The Path from PBX to Microsoft Teams Phone with Tom Garland, Global Service Delivery Manager

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Who should listen: M365 service owners and UC architects planning a PBX or Skype for Business migration to Teams Phone at global scale, particularly anyone weighing direct routing against Operator Connect, reducing an SBC estate, or dealing with India and APAC regulatory constraints and compliance call recording.

Guest: Tom Garland — Global Service Delivery Manager, Willis Towers Watson (WTW)

Tom Garland runs voice operations for Willis Towers Watson, a 120-country insurance and advisory business with just under 30,000 Teams Enterprise Voice users. He walks through nine years of migration from legacy PBX and Skype for Business to Teams Phone, the collapse of a 37-SBC direct routing estate into Operator Connect, and the reality of getting Operator Connect live in India.

Many thanks to Pure IP, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

• WTW has just under 30,000 Enterprise Voice users — around 55% of the organisation — across more than 120 countries, and is now working through the hardest remaining locations after clearing the easy ones. ▶ 2:01
• The SBC estate is being cut from around 37 to roughly 19 during the year, with the survivors kept only for local breakouts where regulation or provider availability blocks cloud routing: UAE, China and parts of LATAM. ▶ 5:35
• The move from direct routing to Operator Connect was driven by the wider network strategy — dropping MPLS in favour of direct internet access and closing the data centres that housed the SBCs — not by telephony features alone. ▶ 6:37
• Decommissioning centralised SBC pools is gated by everything hanging off them: legacy AV devices with direct connections, lift phones, security phones and a remaining Cisco CUCM estate all need remediation before the EMEA pools can close mid-year. ▶ 4:34
• Operator Connect will not do the number translations an SBC can, so complex legacy PBX routing had to be rebuilt with auto attendants and call queues — Garland's advice is to check Operator Connect can meet the requirement before promising it, or accept you are locked into owning and operationalising SBC config. ▶ 7:07
• Meeting rooms moved to BYOD with HP Poly Studio bars and a dock, deliberately dropping touch panels and table-centre consoles to cut cost and complexity; users plug in over USB-C, which removed the 'my meeting hasn't started' and QR-code support queries. ▶ 10:14
• Compliance recording moved from Redbox on Skype for Business — which recorded everything and produced huge data dumps — to Numonix Cloud in the UK, Germany, Australia, Asia Pac and Israel, using multiple profiles keyed on meeting titles, keywords and specific call queues (inbound and dial-out) so peer-to-peer and internal meetings are excluded. Teams transcription is off by default and recording is disabled entirely in Germany. ▶ 12:48
• Operator Connect in India took months of iterations with Microsoft and the operator; the first vendor wanted dedicated MPLS trunks, which conflicted with the network model and added cost. One Indian office is fixed-location only (Teams calling works solely in the office), while Mumbai has full mobile Operator Connect — and common area devices there have to be reversed from mobile to fixed. The Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam are next. ▶ 16:27

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

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