From Microsoft to SOFTEL: Aaron Steele's Teams Journey

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Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners and voice specialists working on Teams Phone migrations, partners and MSPs serving SMB and mid-market customers, telco product teams building Operator Connect propositions, and AV/broadcast engineers using NDI with Teams.

Guest: Aaron Steele — UC Practice Lead, SOFTEL

Aaron Steele, UC Practice Lead at SOFTEL, spent 13 years at Microsoft across MCS, the CXP/CAPE quality programmes and the Teams product group before moving into the partner world. He covers the origins of the call quality dashboard and QER process, the NDI-based Teams builds behind the NBA bubble games, and why Teams Phone remains hard work for SMB and mid-market customers and the telcos serving them.

Many thanks to Neat, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

• The Call Quality Dashboard began life as a machine under an engineer's desk in Microsoft's Chicago office, built to support Accenture's quality experience review process — the QER methodology and QoE Power BI reports grew out of that single customer engagement. ▶ 6:09
• For the NBA bubble, VMware machines ran the Teams client in Orlando and NDI extracted remote attendees onto ten LED panels (roughly 9ft x 30ft each) per arena; camera feeds went to Secaucus, New Jersey, where a second set of meeting-joined machines injected the broadcast back into the same Teams meetings. Measured screen-to-eye-to-screen latency was two seconds. ▶ 10:43
• NDI planning rule of thumb: one uncompressed 1080p stream is around 80Mbit between switches, so stop designing on 100-base and start at 2.5 or 10 gig — and keep it on switches, not routers, which don't cope with the bandwidth. ▶ 13:50
• The same Teams-plus-NDI pattern was reused for South American tennis tournaments, golf bodies, the Aston Martin F1 team, Christie's auctions and a Prada runway show during the pandemic. ▶ 14:52
• The core SMB blocker for Teams Phone is admin surface sprawl — Teams Admin Center's many sections plus Exchange, Intune, the Rooms Pro portal, the M365 portal and Entra/Azure — versus the single self-service portal or help desk ticket these customers are used to from their phone provider. ▶ 17:26
• Telcos such as AT&T aren't actively selling Teams into SMB because the barrier to entry is too high and they lack the skilled people; the opportunity for MSPs and operators is multi-tenant tooling, extended RBAC beyond the native Microsoft controls, site-based delegation and DID management, plus automated discovery of the legacy PBX during migration assessment. ▶ 20:30
• Common migration sources are Cisco, Mitel, Avaya and NEC — NEC volumes are rising because of its exit from the phone system market and the hard end-of-life dates given to recent buyers — alongside UCaaS-to-UCaaS moves from 8x8 and Zoom after hasty pandemic purchases. ▶ 23:06
• Operator Connect is the practical SMB enabler: providers like Lumen, Granite and Bandwidth can light numbers up directly in the tenant so admins never touch voice routing policies or DID imports. ▶ 24:07
• Emergency calling is a real SMB risk area — updating the LIS when a subnet changes means deleting and re-creating data, which a help-desk-level IT generalist in a 50-person firm is unlikely to keep on top of. ▶ 28:12
• SOFTEL's AI position is assistive not substitutive: in contact centres, give first-line agents real-time answers from the knowledge base to raise first-level ticket closure (rather than just ticket handoff) and add live fraud/phishing detection on calls. ▶ 29:13

Insights summarised by AI from the episode transcript, reviewed by the Empowering.Cloud team.

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