Teams Phone Mobile, a perspective from Harold Wortman, Senior Product Manager, Verizon

Harold Wortman, Senior Product Manager - Mobile Unified Communications at Verizon, discusses the journey of deploying Teams phone mobile, feature development and mobile as a default mode of communication,

• Teams Phone Mobile offers a seamless mobile communication experience within the Teams platform
• Significant, with interest from small to medium-sized businesses, enterprises, and government organizations
• Widespread adoption may take time due to the complexity of integrating with different mobile operators
• Security and compliance are important considerations for organizations, and Teams Phone Mobile can help

Thanks to Ribbon, this episode's sponsor, for their continued support of the community.

Transcript

Harold Wortman: There are a lot of larger companies that have a huge footprint here and it's going to make more and more sense for them. And that's, that's coming. It really is. It's just, it's a, it's a journey. It's, it's a journey for, and I think, I think five years is a pretty good bar. You know, let's look at this in five years and we, we might, Probably have, you know, 10 times as many users as we have today or more.

Um, maybe 20.

Tom Arbuthnot: Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. This week I have Harold Wortman, who is Senior Product Manager at Verizon. who is responsible for Teams Phone Mobile. He's been right through the whole Teams Phone Mobile project with Verizon. And we talk about the whole project, how Teams Phone Mobile integrates into operators, some of the features, some of the unique features that Verizon have added to Teams Phone Mobile.

And it's a really great deep dive into Teams Phone Mobile, the use cases, and his thoughts on the future of Teams Phone Mobile as well. Thanks very much to Harold for taking the time to join the pod and also many thanks to Ribbon, who are the sponsors of this podcast. Really appreciate their support of everything we're doing with Empowering Cloud.

And with that, on with the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. Excited to get into this one. I had an awesome conversation with Harold a few weeks ago and about Half an hour into our chat, I was like, Oh, we should have recorded this. Uh, so that's what we're going to do. We're going to dive into Teams Phone Mobile.

Harold, do you just want to introduce yourself? 

Harold Wortman: Sure. Uh, my name's Harold Wortman. I'm a senior product manager at Verizon and I manage the Teams Phone Mobile project at Verizon. It's, it's, the product is called Verizon Mobile for Microsoft Teams. We kind of try to make it complicated. So, uh, we have our own brand, but, uh, everyone, everyone has their own brand.

Absolutely. So good to be here. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I know. So, um, you've been right through the entire journey from kind of theoretical project through to deployment. Is that right? 

Harold Wortman: That's right. Yep. So it's been about three years for us since we got started. Uh, pretty close to right at three years. So it was, uh, really about 18 months.

Uh, maybe it was, it was faster than that. Once we start developing and testing, we got it out pretty quickly in roughly nine months. But we had about, uh, we had some pre tests and proof, you know, proofs of, uh, concepts, so to speak, and things of that, nine months prior to that. So it's, it's been an 18 month in the market and 18 month, uh, uh, product development journey.

Tom Arbuthnot: So I really want to get into where it is today and your thoughts on everything else, but let's start at the start of the journey kind of when it was, you know, I guess Microsoft were probably shopping around the option to a few different operators. What was the thinking at that time in terms of. where it fit in your portfolio and the opportunity?

Harold Wortman: Absolutely. So it made a lot of sense because Microsoft Cloud adoption from the phone standpoint obviously has gone off the charts, especially since the pandemic, it kind of, you know, it definitely accelerated the adoption and into Microsoft, especially, I think they had a sweet spot of saying, Hey, we've got the software, it's ready.

You just got to light it up. And, um, and, and a lot of. Uh, businesses chose to do that and so, and, and continue, uh, to do that. It just makes sense. Uh, they have a lot of other services and to have the, the, everything in house from that perspective is, is attractive. So, so from a customer base perspective. you know, Microsoft was sitting there growing, expanding, um, and they're pretty new, you know, you know, as we know from the Skype world and then going into, you know, uh, trying to expand that and bringing it into this phone product and the phone system into Teams.

It's been a journey for Microsoft, but I feel like, you know, after five or six years, they, they're, they kind of got their claws into it. And it started taking off. Um, from our standpoint, uh, a mobile, you know, we are primarily a mobile company. Now, we still get a lot of revenue from our wireline services, of course, globally.

