What's Up with Tech?
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With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Globalizing Communications: How LoopUp Streamlines Multinational Telephony with Teams
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Cloud telephony is revolutionizing how multinational businesses communicate, and nobody understands this transformation better than Steve Flavell co-CEO and co-founder of LoopUp. After 20 years in remote communications, his company now specializes in integrating cloud telephony with Microsoft Teams—filling the crucial gap in Microsoft's otherwise comprehensive unified communications platform.
The pandemic accelerated Teams adoption dramatically, with Microsoft experiencing "two years' worth of adoption in two months." Yet despite Teams' dominance, telephony remains the missing piece in truly unified communications. By bridging this gap, companies gain remarkable efficiency: eliminating on-premises equipment across global locations, consolidating dozens of regional telecom vendors into a single relationship, and managing their entire global communications estate through one intuitive portal.
Beyond operational efficiency, this integration enables a fundamental shift in how we think about business communications. The traditional "landline versus mobile" distinction is evolving into "business versus personal" identities, where your business number follows you across all devices. This separation gives employees flexibility while maintaining clear boundaries between work and personal communications.
For organizations embracing AI initiatives, telephony integration also ensures valuable voice conversations contribute to their data ecosystem. Without this integration, companies miss capturing insights from a significant portion of their communications for analysis by tools like Microsoft Copilot.
Looking ahead, LoopUp continues innovating with their upcoming "LoopUp One" portal, which will enhance global support capabilities, introduce role-based access, and provide more sophisticated analytics. Want to transform how your multinational organization approaches communications? Discover how consolidating global telephony can streamline operations while enhancing your Teams experience.
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Hey everyone. Fascinating chat today as we dive into the world of global communications and telephony with an innovator in this space at LoopUp. Steve, how are you?
Speaker 2:Very well, thank you, evan, pleased to be here. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Great to see you here, live from the UK. I hope spring or summer at least, is on its way for you, at least is on its way for you. But before we dive into the industry and all things, teams and telephony, maybe introduce LoopUp and the vision and the mission of the team.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, co-founder of LoopUp from back in the day. We've been going 20 years or so now. We started our life in the world of remote meetings or conference calling services. Started life in the world of remote meetings or conference calling services.
Speaker 1:But today we are in the world of cloud telecommunications, integrated with Teams, and all about being the most multinational provider out there. Wow, well, that's quite a bold statement. So let's dive into that. You know, teams, microsoft, copilot I mean, microsoft is really the 800-pound gorilla now in this space. Why is unlocking you know and integrating with Teams so important for productivity, for performance, for collaboration globally these days?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think it's no secret that Teams has gone ballistic, particularly in the wake of the pandemic. I mean, it was showing good signs leading into the pandemic but took off. I think their CEO mentioned that they had two years' worth of adoption in two months when the pandemic hit. So you know, their user numbers have soared and it's not surprising, you know, in today's modern workplace of remote and hybrid working. It enables teams to communicate in a so-called unified way. I think there's one exception to that word of unified, which is out of the box teams whilst it has all your chat and calling and video meetings and lots of other stuff, it does not have telecoms. And that's where we're coming at this loop up. We're one of a number of providers. Of course, we have a differentiation I hope we can come on to that but we're one of a number of providers that is doing what so many companies want to do, which is to integrate their telecoms into their otherwise unified communications platform so that it can indeed become truly unified.
Speaker 1:Great message. And what are the business drivers for moving? You know that global communications infrastructure to the cloud. We used to call it PBX, but of course you know it's a hybrid world. Is it cost savings? And you know CapEx, is that the main driver?
Speaker 2:I don't think it was the drive that led to it. Users rule the roost here. Things happen when users adopt them and it was the benefits that come as the user experience that I think led to the soaring of teams really. However, from a company's perspective, there are some great cost savings and efficiencies. I mean the most obvious, of course, is that by moving your telecoms from an on-premises implementation to a cloud implementation, you can strip out all of the on-premises equipment, all of those PBXs that you have at every site around the world. You know they're all redundant, they can all go. You don't have to look after them, upgrade them, buy new ones. You know that's all looked after in the cloud. So from both equipment and people point of view, it comes with a lot of cost savings and efficiencies. That's great.
