Ribbon Communications on Wednesday launched Ribbon Connect, a portfolio of subscription-based, as-a-service offerings.

The first Ribbon Connect offer supports Microsoft Teams Direct Routing. It allows voice-calling capabilities in the Microsoft Teams collaboration platform.

Greg Zweig is Ribbon’s director of solutions marketing. The Ribbon Connect portfolio announcement is “100% a result of partner feedback,” he said. And there’s a reason this is a whole portfolio of offers.

“Many partners told us they were in different places in their journey to offer Teams-based solutions,” he said. “This first offering, for Microsoft Teams Direct Routing, is end to end because many partners told us they needed a solution to get to market quickly.”

Ribbon’s Greg Zweig

Ribbon Connect Partner Benefits

The new Ribbon service gets partners to market sooner with a complete offer, Zweig said.

“Partners add value for customers that want to integrate with an existing PBX/cloud service or for customers that want to move entirely to Teams,” he said. “They can launch the service without weeks of training and without any capital expense.”

Ribbon Connect for Microsoft Teams connects new or existing phone lines, numbers and calling plans to Teams. The service runs in the Microsoft Azure cloud and includes a fully automated deployment process.

“The rapid growth in Teams, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has created over 100 million trained Teams daily active users,” Zweig said. “CIOs and IT managers are looking for ways to leverage that change to improve their staff’s engagement, internally and externally. At the same time, they are looking for ways to reduce their expenses going forward. Many see Teams calling via Direct Routing as a way to do both.”

In the coming months, Ribbon will announce additional service offerings for its partners, he said.

“We are pleased to expand our agreement with Ribbon through the Ribbon Connect solution, which provides new opportunities for our extensive Microsoft and Teams-focused customer base,” said T.J. Trojan, Synnex‘s senior vice president of product management for North America.