But, you know, most of our revenue, 80%, is mobile. So, it's, it made sense for us to say, hey, this is where the market's going, the trends are this way, you know, this, this is a win win. And, and whenever there's a big win win like that, you know, it, it's pretty easy to, to create a, craft a plan around it. So, so it, it accelerated pretty quickly after that point.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. And this is a non, both a non trivial investment and a non trivial kind of technical thing. I think people don't understand, and maybe you can give us an idea of how, because it's quite a tight integration, how much their work is to do between Microsoft and an operator. 

Harold Wortman: Yeah, absolutely. So, so, Uh, it, it's a huge integration because it, this is the first integration with a third party into our wireless network, into our ir you know, in, you know, into the, the, the networking and routing components of our, of our wireless network.

So you're getting into the brain, so to speak, of, of the wireless world, and it's very different than a a SIP trunking connection. Um, you know, it's just a lot more complex. There's a lot, uh, a lot to it. Um, and everything is there for a reason, and you have to test every component to make sure it's all functioning the way we expect in, in providing the services from a wireless standpoint that we're used to providing within Verizon. So, so it was a, it, it definitely has been a, a, a large effort, uh, from that standpoint. Um, and significant, some significant investment on the Verizon side and on the Microsoft side. We both kind of split that, uh, to make sure that, that we were doing it the right way.

So, so we've each got a stake in it and, um, and we feel good about it. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Yeah, I feel like from a kind of outside perspective, I've worked with telcos for a long time, not so much with mobile providers, but like telco just takes a lot of time. And there's, you know, both some legacies that, and there's some good reason to that, you know, the dependency in the service.

But I think a lot of people, when Teams Phone Mobile was launched, they expected it to come to market a lot quicker than it actually did. Even inside of Microsoft, because Microsoft used to think about it as software. Yeah. They think, I think, think faster than operator Yeah, 

Harold Wortman: absolutely. And The mobile world is very different.

The networks, the networks are a lot more complicated. Uh, you know, SIP trunking, people, for a large part, we've got to figure it out. You know, it's, it's, uh, there's a lot of that out there, a lot of different networks out there, the technologies, um, you know, it's, it's stable and it's mature, um, and we have a lot of security and all the, a lot of things around it.

This is, this is a very new integration, uh, direct. So, so you're. Your Teams number is your cell number. It truly is. The same number. We are, we are processing it through our mobile network. So, so there, there's a lot there, um, you know, that we had to get through and test. And we learned in the first, you know, 18 months of our product journey, you know, what we were missing and we made adjustments.

We can talk through some of that stuff too, if you want to. But, 

Tom Arbuthnot: um. Yeah, I'd love to, I'd love to get into that because you've done some really cool stuff. The Apple Watch stuff and other bits and pieces. So, um, but yeah, how that would be a great place to start actually kind of. Where was it at V1 and kind of what came along?

Harold Wortman: Yeah, absolutely. So our, our goal getting out of the market was to have a stable product, first of all, and that served the very basic use case, which was, hey, we want it to be really easy to turn on. And we want the end user, the customer to have the ability to turn it on and off on demand. So we accomplished that.

It's a feature. It's set up just as a feature you can add to any voice plan. So it's really easy to turn on. You just have to associate your tenant in our, in our self service tools. And, and it's really easy to turn off. It's a feature. You just turn it off and we pull the number out of the tenant. So it's all API driven from that standpoint.

And we're leveraging those operator connect APIs that have been there for some years. that Microsoft kind of transitioned from mobile. So, so that, that's been, you know, that's kind of where we started. Make it easy, make it simple, and be able to add a feature. Uh, make sure it works, make sure it works like we originally expected.

Um, so, um, and, and for a large part it did, but we found problems, right? We found things. That, from a user perspective, of course, when you launch something new, that you didn't, you didn't expect, you didn't think about, and, and, and other things that, um, definitely, uh, you know, we, we planned on, you know, improving as we went along.

So we've, we've kind of plugged a lot of the holes, some of the features, what's interesting about this product. Really interesting is that you get a lot of features on your wireless account by default. Um, and this, this product, you don't want to, we had to think very carefully. What features do we want to keep on the wireless side within our intelligence and our network?

And what features do we, do we want to add to just let Microsoft handle as part of the PBX? So, Um, they're the PBX, so we, we took a guess at that going, you know, when we launched. And we did some testing, but still, we didn't, you know, took some time for us to realize, okay, we gotta rebalance this a little bit and add more features into our network to make sure You're getting the experience that you're expecting from a wireless provider, still.