Speaker 1:And not an expert on the UK, but certainly hybrid work in the US is all over the map. You have every company almost doing things differently from all in back to the office, from the big banks and contact centers, financial institutions to, you know, totally remote, lots of startups. Where do you see most of your customers landing on that continuum of hybrid work, remote work, back to office.
Speaker 2:Well, we see a lot of the remote and hybrid remaining in our target market. I think we serve multinationals Again, we'll hope we can come back to that how we consolidate that procurement and management of telecoms for companies that have operations in lots of countries and for that segment we still see a lot of hybrid and remote working. It's maybe tempered a little bit since the pandemic was at its worst but it's maintained to a very strong degree and I think we see that in the UK and in the US there are pockets and segments that are more demanding a back to the office approach. But in our general cross-sector, cross-vertical multinational segment we still see a tremendous amount of remote and hybrid working.
Speaker 1:Yes, I would concur there. And you know, microsoft, of course, has gone all in on AI, gen, ai, but phone conversations are sort of overlooked when it comes to the AI data sets. And what does that omission mean? And how can those conversations whether they're employee conversations, customer conversations add value to an AI strategy add?
Speaker 2:value to an AI strategy. Yeah, I mean, it's another driver for integrating your telecoms with your unified communications platform. In our case, we work with Microsoft and with Microsoft Teams. But, just as I was saying that, the telecoms bit by default is not unified into that setup. Therefore, your telecoms data, you know the calling information, the content of the calls, is not by default therefore in your AI data set as an enterprise. So to the extent that you're trying to leverage, say you know Copilot from Microsoft or something like that, you know, say you know co-pilot from Microsoft or something like that, you know you would want that data at least to stand a chance of coming into that AI data set. No-transcript.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well said so. You know better than I in this business for 20 years that telephony, telecoms is complicated, to say the least. And now you're talking cloud, a lot of that complexity is still there. I mean, how do you onboard a customer, given all their devices, endpoints, mobile phones, existing numbers, sites? I mean, what's that process look like for bringing a new global, let's say 2000 onto your network?
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, it's without trivializing it. It's way simpler than it was.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay, well, I need to catch up on my understanding.
Speaker 2:The move to the cloud changes the game because you're not having to deal with all of the on-premise aspects of it. You know there's still work to be done in terms of, for example, if companies want to retain their numbers when they move from their on-premises perhaps they're using Cisco Call Manager or something with SIP trunks coming in they want to move that into a truly cloud-based implementation with Teams. They may want to move those numbers over to that cloud-based provider. So there's work to be done.
Speaker 2:In terms of the porting, we spend a lot of time and effort getting good at porting because it's so important to our customers and we don't want to do that wrong. It's a really key part of our proposition and differentiation. But essentially it's so much easier in the cloud because telecoms really now is not a lot different to so many other data applications. It's no longer wires into buildings. Copper wire into buildings, which it used to be, is of course no more. And the fiber into buildings which you get today is not for telecoms, it's for your broadband and network operations and that's still, as an industry, very physical. It's cables into homes and buildings and offices, but telecoms is just data. Over that broadband it can be deployed efficiently, just like other data applications can be deployed With due respect to porting, the rest of it can be quite straightforward in comparison to what it was five to ten years ago with an on-premises implementation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, total game changer.
Speaker 2:It's an exciting time, therefore, for the industry, because you're getting in this huge industry. You've got all this restructuring. You've got the move to the cloud number one. You've got the integration with UC platforms number two and then, because of the nature now of the deployment, there is no technological reason why you can't do everything globally. You no longer have to buy telecoms off Deutsche Telekom in Germany, telstra in Australia, lumen in the States, bt over here.
Speaker 1:No disrespect to our friends in the telcos, of course.
Speaker 2:That's your network, that's your broadband. You know your telecoms is now data over that network and it can be bought, provisioned, managed on a global basis. And that's what we do at LoopUp we multinationalize telecoms for those multinational companies. Why have 25 vendors around the world when you can have one?
