Cruyff once said: “Quality without results is pointless. Results without quality is boring.” It’s a lesson I’ve applied to business.

BT prides itself on the excellence of its managed services. We work with partners such as Microsoft to offer services that not only deliver the results customers expect but give quality experiences to ensure they are well used and easily adopted across their organisation.  

Around 18 months ago, we renewed and deepened our strategic partnership with Microsoft. Together, we committed to ensuring Microsoft solutions work “best on BT” delivering both quality and results. Here’s an update on our successes so far:

• Innovation

We’re innovating not only in the development of products and services, but in a digital experience. We have a digital quotation journey for Operator Connect and five solutions now available on Microsoft’s commercial Marketplace. On AppSource, we have: Operator Connect for Microsoft Teams with BT; Microsoft Teams Voice with BT; BT Virtual Events for Microsoft Teams Live Events.

And on Azure Marketplace we have: Managed Microsoft Sentinel and Extended Detection and Response (XDR) with BT; and 5G Private Network with Microsoft Azure Multi Edge Computing (MEC).

• Enterprise voice

We said we were migrating our Global Managed Voice platform to run on Microsoft Azure as part of Microsoft’s Azure for Operators programme. This is now live.

We’re offering our Global Managed Voice services directly through Microsoft Teams. And we’ll be launching Microsoft Teams Phone Mobile too.

• Cyber security

We’ve expanded our security portfolio from Managed Sentinel (Cloud SIEM) to include Microsoft Defender and XDR.  We've enabled Microsoft Sentinel onto the UK Government G-Cloud framework for Public Sector. We’re seeing an increasing number of customers buying Microsoft security plus other Microsoft services from BT in a true multi-cloud approach. 

• Industry-focused services

We’re working with Microsoft to develop a new private 5G and edge technology service designed to unlock safety, sustainability, productivity and security for a range of UK industries, from transport and logistics to manufacturing. It will bring together private mobile networks from BT with Microsoft’s Azure private multi-edge computing, which includes Azure Private 5G Core, cloud-managed edge computing and an ecosystem of application partners in robotics, video analytics and IoT.

• Consumer

Over in our Consumer division across both our EE and BT brands, we’ve been highly successful in integrating Microsoft services into a variety of our tariffs and plans. We were the first partner globally to offer M365 as an integrated solution and the integration of Game Pass Ultimate has made us the go-to fixed and mobile network for Xbox and gaming in the UK.

When I last met Omar Abbosh, president of Industry Solutions at Microsoft, he said the world is still at an early stage in its digital journey. “Partnerships are key to progress. Our Microsoft-BT partnership is built on a culture of teamwork, innovation and co-creation. By delivering high-quality digital services to end-users, we motivate customers to adopt digital technology to drive market impact and results,” he said.  

You can find out more about our Group-wide partnership with Microsoft at Mobile World Congress. We’ll have a pod on Microsoft’s stand (Hall 3, Booth #3H30) where you’ll be able to see what we’ve been delivering. This will also feature EE’s successful integration of Microsoft capabilities into market-leading services for XBox, Game Pass Ultimate and Microsoft 365. 

At BT, we aim to be the world’s most trusted connector of people, devices and machines. To earn trust, we must deliver repeatable, predictable results for our innovative managed services. As Cruyff said: “Winning is just one day, a reputation can last a lifetime.”

Today, we’re marking Microsoft’s announcement of the general availability of Operator Connect for Microsoft Teams with the launch of an entirely new BT-branded global managed voice service.  

It’s at the cutting edge of future voice services innovation. Delivered directly through Teams, it securely integrates telephony, engineered for quality of service, with the very latest in digital collaboration.

For customers, it will provide pace, simplicity and reach, helping them accelerate their digital transformation by enabling new productive, hybrid workstyles built around Teams.

Voice and telephony services have been around for a long time. If you’re a CIO, the chances are you’ve got a mixed bag of voice technologies and services, fixed and mobile, spread across your organisation which may differ from country to country or even site by site. At the same time, your colleagues’ use of Teams has been soaring since the start of the pandemic.

At BT, we’ve seen the number of customers using our managed Teams service almost double in the past year. And according to Microsoft, total calls on Teams surpassed 1 billion in a single month for the first time earlier this year.

Having seen the benefits of digital tools and workstyles, your colleagues now expect to use them to their full potential. They prefer the ergonomics of simply clicking to talk via the Teams app than using a separate phone or voice service. They assume they’re secure and expect a reliable, quality service. And this is as true in the office as at home — and on the move.

Operator Connect for Microsoft Teams with BT offers a simple and secure way of calling in Teams via BT’s global voice network backed with assured end to end service controls for high quality, low latency voice conversations. It’s an entirely new way for multinational organisations operating in different countries to choose and enable their voice services and it doesn’t matter if you’re an existing BT customer or not.

Ripping up the rule book for an established technology like voice is never easy. When you do, it’s good to have experts on hand — two great enterprise technology, cloud and security brands recognised as leaders in their respective fields. It also helps if your service provider has already invested in a technology platform to remove the complexity of change and offer simple choices.

As BT and Microsoft look forward to delivering Operator Connect for customers across the world, Omar Abbosh, corporate vice president of industry solutions at Microsoft, said: “Operator Connect with BT calling plans is the first step in the realisation of our new strategic partnership with BT and meeting the needs and demands of today’s customers.”