Not just dialtone, but you're still getting the capabilities that you expect. So 

Tom Arbuthnot: So what's an example of that, like, a feature that you, that Verizon brings to the party? 

Harold Wortman: Well, a lot of the mid call features. are examples of that. So, so from a usability perspective, you expect to do, be able to do, when I say mid call features, I'm talking about three way calling, or even something as simple as call waiting.

Call waiting, three way calling, transferring a call. You expect to be able to do that from the native dialer if you want to. And our original, some of our original assumptions going in were, hey, They can go and they can do all of this through the Teams app on the phone. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, and that's the, that's the Microsoft typical marketing pitch, right?

Isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Escalate to the Teams app and then you take control and do your, because you can visualize it and everything else. But it sounds like, and it makes sense that some of your customers, particularly if they're used to those capabilities and they know their DTMF tones and things. 

Harold Wortman: And why would you want to, yeah, why would you want to have to transfer the call into your Teams app, open your Teams app, transfer the call, then do the function.

It just, of course, didn't make a lot of sense. So, um, so we, we, we came, went back through and we picked out some of those key features, four, five, six of them, and we pulled them back and said, now they're, now they're offered on both sides. So you got them on the native dialer, or you got them, of course, on Microsoft PBX.

That was, that was a bit of learning, uh, of course, that, that, that we had that was, really quick in the first few months. Um, but then, you know, other things come up. You mentioned, you know, the Apple Watch, um, aspect. Uh, we have something called NumberShare that enables that Apple Watch in our network. And so, we quickly found a lot of executives have Apple Watches.

And they want to use their Apple Watch. And does this work with their Apple Watch? Well, if not, call us back when it works. So, um, so we have, we, we, we went through and we, we tested that and got it to work and made adjustments and, uh, and call em back. So, so it's good, you know, yeah, they're, and a lot of those customers are now retesting it and, and getting it back into their, their program because they're interested.

Yeah, they just they want. They want some. Some customers just want specific features. 

Tom Arbuthnot: So it's super useful to understand as well because of people listening to this podcast. There are different operations, different regions and from Microsoft point of view, we presented as. More or less the same thing, but I'm guessing there's going to be difference between operators and how they handle those scenarios.

And now we're going to hit a period of time where there'll be competitive operators in the same markets. Those differentiations are going to start to matter a little bit more, I think. 

Harold Wortman: Absolutely. So, you know, one of the things we've talked, we've talked with Microsoft about is, are you tracking any of this? Microsoft, do you know who offers what and how the special things?

because we at Verizon have done a bunch of things to enhance our network, you know, from a learning perspective and customer perspective, that we absolutely feel confident other providers have not done. In the same way, were done at all. Um, so, and, and they're, I'm sure they're 

Tom Arbuthnot: Sounds, sounds like you're saving me some homework, Harold, to do a research comparison.

Harold Wortman: Well, I would like 

that. I would like to know too. If you want to go to those six or eight providers and do, do a, Do a list. Somebody, from a customer perspective, my, my, um, when I talk to, to customers that are global and they're interested and we have some that, hey, they're, they're going first in Germany and, and, and Italy and, and, um, and, or England, um, and, and they're, they're rolling out there and, and they're doing, having to do individual pilots with every operator because everything's, it just works differently.

Yeah, 

so it is a different product per operator, even though the program from a Microsoft perspective says Teams Phone Mobile. It's not the same when you get every operator now. Um, the basic dial tone should be through that. It's going to be through that operator. Right. But then how it works. 

Tom Arbuthnot: And the Teams side is going to be the same, but it's where you get to the, all those, like you say, mid-call features and, and, uh, Apple watch and other capabilities and also commercially people are treating it differently as well.

So there's that. 

Harold Wortman: Absolutely. And then, and then we, you know, other really important things that we figured out. How do we connect to, to, um, to users? So, so when you get Teams Phone Mobile, Let's say you've got users in your company that don't have PSTN connectivity, they're on an E3 license, but you still talk to them all the time, right?

But now you're on Teams Phone Mobile, we found out that broke the connection between the internal company and the external company. Because now we're routing through the mobile network, and it's acting like a PSTN call in a way. til Microsoft comes back in and broke it. So you can't connect that. That's another thing.

We had to do some magic in our back end, and I can't talk about what that was, but we had to make that work, right? 

Tom Arbuthnot: Um, that's really interesting. So that's an internal user, non Teams phone user, E3 user, trying to call their peer in Teams. Yep. But the person expects the call to come through to their cellular native dialer because they're a Teams phone user.