Speaker 1:Brilliant. Well, there's your 90-second clip for a TikTok or a T, I don't know what you mean. So you have lots of customers, hundreds, thousands of customers, any favorite children you know, customer references, anecdotes or stories, or maybe industries where you know. Your solution is really enhancing productivity through cloud telephony.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know I might get into trouble by naming names, but you know, let's take our first ever customer that we won back in 2020 when we moved into this Teams telephony segment. You know it wasn't quick and the lack of speed wasn't because the implementation was painful, it's because you progressively roll out with that multinational as their local incumbent carriers come around for renewal and you know you grow your geographic sort of rollout over time with a typical customer in our multinational segment. But you know that that that customer now has gone, done what I said just a few seconds ago. It's it's gone down from 24 telecommunications vendors around the world to just one and all of the efficiencies that come with that. You know we're hopefully going to be doing a little case study with them. We'll let you know when it's done.
Speaker 2:But they only have one contract. They have one set of global tariffs, one support team that they're dealing with in a consistent way around the world and, perhaps most of all, they have one management portal. You know, if you've got 25 telcos, maybe not even all of them have a management portal, but the best case, you've got 25 different ones that all work differently and have different data everywhere and absolute mess. You know, with LoopUp you can see all of your global estate of phone numbers in one place. You can provision your users to and from them. You have all the analytics associated with all your telecoms globally. Why on earth wouldn't you want to manage your telecoms the same international global way, like you manage Teams?
Speaker 1:Yeah, really well said, and I assume you have lots of customers who still like their desk phones. You know they want those to stay forever. But a lot of the innovation is happening on mobile, including with Teams, 5g, with video, with RCS and messaging. You're seeing a lot of new opportunities unlocked on the mobile side with cloud plus Teams plus AI, definitely cloud plus Teams plus AI.
Speaker 2:Definitely there's some interesting trends there, because you know you can take cloud telephony calls Teams calls on your mobile, just like you can on your computer or at your desk, and a lot of the calls absolutely happen that way and it's leading to an interesting trend, I think, because you know back in the day. You know the last 10, 20 years with telecoms, since mobile came in, the distinction has been landline versus mobile. It's how telecoms world talks about those two key categories and it's increasingly not all about landline and mobile anymore. It's about business and personal. Your numbers are going to ring on whatever device anyway when it's cloud implemented.
Speaker 2:So you're seeing more and more companies, more and more certainly in our target market, that are having a business number and of course it rings everywhere. It doesn't matter what device is, whether it's a fixed device or a mobile device or a computer or whatever, but it's your business number as opposed to your personal number, and that very often is the person's actual mobile operator mobile number, which is then distinct for their personal use. Then they have one business number. So I think it's one of the interesting trends. You know mobile landline is going business personal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's an interesting one, and even multiple identities and multiple eSIMs really interesting stuff. And, of course, microsoft dominates the employee experience, but lots of people are looking to Teams and Copilot for customer service, customer experience use cases. Are you seeing that with your customers as well?
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and there are intersections of those two worlds. One of the common intersections is when a company has a call center, for example. It clearly infiltrates the telecoms world, but it's clearly as well part of the customer satisfaction world. And that is, you can get an extra degree of complexity where those two things meet. Sometimes it's not possible just to do things in the cloud if they have a more on-premises-based contact center solution. So there are still elements of complexity out there in implementations and we help all our multinational customers through those deployments.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. So we're just through the busy trade show season heading into spring. What's on your radar Are you and the team, your agenda, any travel or events or announcements coming up you can give us a peek into.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've got a launch of our brand new portal. You know, we did a V1 when we came out to the market and it was launched in 2021. We've got a brand new customer portal coming out. It's going to be branded LoopUp One. It's going to include, you know, capabilities like being able to do all your support globally through this portal. It's going to allow administration teams to select themselves.
Speaker 2:You know, it's all very well having a portal, but you don't want your office manager in Columbia to be able to change all the settings for your US implementation. So it comes with and roles-based access and permissions, the next level of analytics, and, yeah, we're really excited to introduce that to our customers. And then, alongside that, to work on versions that our channel partners can access and utilize as well in combination. And, of course, we're leveraging AI ourselves in the business to try and automate as much as we can for our customers and let them self-serve. I mean, there are times when they need to reach us and we, of course, make sure that's easy for them, but a lot of the time, they want to self-serve and so increasingly, we're building that capability into our platform as well.
Speaker 1:Brilliant, well, exciting times. Can't wait to see it all unfold. Thanks so much for sharing an update and a peek behind the curtain Much appreciated.
Speaker 2:Brilliant Thanks, Evan. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:And thanks. Thanks for everyone for listening, watching and sharing. Thank.