yealink are working together to bring an innovative solution to market that will allow an entire organization’s employee base to realize the full benefits of Teams, even as separate groups are gradually migrated to the Teams voice capabilities,” said Alvin Liao, Vice President of Product at Yealink. “Many organizations believe that they have to wait until their entire employee base has been migrated to Teams before purchasing the latest models of Microsoft Teams SIP phones, so that all employees will be able to collaborate in the Teams environment. Yealink and Ribbon are addressing this issue with our fully-featured Teams phones, which can be deployed before the Teams migration is completed. Our extensive line-up of SIP phones uses Ribbon’s Microsoft-certified session border controllers (SBCs) to route phone calls in the absence of the Microsoft Phone System, providing everyone in the organization full access to Teams collaboration capabilities.”

“We have a long standing, strong partnership with Yealink and our latest offering puts us squarely in a market-leading position that delivers a unique offering for enterprise customers migrating to Microsoft Teams,” said Patrick Joggerst, Chief Marketing Officer for Ribbon. “In addition to offering Teams collaboration capabilities to the entire organization prior to or during the migration process, or in the event of an interruption to the connection to the phone system, these phones can make and receive calls leveraging Ribbon SBCs. The innovative new solution provides end-users the ability to switch to Ribbon’s SBC technology for call routing with a single tap of the finger, adding an important call survivability feature not previously available.”

Ribbon also put the solution on display at a Channel Partners conference last month.

“Our channel partners are critical to our overall success and the solutions that we are featuring at this year’s conference provide them with several competitive advantages including the ability to quickly capitalize on the rapidly growing UCaaS market, which Gartner forecasts at 15% CAGR worldwide between 2018 and 2022,” said John Macario, Senior Vice President of Channel Marketing for Ribbon. “Our Cloud UC, Direct Routing for Teams and Intelligent Edge solutions are all playing key roles in helping our partners differentiate their offerings in a hyper-competitive environment and deliver increased value to their customers. We are looking forward to highlighting our channel partner-focused solutions and numerous success stories at the industry’s largest annual event.”

Edited by Maurice Nagle