Yep. But obviously it sounds like it didn't by default. 

Harold Wortman: Yeah, and vice versa. So, um, being able to, you know, have it come in. Yeah, yeah, the other direction. But mainly, you're right. Being enabled on the E3 to be able to reach the Teams Phone Mobile user, um, and, and terminate on the cell phone as expected on the native dialer, that, that takes some work because most mobile networks don't accept SIP, SIP dialing.

Right? Uh, it's E164. It's an E164 land. So, um, so we've, we've, uh, we made it work on our network and, uh, we support it. That's a big example of those things that are just customizable from a, from a carrier perspective that, that we've learned along the way. 

Tom Arbuthnot: That's super interesting. And what about kind of from a, Customer perspective, where have you seen it fit well? who's testing it? Big, small use cases up as much as you can share, obviously. 

Harold Wortman: Yeah, sure. I mean, we've got a lot of customers testing it from the small end to medium business to enterprise to, you know, in the SLED market, we launched it across the gamut. Um, so. We have government customers. We have, um, you know, we've got, uh, education customers, but we also have some enterprises and we have enterprises in medium business.

Now, initially, it seems to be the sweet spot is in the Kind of the, you know, low end of enterprise or medium business. Um, and that's, I think that's only because it takes a lot longer for those large enterprises to make a pivot of this nature. You know, and we have a lot of them trialing it and a lot of them have said they like it and they're just trying to figure out what they're doing.

With their technology. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Is it, is it, is it fair you probably, you know, you do see more, obviously more of these use cases than I do, as you get bigger into bigger organizations, is it a different team that own the mobile conversation and the, and the, and the fixed line voice conversation? I definitely see that in the customers I work with.

Harold Wortman: Absolutely. And I was going to write something about this on, you know, post something on LinkedIn. I was going to write an article on this because it, it is totally a jumble of, um, kind of institutional structure and the way businesses are, are organized. And it's, they're not, they're not built for this mobile integration.

There's usually a different department that does. Mobile, and Cell Phones. And that's still siloed in many respects from the IT, uh, you know, PBX world, the cloud world, you know, everything that's kind of come together, uh, for office telephony, for most, most businesses over the last 10, 15 years. Um, but the mobile side is still kind of off in its own land.

Uh, is what we found in, in large respects. And that has caused friction and it's slowed down business making decisions. And, um, and, and, and sometimes it's just completely killed the momentum of, of the idea. Right? And until they, until it's kind of picked up by that other organization and they, they talk.

So it's got to almost be championed by somebody in that case internally to, to make that bridge. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, that definitely I definitely have seen the same thing. And it's really interesting when you're talking to people who are like, this is a fantastic idea. I love it. But it's not my remit. And I can't move that team.

And they have a different budget cycle. Like these, we've seen the same thing over the years with obviously UC bringing IT and telephony together. And now UCAS. Yeah. I think it's the same thing. Again, I think it'll take a while. And also awareness as well. I'm surprised, or maybe not. I was initially surprised at how often I'm having conversations where I'm just having to explain it exists.

It's just not very well understood yet as well. 

Harold Wortman: Yeah, that's absolutely true. And the size of the organization, as we were saying, you know, they're making decisions. And a lot of them are moving to Microsoft Teams and they want to move to Microsoft Teams and then deal with this. They're like, okay, let's just get over to Teams, get all of our infrastructure done.

Everybody's happy. And then we'll, we'll, we'll tinker with this Teams Phone Mobile thing. Right? Um, that's what we're seeing a lot too, is it's at the back end of the decision process. It's not as integrated because of a lot of those factors. Like, you know, just, you know, It's the inertia of this is the way things have always worked.

We'll deal with it. It's new. It's great. Okay. We kind of like the idea, but let's just do, we got to plan for what we want to do. We understand how it works and then we'll do it later. You know, if it makes sense. That's what we hear a lot of. So, uh, and some of those customers after 18 months are coming back.

There's, we're seeing them cycle back in now. It's good. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. And as you said, like SMB mid market, I feel like they're are typically a more mobile first market anyway. And the agility is a bit more there. You're not going to have completely different departments that don't talk to each other. Responsible for those two areas in a few hundred seats potentially.

Absolutely. That's cool. And what's your thoughts on like, timelines are hard, but like, I feel like this is inevitable on some timeline. Do you feel like mobile is going to be moved to a more of a default position at some point in the future? 

