Tony at NWN Explains How They Deliver Multi-Platform UCaaS at Scale with NUWAVE iPILOT

Tony McQueen, VP of UC & Collaboration, at NWN

Executive Summary

NWN manages nearly 200,000 telephony seats across Microsoft Teams, Zoom Phone, and Cisco Webex from a single carrier platform. By partnering with NUWAVE iPILOT instead of building their own carrier infrastructure, they achieved global scale in 25+ countries while maintaining the flexibility to port numbers independently from UC platform migrations.

When COVID hit in 2020, demand for cloud telephony exploded overnight. Everyone needed UC platforms immediately, globally, at scale.

For NWN, the question wasn't whether to deliver cloud telephony—it was how to support multiple UCaaS platforms simultaneously without building carrier infrastructure in dozens of countries.

Tony McQueen, VP of UC & Collaboration at NWN shares their five-year journey and the architectural decisions that made multi-platform delivery work at scale and explains how his team now delivers nearly 200,000 seats across Microsoft Teams, Zoom Phone, and Cisco Webex using NUWAVE iPILOT as their carrier management platform.

NWN is the leading AI-powered technology solutions provider for North America's most innovative public and private organisations. For more than 30 years, NWN has helped deliver technology modernisation programs with its Intelligent Workplace, Customer Experience (CX), Managed Devices, Cybersecurity and Public Safety, Connectivity, and Intelligent Cloud solutions. NWN has a team of over 1,000+ experts.

Thanks to Tony for sharing his insights and operational experience for this post. Thanks also to NUWAVE Communications, who are an Empowering.Cloud community supporter, which enables us to provide the newsletter, podcast, briefings, research and events free to access to the community.

Build or Buy: The 2019 Decision Point

In late 2019, NWN already saw the UCaaS market accelerating. Then COVID-19 arrived.

Suddenly, every organisation needed cloud telephony immediately. The need for NWN to deliver at scale, globally, across multiple platforms came sharply into focus.

Tony explains the decision: "We were evaluating: do we want to build something or buy something we can go to market quickly with? Our decision was how to get to market fast and on a global scale."

Building your own carrier infrastructure is a multi-year commitment. In the United States and Canada alone, you're navigating FCC regulations. Global services mean telecom regulations in dozens of countries, ongoing platform maintenance, security patching, and scaling infrastructure as demand grows.

The timeline didn't match market reality. Customers needed solutions in months, not years.

Why NUWAVE iPILOT? Multi-Platform Support from Day One

NWN evaluated multiple options. The NUWAVE iPILOT platform offered immediate advantages that aligned with their requirements.

The platform supported multiple UCaaS providers—Teams, Zoom, and Webex—from a single infrastructure. Multi-UCaaS wasn't just a nice-to-have. It was baseline.

It was also proven technology rather than a greenfield development risk.

NUWAVE iPILOT is a cloud platform designed specifically for managing unified communications across multiple providers. It provides a single management interface for Microsoft Teams (via Operator Connect and Direct Routing), Zoom Phone, and Cisco Webex Calling. The platform handles the carrier-grade infrastructure, regulatory compliance, and global connectivity that would otherwise require years of investment to build.

"We leverage the architecture and platform, but we don't rely on them. We do our own deployments, we spin up customers, we handle international porting."
— Tony McQueen, NWN

NWN maintained operational control while gaining carrier infrastructure. With an Operator Connect tile in the Teams Admin Center and Direct Routing as a Service capability, they achieved global reach—active in 25+ countries today.

Operating at 200,000 Seats: What Actually Works

NWN's differentiator is telephony expertise, not infrastructure. The team brought deep knowledge from Avaya, Cisco, and legacy voice integrator backgrounds. iPILOT provides the carrier fabric. NWN handles implementation, technical support, and customer management.

The platform consolidation enabled something that separate carrier relationships couldn't: cross-training.

"We cross-trained all those engineers. Teams Phone isn't overly complicated if you have a telephony background. Now the entire team is cross-trained. You avoid cross-team finger pointing or slow handovers. One engineer can say, 'I know exactly what Cisco's doing here, here's how we replicated it in Teams.'"
— Tony McQueen, NWN

One carrier platform to learn. Three UCaaS platforms to support.

