SBC Emerging Services (for Enterprise Teams Users)

Don’t think Session Border Control as just a UC play. Evidence is mounting it’s also a catalyst for valuable new services clients need–and which will boost your revenue

A client of ours provides a complete platform for wholesale Voice and video session-based transit. With end-to-end visibility, the company offers trusted, carrier-grade, real-time communications, on a global basis. And what’s interesting about this engagement is that all this is offered as a fully managed service that both solves multiple enterprise challenges while securing a growing, value-added service revenue stream for the provider. How: by use of SBC, Session Border Controller, tech and the Enghouse revenue management platform.

For sure, SBCs are well-established in playing a key role in enabling access to remote UC services and platforms, to name one key use case. But several trends are coming together that are making its capabilities of more and more interest to enterprises—and therefore, organisations that support them with telecom and connectivity services… or who would like to offer them more value.

Building corporate bridges to Teams

Just one example: Microsoft Teams. As a service provider, provision of Teams breakout now goes hand-in-hand with the opportunity to deliver the SBC as a service to all your enterprise clients. Let’s explain why: during the pandemic, the knowledge worker world, as well as the world’s school children, of course, started to live and work online through videoconferencing tools, with this solution in the lead.

Only formally launched as the successor to Skype for Business in Summer 2017, the number of daily active users of Microsoft Teams has almost doubled in the past year, increasing from 75 million users in April 2020 to 145 million as of April 2021; in March 2021, the vendor claimed Teams users placed over 650 million calls in October, up 11x from March 2020.

But Teams is an island. Microsoft has gone a long way towards enabling breakout to landlines and cell phones outside the company network, enabling easy interconnection between the corporate Teams and the outside world – something busy CIOs are happy to pay for, as part of calling plans and so on. Such capability has become increasingly important as more flexible and remote workstyles have become standard. So, while many enterprise users are able to access Teams through their standard clients, they may also need to be reached via fixed and mobile devices and thus the ability to break out to PSTN/PLMN numbers from Teams is now fundamental. While Microsoft offers calling plans, carriers and service providers have the opportunity to join this game – but they must deploy approved SBCs to do so.

That doesn’t just apply to classical enterprise functions, of course. Call centres have also gone through the same transition. In that context, many agents and advisors need to direct calls to personal devices as part of backup and resilience measures now they are working either temporarily or on a part-time basis at home. For sure, they might have business Teams accounts–but to ensure continuity of service, a host of new termination points need to be available for call handling. So, again, breakout to PSTN and PLMN lines has become critical, for large numbers of the workforce.

All of these factors point to the need to be able to manage Teams breakout effectively and efficiently, for which an SBC is a prerequisite. Not only that, to ensure compatibility with Teams, the SBC needs to be Microsoft-certified (as the Enghouse solution is). Actually, that’s just one reason to look at SBCs again. It turns out they actually meet a wide range of use cases that will swell demand and create new revenue opportunities for service providers.

To help, we’ve produced a new resource from Enghouse, Session Border Control as a Service for B2B customers: a brief overview for service providers. In it, we’ve pulled together the reasons why setting up what we might call an ‘SBC-as-a-Service’ business stream makes a lot of sense right now.

A compelling proposition to customers in the foreseeable future

As the full Session Border Control as a Service study shows, that’s because so-called Teams Direct Routing is just one nice bit of capability an enterprise might be looking for. Another of the business cases emerging that SBCs slot perfectly into is the move away from ISDN to SIP trunking. Introduced in the 1980s, Integrated Services Digital Networks were for a long time the ideal way for a business to handle end-to-end, simultaneous voice and data on a single link and network: at one time, 29% of all business lines in Germany were ISDN. Now, as tech advances, BT has confirmed it will switch off the remaining millions of UK ISDN lines in 2025, and Verizon stopped installing it in the US in 2013. many other countries are following its lead. As a result, customers are looking more and more into upgrading to Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based comms instead, which almost by definition brings along with it the SBC.