Harold Wortman: Um, it's going to take some time, but I feel like it's going to pick up, uh, it's going to pick up a large piece.

Okay. So, um, There's just too much sense there for it not to. It's, you know, uh, you know, I, I think that, you know, will it be the primary mode of communication for a large enterprise? Probably not, because of the overall expenses involved. Um, and the breadth, and how you stitch together that, stitch it together like, you know, with every mobile operator.

You have SIP trunking networks worldwide, right? Verizon does. and other companies do. You may have to deal with a couple different providers if you want a worldwide network for a big enterprise, global enterprise. But for this, it's got to be really patchworked together. You've got U. S., you've got Canada, every country's got its own It's got to have its own operator, and then you got to go in and figure out, okay, how does it work differently for my end users?

So, that's another, it's another thing that's kind of going to slow it down to some degree from a mass adoption perspective, but within the U. S. and Canada and, you know, North America, I don't know, you know, if Mexico will be a part of that eventually, but U. S. and Canada, for sure, to start out with, Um, there are a lot of larger companies that have a huge footprint here, and it's going to make more and more sense for them.

Uh, and, and that's, that's coming. It really is. It's just, um, it's a, it's a journey. It's, it's a journey for, and I, I think, I think five years is a pretty good bar. You know, let's look at this in five years, and we, we might Probably have, you know, 10 times as many users as we have today or more. Um, maybe 20.

Because it's going to accelerate. And you were asking about, you know, what kind of customers are starting to really adopt it. And we talked about that a little bit. But I would add one thing to that and that's, you know, we're seeing a ton of security and compliance. Um, you know, interest, and that is the key.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I was going to, that's a great point, actually, because that's one of the things we hear as a big selling point, is the idea of bringing all your call records and your recording into one system. Is that, you've seen that born out then as kind of a good use case? 

Harold Wortman: It is, and, and, um, you know, we've got several larger customers already that are adopting it, and, um, And it's, it's becoming, uh, I think the word of mouth is getting out there that, hey, this, this makes a lot of sense.

Uh, now we don't, you know, you, you have an integrated solution, uh, for your voice and your SMS, uh, capture and archiving through your Microsoft Teams environment that you're already running and managing. So, um, that, That story and the, the ease of it is just going to continue to get better, um, you know, with time and, and it's already there.

So we're already, we're already picking up a lot of interest there. So that, that's definitely something that's, isn't, it's an accelerator for that market, um, for, for those. Those markets, um, to, to adopt earlier, for sure. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Well, thanks for taking us into the weeds a little bit. It's great to understand how it works kind of in the background and some of the journey.

There'll be a lot of organizations listening all over the world, just not in the U. S. Any thoughts on how they should think about this? Like, should they be trialling some seats? I guess it depends if their operator supports it. Any, any sort of thoughts around that? 

Harold Wortman: around customer from a customer perspective.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, yeah, I guess it's a new option on the table for most organizations, isn't it? 

Harold Wortman: Yeah, 

I would say, um, you should, first of all, every customer already, you know, those we talked about your mobile, the mobile side of your business, you're already, Managing that kind of through your own organizational structure, probably a little bit separately already.

So you're used to having to manage country by country by country already, to some degree. But there needs to be an integrated plan organizationally, like we were talking about, to be able to talk to your IT department, your cloud department, your Teams, your Teams management folks, and have an overlay there.

Because, If not, you know, starting to merge the organizations, just at least have an overlay, a structural. you know, kind of a matrixed approach to how you're going to manage it. And then decide, I would go, what's my most important country? You know, where do I have most of my mobile users today? And does it match up with the footprint that Microsoft has with their operators, their Teams for mobile operators?

Because there is still a limited footprint, and I know Microsoft has got a few more operators coming on board here soon. It's still going to be, though, a pretty Pretty big patchwork. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it's interesting. I'm in the UK, so we're one of the markets that, you know, should be getting three big operators. One at the moment, but two more coming.

We'll have two. I know there's a second one coming in the U. S. as well at some point. 

So there are markets starting to have some competition and historically we've always seen that. Kind of geez everybody up a little bit, because it's now, oh, there's two different people talking to this, you know, 

essentially.

Harold Wortman: Yeah, and that, that's, that's another point that we've seen as well. So we've had some big customers say, well, what are we going to do? Because, because in the United States at least, and I don't know how it is in the UK, but from a mobile perspective, we've got three major carriers, just like I think you do.