Engineering scales more efficiently than maintaining platform-specific specialists for each technology stack.

The Daily Partnership That Makes Scale Possible

Tony describes his working relationship with NUWAVE: "I have Mark [Bunnell, NUWAVE COO] pinned in my Teams client. We probably chat every day. 'Can you guys support this?' 'Yeah, no problem.' Here are things we want to see in iPILOT—generally happens pretty quickly."

Customer requirements emerge fast in this market. A platform partner who responds in months rather than days creates bottlenecks that kill deals.

NWN's daily communication channel with NUWAVE enables rapid problem-solving and feature requests, which are implemented rather than queued indefinitely.

Real Customer Scenarios: Where Platform Architecture Matters

Case Study 1: Port 6,000 DIDs Without Migrating UC Platforms

A customer's Verizon contract was expiring in 45 days. They operated 5,000 to 6,000 DIDs serving 4,000 users on an Avaya system.

They needed to exit Verizon but weren't ready to migrate to Teams yet.

The traditional approach creates a coordination nightmare. Port numbers from Verizon and migrate to Teams in a 45-day window. Everything succeeds together or fails together. Timeline pressure, technical risk, and user impact all compound.

NWN's approach with iPILOT separated the concerns:

Port all numbers to iPILOT within the 45-day contract window.
Provision a SIP trunk from iPILOT to the customer's on-premises Avaya SBC.
Traffic flows from PSTN through iPILOT, across the SIP trunk, to Avaya.
The customer's existing phone system continues operating.

The customer then migrated to Teams at their own pace—no external deadline pressure. When migration was completed, NWN disabled the SIP trunk and routed calls directly to Teams.

No second porting event. No coordination windows. No number risk during migration.

This pattern separates telephony risk from platform migration risk. Customers control their migration timeline independent of carrier contract constraints.

Case Study 2: Adapt to Changing Requirements Without Re-Porting

A customer deployed a Genesys or Five9 contact center integrated with Microsoft Teams. Microsoft subsequently improved native call queue capabilities and lowered the cost barrier for basic contact center scenarios.

The customer wanted to move some queues from the CCaaS platform to Teams native to reduce per-seat costs.

The traditional problem: numbers are provisioned to the CCaaS provider. Moving functionality to Teams native means porting numbers—with all the coordination windows, risk assessment, and potential service disruption that porting entails.

"We can just say stop routing these DIDs to Zoom, move them to Operator Connect, push them to TAC (Teams Admin Center), and we're done. You don't have to worry about porting windows."
— Tony McQueen, NWN

A configuration change replaces a porting event.

If the customer decides native capabilities don't meet requirements, reversing the decision is equally straightforward. Business requirements change. Telephony architecture shouldn't create friction when adapting to those changes.

When Custom Infrastructure Still Makes Sense

A shared platform—even a robust one like iPILOT—can't meet every specialised/dedicated customer requirement.

NWN maintains its own data center infrastructure for some large customers. They can establish SIP connectivity to iPILOT when specific capabilities make sense, but the core service runs on dedicated infrastructure with custom SLAs.

The lesson: platform partnerships succeed when they accommodate both models. NWN delivers approximately 95% of their customer base through iPILOT. The remaining 5% with specialised requirements don't force a choice between platform efficiency and high-touch custom solutions. Both can coexist.

Why Multi-UCaaS Support Became Non-Negotiable

Service providers can't assume customers will standardise on one UCaaS platform. NWN sees several drivers of platform diversity in their customer base.

M&A activity drives platform diversity. Companies acquire organisations on different platforms. Integration timelines stretch over years, not months. During that period, both platforms need support.

Vendor pricing changes trigger platform migrations. Cisco raised Flex agreement pricing by 30% in 2024. Tony describes the impact: "This year's been very busy. A lot of it's been 'we're a Cisco customer; we don't want to renew Flex. Can you migrate 10,000 users in two months?

