Microsoft Partnerships

In many respects, Microsoft is not viewed as a competitor to UCaaS firms, according to the roundtable participants.

“People are buying ecosystems these days, Google or Microsoft, and they basically tend to stay in those ecosystems,” Fazlulla said. “And they think Teams is the panacea to all communications problems. And in some ways, it is. But it’s not a fully redundant UC solution. And they discovered that very quickly. We can come in and add that UC backbone to a customer’s Teams solution. It’s a perfect marriage.”

Day took a more enthusiastic approach to a Microsoft partnership.

“We love Microsoft,” he said. “They own 98% of the desktops globally. Every computer we have, someone’s running an application right now built on Microsoft. Every company has to make a decision to compete with Microsoft and their offering.”

However, a partnership with Microsoft is stronger than the competition side is going to bear out, Day said.

“Microsoft has a unique position where they can dictate our destiny. They also have the financial abilities that they could own any one of us if they really wanted to. And in reality, Microsoft’s been in the voice space for over 20 years, going back to products like Skype. However, when they partner with one of us in this room, all of a sudden, the voice product gets better.”