Scaling Microsoft Teams Phone and Teams Rooms at BAE Systems with Andrew Wigmore

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Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners and UC/AV leads planning large-scale Skype for Business or PBX migrations to Teams Phone, running Teams Rooms estates through managed partners, or handling cloud adoption in regulated, export-controlled or defence environments.

Guest: Andrew Wigmore — Teams Product Owner, BAE Systems

Andrew Wigmore is Teams Product Owner at defence contractor BAE Systems, where he has spent almost 40 years, moving from flight control software for Typhoon to owning all things Teams. He talks through migrating 45,000 phone numbers from Skype for Business in a single Friday morning, running Operator Connect across 11 countries, and managing 180 Teams Rooms in an organisation that historically avoided the cloud.

Many thanks to Ribbon, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

• BAE Systems runs 65,000 E5 licences with around 41,000 users active in Teams in any seven-day window, generating roughly a third of a billion Teams audio minutes a year — of which only about 9 million are PSTN minutes, showing how little of the traffic touches telephony carriers. ▶ 10:27
• The Skype for Business to Teams pilot was 3,500 users — the whole shared services IT organisation — on the principle of doing it to yourself first. The bulk of the business was in Teams by 20 January after the Christmas break. ▶ 9:54
• 45,000 numbers were cut over in a single Friday morning: numbers were first ported from Vodafone to Gamma and redirected back to Vodafone, then reassigned into Teams by teams of people running parallel PowerShell scripts, because each number assignment takes about three seconds. Only one ticket was raised all day, and that was a SIP trunk fault Gamma fixed. ▶ 13:32
• Operator Connect was chosen because there is no compliance recording requirement and the contact centre already sits in AWS — the price was right and someone else owns the infrastructure. Telephony now runs in 11 countries; the Middle East remains the hard gap, with Saudi Arabia available but very expensive, and Wigmore is waiting for demand to bring prices down. ▶ 11:30
• The old Poly HDX estate hit end of support just as lockdown began, which made room replacement easier — empty rooms meant engineers could strip and rebuild without interference. A coincidental VPN infrastructure upgrade already purchased let remote capacity jump from 4,000 to 40,000 users, and Skype hit a billion minutes between June 2020 and June 2021. ▶ 15:05
• Moving from on-prem to cloud forced a policy rethink at a defence company: export control means knowing exactly where the data sits, and sharing a document can be an export to the US if that is where the server is — this needed education rather than retraining. ▶ 18:12
• Windows-based Teams Rooms broke the old change-control model — previously one firmware push to all HDX units on a Friday afternoon, finished by 7pm; now updates land continuously and can't be held back. A standard change now covers Teams app and Windows updates, but the partner has seen Teams Admin Center push firmware such as 9.3.1 after only a week in test. ▶ 21:19
• Across a full year Teams generated only 10 genuine tickets attributable to Teams itself (excluding network outages) — about one ticket per 10 users for the entire year — and two thirds of those resolved as user training, with much of the rest licensing-related, such as users returning from maternity leave to find their number recycled back into the pool. ▶ 30:59
• A 24/7 global footprint (Australia, Canada, US, Malaysia, Saudi) means Sunday updates are no longer possible and a Sunday–Thursday working week has to be supported; extending support from 7am–7pm UK to overnight and weekends takes a contact centre from roughly three people to eight, so BAE still runs 7am–7pm with on-call for Sev-1 and Sev-2. ▶ 28:57

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

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