Teams Insider

Microsoft Teams and Teams Phone in 2025 with Metrigy's Irwin Lazar

Irwin Lazar, President and Principal Analyst at Metrigy, shares buyer-side research data on hybrid work policies, practical generative AI adoption and the Teams Phone PSTN mix. He and Tom Arbuthnot dig into licensing pressure post-unbundling, why large enterprises still favour Direct Routing, and th

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Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners, UC architects and telephony leads planning 2025 Teams Phone PSTN strategy, Copilot licensing decisions or hybrid-work policy, plus channel and carrier teams tracking competitive dynamics.

Guest: Irwin Lazar — President and Principal Analyst, Metrigy

Many thanks to AVI-SPL, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

Metrigy's November UCC study frames three themes for 2025 beyond AI: hybrid work and how workspaces/devices evolve, moving generative AI from hype to measurable deployments (with governance, security and user training as success factors), and Teams maturing from meetings and messaging into a credible cloud voice platform. ▶ 2:03
Improved enterprise search — finding information across meetings, email, chat, documents and business apps — ranks as the top AI use case in Metrigy's data; meeting summaries, transcripts and action-item capture have already become table stakes across calling, meetings and contact centre. ▶ 4:37
Of best-of-breed shops running Cisco, Microsoft and Zoom side by side, roughly a quarter said AI was pushing them to consolidate onto a single collaboration vendor for data accessibility, with another 40% actively evaluating it. ▶ 8:11
Being a Microsoft shop does not guarantee Copilot: Lazar moderated a session with a global insurance company that had standardised on OpenAI as its enterprise AI engine and was working out how to get its Microsoft data into it — expect more pressure for open data-sharing ecosystems. ▶ 8:44
About 24% of Microsoft customers surveyed said they will at least do due diligence on alternatives at licence renewal following the EU-driven Teams unbundling — not to leave, but to create pricing leverage with their Microsoft rep. ▶ 9:45
Around a quarter of Teams messaging/meetings shops use a third-party UCaaS provider for PSTN, driven by outage risk concentration and contact centre gaps; fewer than 10% of Teams Phone users in the last study were on Operator Connect, with large enterprises still preferring Direct Routing to keep multi-carrier relationships, number control and Contact Centre integration. ▶ 13:18
About 40% of companies are deploying Teams Phone Mobile in some fashion, but almost always at small scale; TPM has been priced at roughly $4–8 per user per month versus $2–3 for Direct Routing, so AT&T not charging extra on business plans could reset the market — alongside dual-SIM support arriving. ▶ 17:54
On Teams Phone Mobile, a 911/112 call is handed off to the mobile carrier rather than Teams, which arguably breaks Kari's Law and Ray Baum's Act compliance since those only apply to the enterprise phone system — untested in court so far. ▶ 19:57
Just over half of companies require at least part-time office attendance (about a third full-time, the rest roughly three days a week), but plans are in flux: around 30% say they will allow more remote work next year, and Metrigy found no correlation between company success and forced return to office. ▶ 23:29