One NZ doubles ICT business by enhancing Microsoft Teams Phone for customers

One NZ is a telecommunications company and one of the biggest wireless service providers in New Zealand. While the business has established itself as a go-to carrier for much of the region, the organization is continuously adapting to its customers’ needs. The latest phase of One NZ’s ongoing evolution? To become a technology business as well as a telecommunications company and lead the region in innovation. 

One NZ’s technology journey is in part a response to changing customer demands. “Customers were increasingly taking on huge amounts of complexity inside their businesses,” says Michael Wells, Strategic Innovation Manager at One NZ. “There was a perception that local carriers provided internet connectivity and not much else.” To shift perceptions of what its business could provide, One NZ turned its attention to offering new productivity-enhancing business products and services for customers. Among those new offerings is Operator Connect, a service that adds Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) connectivity to the Microsoft Teams experience. As more and more businesses adopt Teams, employees expect to use their existing mobile phone numbers within Teams – and companies want to offload this capability to a local trusted operator.  

For One NZ, the new service is an opportunity to stand out. “It’s really important for us to be an innovative organization in New Zealand that makes life easier for customers,” says Norman McLennan, Product Lead at One NZ. By collaborating with Microsoft to be the first operator in New Zealand to deliver Teams Phone via Operator Connect to customers, One NZ is doing just that. With this move, the company enables higher quality Teams calling experiences for customers, making their lives easier and advancing its own business transformation. “Microsoft has been an integral part of our journey from telco to tech-co,” says Madison Devine, Product Specialist - Microsoft at One NZ. 

Doubling Information and Communications Business 

One NZ identified the prevalence of Microsoft productivity applications at businesses across the country and recognized an opportunity to deliver more value to customers by working together with Microsoft. “We are looking to provide highly resilient, highly secure communications paths for Microsoft users,” says Wells. “Microsoft Teams is the delivery vehicle for it all. It’s the application people touch and see every day, so our goal was to continue to drive value there.” That goal led One NZ to embrace Operator Connect. 

Additionally, One NZ saw a trend in how workplace behavior is changing to favor more unified productivity experiences. “We are getting to a point now where voice is being accepted as just another communication stream alongside chat and other things,” says Wells. “People are a lot more comfortable with going between the modalities, for example from a Teams chat to a call and then to a meeting and doing it all seamlessly.” 

Reducing time to market, deploying in hours as opposed to days

Working together with the Microsoft Azure for Operators team, One NZ launched its new Operator Connect service for customers in 2022, achieving a rapid time to market that set the company apart as an innovator.

“The Azure for Operators team are brilliant. It’s a really collaborative relationship, says Wells” He and his colleagues were particularly impressed with the team’s industry knowledge. “Telcos are quite unique in terms of how they operate, and the Azure for Operators team genuinely understood our industry,” adds Wells. One NZ utilized Azure Communications Gateway and Microsoft Azure Peering service to connect customers to the PSTN. The Operator Connect service continues to simplify the delivery of Teams Phone capabilities for One NZ customers by handling session initiation protocol (SIP) interworking, allowing One NZ to focus on customers’ experiences over network integration. 

Improving speed to market comes down to the collaborative relationship between Microsoft and One NZ. “Operator Connect is super quick to enable for our customers, so it becomes about training and building the Teams Phone transition story with the customer,” says Wells. Devine agrees. “When we were first implementing Operator Connect, the Azure for Operators team really allowed us to focus on our implementation and go to market faster,” she says. “It allowed us to focus on the development side of Operator Connect and put our investment into rapidly onboarding customers to Teams Phone. That allowed us to be first in our region, first to market, and to build new relationships with customers,” adds Wells.  

One NZ customers have already been impressed with the speed of deployment and security posture Operator Connect provides. “The time required and the amount of people it takes to realize value in these services has come down exponentially,” says Wells. “It’s a massive improvement,” adds McLennan. “We can deploy in hours as opposed to days.” Enterprise customers benefit from a cohesive collaboration platform in Teams; Teams Phone delivered via Operator Connect works together to ensure that employees can make calls from within the highly secure platform where they already work.  

Building an extensible business

One NZ credits its experience with deploying Teams Phone via Operator Connect and delivering an enhanced Teams calling service as an important step on the road to becoming an IT tech company. Delivering productivity enhancing apps to customers will enhance customer relationships and build loyalty as well. “We hope to extend Operator Connect into contact centers and other workloads, including gaming,” says Wells. “The nature of the service facilities highly resilient gaming which allows us to start exploring e-sports as well.” 

The ability to offer customers industry-leading security as another compelling aspect of collaborating with Microsoft on new product offerings. For instance, using Teams Phone, customers can meet core compliance recording requirements easily, even when they are working remotely. “No matter where they are, they are going to have all the same compliance, security and oversight tools,” says Wells. “This unified security overlay makes our lives easier as we work to make our customers more productive.”

This first step with Operator Connect bodes well for the transition underway at One NZ. As the company moves into providing business productivity apps that rest on simplified connectivity and telecom solutions, more and more customers will come to equate their operator’s offerings with security and reliability. 

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