The numbers reflect these patterns. Approximately 35% of NWN's customers migrated from legacy Cisco to Teams. Another 30% came from Avaya to Teams. The remaining 35% represents other platforms or net new deployments.

Supporting three UCaaS platforms on a single carrier platform created operational efficiency. Cross-training became possible in ways it wouldn't with separate carrier relationships for each platform.

The Managed Services Layer: 45% Attach Rate

Approximately 45% of NWN's customers add managed services on top of carrier services. That's notably high for cloud offerings, where customers often assume "managed" is included in the base service.

Tony explains the value proposition: "We use Microsoft APIs, ingest all that data into our tooling. Instead of reactive support, we monitor based on Geo IP locations. We can say 'this location's health index dropped from 90% to 65%, are you having a network issue?'"

Proactive monitoring replaces reactive troubleshooting.

The commercial discussion becomes straightforward: "If you did this on your own, how many FTEs do you need and what's their fully loaded cost?" For a 10,000-user organisation, the math typically favours managed services.

What to Look for When Evaluating Platform Partners

If you're a service provider considering a similar architecture decision, here's what NWN's experience suggests matters most:

Proven uptime history matters more than marketing claims. NUWAVE markets more than 10 years without customer-facing outages. Ask for a track record, not just assurances.

Multi-platform certifications reflect breadth. Not just Microsoft Teams. Zoom Phone and Cisco Webex Calling support demonstrate that the platform can actually meet your customers' requirements, not just the majority use case.

Responsive partnership determines operational success. Can you reach someone daily when issues emerge? Do feature requests get implemented, or are they acknowledged and ignored? Tony's daily communication with NUWAVE isn't a luxury—it's a necessity at scale.

Flexible connectivity options meet diverse scenarios. Operator Connect for straightforward deployments. Direct Routing as a Service for global reach. SIP trunking support for legacy integration and specialised requirements. Customers need different approaches for different situations.

Speed to market typically trumps full infrastructure control. Building carrier infrastructure takes years. Market windows don't wait. You need global reach without constructing carrier infrastructure in dozens of countries, each with unique regulatory requirements.

Five Years Later: The Decision Proven at Scale

Tony's team made their platform decision in 2019-2020. Five years later, approaching 200,000 seats across multiple UCaaS platforms, the decision has proven sound.

Not because platform partnerships eliminate all challenges, but because they solved the actual problem: delivering secure, efficient, multi-platform UCaaS connectivity at scale without building global carrier infrastructure from scratch.

Service providers face a market reality that single-platform strategies can't address. Customers need multi-platform support. M&A creates mixed environments that persist for years. Vendor pricing changes trigger migrations that weren't in three-year plans. Different departments have legitimately different requirements.

Single-platform standardisation is the exception, not the rule.

The telephony layer doesn't need to compound that complexity. Separating carrier services from UC platforms—using something like iPILOT as the connectivity fabric—lets service providers focus on what creates customer value: implementing solutions, providing support, and managing ongoing operations.

The build-versus-buy decision remains strategic for every service provider. NWN's experience suggests that for organisations prioritising speed to market, global reach, and multi-platform support, platform partnerships provide a viable path to scale.

Evaluating a similar architecture decision? Connect with the NUWAVE team to discuss multi-platform carrier infrastructure, or reach out if you'd like to discuss NWN's operational experience with this approach.

About NUWAVE iPILOT
NUWAVE Communications provides carrier-grade infrastructure and the iPILOT platform for unified communications management across Microsoft Teams, Zoom Phone, and Cisco Webex. The iPILOT platform offers single-pane-of-glass management, automated provisioning, and multi-platform lifecycle management. Learn more at nuwave.com.

About NWN
NWN delivers AI-powered technology solutionsn including Intelligent Workplace, Customer Experience, Managed Devices, Cybersecurity, Connectivity, and Intelligent Cloud services for North America's public and private sector organisations. Learn more at nwn.ai.

About Empowering.Cloud
Empowering.Cloud unlocks the transformative potential of Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 for industry professionals through community and research. We provide expert briefings, research, newsletters, podcasts, and events to help organizations maximize their Microsoft 365 investments. Learn more at empowering.cloud.