Credit Dave Michels for identifying the biggest story of 2024 as it was unfolding: Microsoft Teams' growing dominance in the unified communications and collaboration space. As he wrote in "UCaaS is a Teams Sport. Who’s Really Winning?"
Teams has become dominant in enterprise communications and collaboration. According to Gartner’s Magic Quandrant framing, Teams is the dominant market leader in UCaaS. According to the network advisory firm the Cavell Group, approximately 20% of the world’s UCaaS users are using Teams with telephony-enabled licenses, while Cisco Webex has 12% and Zoom has 7% (6 Million users).
Michels reiterated the three modalities for unified communication --meetings, messaging and telephony -- and pointed out that Microsoft Teams had the first two baked into the platform on launch and its telephony customer growth is outpacing the rest of the market. Microsoft also benefits tremendously from bundling other apps and workflows into its communications/collaboration platform and from partnerships that expand its reach among would-be competitors.
A look through our No Jitter Rolls through 2024 backs this up. Among Microsoft's moves to expand in the communications and collaboration space this year:
January 2024
Microsoft makes Copilot broadly available to small businesses with Microsoft 365 Business Premium and Business Standard licenses. They also debuted a standalone Copilot mobile app for Android and iOS.
Moving from handheld hardware to conference room set-up, MAXHUB and Nureva debuted two plug-and-play, Microsoft Teams Rooms certified conferencing bundles.
February 2024
Cisco, Microsoft and Samsung launched an integrated video collaboration solutions for Cisco Room Series. IT admins can manage the solution in the Microsoft Teams Admin Center and Cisco Control Hub provides insights into the meeting room.
March 2024
Microsoft unveiled Teams Phone for Frontline Workers, with auto-attendants, call queues, and call delegation, electronic health record application integration, call recording, and transcription, and CRM system integration and call park. Groups of users can also make and receive calls with a shared phone number and calling plan.
SIPPIO announced an expansion of its Microsoft Teams Phone service at the Channel Partners Expo. The service now offers advanced reporting, call recording, AI-driven insights, and integrated messaging.
In addition, SIPPIO's partnership with Enreach, a European leader in converged contact solutions, expanded Enreach's Voice for Microsoft Teams features to customers in 82 countries.
May 2024
Microsoft Places, a location planning and workspace management tool, is announced. In the second half of 2024, customers with a qualifying Microsoft 365 subscription are able to use Places in Teams (as well as other M365 apps) to set up personal working schedules and locales, share schedules and locations, and book in-person locations via Microsoft Copilot.
June 2024
SIPPIO CX for Microsoft Teams is released for general availability. The suite of services allows organizations to monitor and analyze customer engagement in Microsoft Teams. The suite uses SIPPIO Reporting, SIPPIO Recording, and SIPPIO Recording + AI to enhance customer experience and ensure compliance within Microsoft Teams.
June 2024 - July 2024
Microsoft Dynamic 365 Contact Center, a Copilot-first Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution, is launched into general availability. As Sheila McGee-Smith wrote of the standalone contact center service in June 2024:
Don’t think of Dynamic 365 Contact Center as a CCaaS for smaller contact centers today that may scale over time. One of the key messages of the briefing was that the solution is ready for scale today. At general availability July 1st, it will be available in over 240 countries and regions, supporting up to 30 languages.
Also supporting the message of scalability, Microsoft identified 17 systems integrators that have already been onboarded to support Dynamics 365 Contact Center, including KPMG, Capgemini, Accenture, and EY. AWS used a similar approach when it launched Amazon Connect in 2017 – a strategy that certainly worked well to kickstart its product into the market.
At launch, Dynamics 365 Contact Center will also work with Salesforce or custom-built CRMs. Over time, support will be extended to include other CRMs and case management solutions, e.g., Zendesk and ServiceNow.
October 2024
Calabrio Workforce Management is now interoperable with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center, so Dynamic 365 customers will now be able to use Calabrio WFM to use self-service capabilities and AI-driven insights to optimize call center operations.
November 2024
ServiceNow and Microsoft have combined Microsoft Copilot with ServiceNow’s AI agents to help modernize front-office business processes.
Snowflake and Microsoft connected the Snowflake Power Platform with the Microsoft Power Platform, fostering bidirectional access between Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud and Dataverse, an enterprise data platform for agents.
Microsoft announces a slew of AI agents in Teams, including: Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Chat, an AI agent that can retrieve benefits and payroll information, start a leave of absence, request a new laptop with IT and even get assistance for Microsoft 365 products and services; an AI facilitator agent that takes real-time notes in meetings and provides "important" information summaries in chats; and an interpreter agent that translates in Team meetings in up to nine languages.
December 2024
Five9 released a Microsoft Teams UC Integration, fostering a bi-directional presence to allow agents to find and communicate with back-office experts and accelerate resolutions for customer requests.
As you can see on reviewing the year in Teams -- it expanded its capabilities and partnerships in everything from mobile devices to conference rooms, collaborative spaces to different types of contact centers. There are a lot of companies with big stories for 2024, such as Salesforce going all-in on AI with Agentforce, Five9's realignment so it can offer enterprise customers a wider array of expertise in inbound and outbound communications to deliver personalized, proactive customer experiences across marketing, sales, and service, or Cisco's ongoing commitments to integrating sustainability practices and AI across its product portfolio.
However, Michels has identified why the Teams story matters for this year: the company has become so dominant across so many facets of communication and collaboration technologies, on a global scale. How this dominance will shape the UCaaS market -- or the ever-evolving CX market -- is only beginning to be seen.
