Fusion Connect Drives Growth with Long-Term Investment in Microsoft Operator Connect

Mario DeRiggi, chief revenue officer at Fusion Connect, says his company is doubling down on its relationship with Microsoft, specifically with Teams via Operator Connect. Currently, Fusion Connect clients can make calls to mobile devices and landlines directly through Microsoft Teams with dedicated local phone numbers that can be accessed on any device, including PCs, smartphones, tablets and Teams-enabled desk phones. With Operator Connect, employees can make these calls seamlessly, directly through Microsoft Teams and administered through Microsoft Teams as well.

Fusion Connect’s Mario DeRiggi

Historically, people – including DeRiggi – were often concerned about the stability of Teams. But Microsoft has resolved a lot of those initial technical issues that made Teams go down, especially during the pandemic. It’s that course correction that gives DeRiggi confidence in Microsoft and Operator Connect as a collaboration tool. In this interview with Channel Futures, DeRiggi talks about the path Fusion Connect is taking with Microsoft and what it means for partner opportunity.

Channel Futures: Fusion Connect is heavily invested in Microsoft. How do you continue to drive value in that ecosystem?

Mario DeRiggi: For [Fusion Connect], really everything and anything that we’ve been focused on is around Microsoft. We’ve always been a Microsoft CSP. So, we did a lot of licensing. We were a direct routing partner in the past. We did calling services using direct routing. We have recently become one of the top Operator Connect certified partners for Microsoft. So when you look at the Microsoft ecosystem, M365 is an application suite that is widely used across the midmarket enterprise space and even SMB.

As you know, Teams is an application within M365 that comes along with it for free. Over the last few years, the Teams application has gotten so much more robust and stable to the point now it is the leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. For us, it’s how do we take advantage of that? And how do we continue to develop internal solutions that help optimize business solutions for midmarket and enterprise that are using Microsoft 365? We recently became certified in Operator Connect. We are considered one of the top companies in growth with Microsoft and Operator Connect globally. And it’s continued to drive the feature set to not only meet the business outcomes for the midmarket and enterprise, but how do we continue to drive and optimize how they use the solution so they can optimize their workforce?

For us, we have what I believe is an industry-leading service guarantee. We have 100% SLA, so when you buy our Operator Connect, we are guaranteed 100% uptime. And the second thing is we are guaranteeing install intervals that are mutually agreed upon. One of the biggest issues we’re hearing when people try to move to calling services in Microsoft is the inability for people to deliver on timelines that they are committed to.

We are also expanding globally. We are currently in 17 countries, mostly European. We just launched in South Africa and that was all customer-driven by the way. We have a bunch of countries in Asia Pacific that’ll be coming up in the next 30-60 days. And global coverage is important for us because when we want to go midmarket enterprise, they have global offices. For us, to have the ability to go out and consolidate those into one tenant for them, is a real differentiator for us. It’s actually driven more Microsoft opportunities to us, because we’re one of the few people that could do it.

And then it’s the feature set. How do we continue to drive features and make our solution feature rich? How do we continue to drive more feature set within the Microsoft ecosystem to allow us to provide a better solution that helps our enterprise customers meet their business outcomes? The other big thing for us is we are a [cloud solution provider]. We are a direct CSP with Microsoft. We could actually provide the entire solution end-to-end … licensing, professional services and the calling services, and then adding global coverage, our service guarantee, as well our feature set that we’re investing in. We are a full tech stack company. But our focus today is everything and anything around Microsoft Teams.

CF: When it comes to optimization, what do customers find most appealing?

MD: What we have found is that a lot of organizations were using Teams for their …