But, um, you have better signals in different areas of the country. I mean, it's just, that's the way it works. Um, and. Um, and, and, so, if you're a big customer, you've got 60, 000 lines across the country that are mobile lines, what are you going to do if 20, 000 of them are serviced by one, and 20, 000 another, and 20, 000 another?

Okay. Or, you know, 14, 15, whatever it ends up being, you have to have a plan for that. And so, you know, one of the things we did initially was we, and, and you've got the BYOD folks, you know, that's, that's, that's a shifting more, but we can talk about that more, but we have a plan. For that, from a Verizon perspective, but in the same time, the customer's like, Well, it just doesn't make sense for us to move all of our users, and we want to have a uniform strategy.

So, they're waiting. So some of the large customers are just naturally waiting for this to happen. They're waiting. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Oh, so 

that's interesting. So actually the, the, the multiple providers, I've seen a variant of that conversation in the UK customer where they're like, we're not, we like the concept, but if we go with this and there's only one provider, we're, We have no negotiation because we're locked into that feature.

So not the, not the coverage issue in that case, but similar. Once a few people have it, we're more committed to it's a thing. 

Harold Wortman: Well, they want that too. They want to be able to negotiate against, you know, that's, that's another component, um, for Verizon. And I think for the other carriers in the U S at least, this is not about, um, making a ton of money off of.

Uh, this integration, purely this integration. This is about just servicing our customers. And getting, you know, and having an attractive offer that locks them because it's going to lock you in, right? If you've got a mobile interconnect that you're happy with within Teams, you're never going to leave.

You're never going to leave that, that, um, you know, that provider. It's going to be a lot more difficult for you to be switching providers. So there's a lot of built in positive, um, you know, attractions there for us from a market perspective. Um, so, so as far as cost goes, I don't think cost is going to be so much a part of the equation.

We want, uh, Verizon has three products, you know, we offer direct routing services into Microsoft, we offer trunking into Microsoft, right, SIP trunking, Operator Connect, and then we have the mobile. So we've got all three, and ultimately, it's going to be The price is very similar for all three, and you just choose what makes sense for you.

That's where it's going, and it's close to that already, but that's where it's going. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. And for customers that want to get started with this, this is not a, I've got a thousand lines. I have to cut them all over to if they could start with a handful and see how it works. 

Harold Wortman: Yeah, we've had, you know, well over 500 pilots, different customers just try a couple lines.

And, um, And that's that's and it can be set up in minutes. It's really easy to set up. That's that's one of the good things. It's not like you have to set up a SIP trunk here. You've got the line of service. We set it up as a feature. You toggle the feature on. It sends the telephone number over to Microsoft Teams.

You add it to your end user in the platform. Whoever your Teams administrator is. And you're off. You're off. 

Tom Arbuthnot: I think it's got to be worth, you know, I think I like to stay on top of these things, obviously, but I think as a customer, it's good to at least try a couple of lines and understand it for when the CTO or somebody else comes down the business is what are we doing about this?

What's our strategy? It's great to have, you know, We're trying out here or we understand it. So the fact you can do it on a per user basis means it's not that big a bet to try a, try a department or try some users or even just roll it out into IT. So you know how it actually works in the real world. 

Harold Wortman: Yeah.

We've had, we've had a lot of customers say, Oh, can we get this free? Uh, you know, what's the contract term? And, you know, there is no contract term and it's, it's a few bucks a month. And so they're like, Oh, okay, no problem. You know, it's going to cost us $24 a month. To trial it over, you know, 10 people or whatever it is.

And, and that's, that's nothing. So, um, so from that perspective, it's, it's really easy to enable, disable, pilot, all those things. Uh, which is one of our initial things that we launched with it. We were very happy about, we, we, we made it easy at least. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Well, Harold, thanks so much for diving into that.

I appreciate the time. If people want to find out more about. TPM offer everything else. What's the best thing to do? I guess there must be a website landing page for it. 

Harold Wortman: Oh, yeah, no, absolutely. Uh, well, it's on the VerizonBusiness.com page. You'll find it. But if you search up Verizon Mobile for Microsoft Teams, Uh, you will find the product and, um, and it will tell you everything you need to know about it.

Um, of course, then you can reach out to, to your, your representative or, or anyone there and we'll get you, get you a demo, get you whatever you need to, to go forward. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Thanks, Harold. Appreciate your time. 

Harold Wortman: Yeah. Thank you, Tom. Take care.