Goodbye desk phone, hello Unified Communications: SAP turns to Microsoft Teams for mobile working worldwide

The challenge: Saying farewell to the desk phone

“The real challenge came in 2011, with the introduction of Lync. That’s a move we’re still benefiting from,” says Gabriella Dorninger, Change Management Expert at SAP. At the time, there was a phone on every desk at the German software company. What’s more, each branch seemed to have a telephone system from a different manufacturer. “We’re talking about a real patchwork!” says Andreas Bertisch, Director of Unified Communications Technologies, with a grin. It was never going to be a question of simply replacing all this with a newer, uniform system. “Even then, it was unusual for anyone at SAP to spend more than two years in any one office, at the same desk,” explains Michael Bethke, IT Infrastructure Architect. “With a desk phone, there’s a lot of work involved in moving an employee from one building to another.” The introduction of voice over IP (VoIP) was intended to provide much greater flexibility, with employees able to work remotely while at clients or away on business trips. “Even then, the ultimate aim was to ditch the desk phone and switch to using a PC and headset,” says Nico Geppert, Chief Architect for Unified Communications. 

“There were misgivings, of course,” says Christophorus Laube, Global Service Owner Teams Communications at SAP. “Some people wondered whether they would be able to work without a proper phone.” And there were other concerns of a cultural nature across the global software company’s diverse workforce. “It was all very new,” Dorninger recalls. “Initially, some people had issues with wearing a headset, for example, because of their hairstyle or traditional headdress.”

Back then, there was no way of knowing what kind of impact the introduction of VoIP would have. As it was, it prompted a sea change among the workforce, ushering in a greater willingness to embrace new technologies. Today, company employees are just as likely to take the initiative and introduce new modes of communication in the workplace. 

The solution: Swapping a desk phone for a headset and Unified Communications

In 2011, the first job was to source some suitable software with which to replace the desk phones. Then came a pilot project with volunteers. “In the final phase, we had 500 people using Lync and 500 using a rival product, and then we swapped them over,” Bethke says. The user-friendliness of Microsoft Lync proved hard to beat. “The feedback was amazing,” Bertisch recalls. Over the next three years, the global switch from desk phones to VoIP generated a lot of work for the people in change management. “We had campaigns running at all the company’s locations, getting employees to hand over their old desk phones,” Dorninger recalls. “Each day, they just kept piling up, higher and higher, in the dumpsters outside. We took photos of them so as to sign and seal our departure from the old telecommunications world.” 

Unified Communications: A platform for global collaboration

With the advent of Skype, more and more people at SAP acquired a taste for video calls and videoconferencing. This, in turn, fueled the trend toward remote working from any location. In 2019, Microsoft announced that it was withdrawing Skype for Business. Soon after, COVID-19 struck. By then, however, the move to Microsoft Teams was already underway. The actual switchover coincided with the start of the health crisis, which itself further accelerated the transition because it led to an explosion in the use of video calls and videoconferencing. Meanwhile, there was another reason why employees were keen to move from Skype to Teams: the quality and the reliability were better, especially when working from home or on a mobile device. “People voted with their feet,” Geppert says. And, as Laube explains, there was another key argument in favor of Teams: it caters better to people with impaired hearing. “And that’s a key consideration for SAP,” he adds. “The picture and sound quality are better, and the subtitles are great.” Meanwhile, Bethke highlights another benefit of Teams (and Skype): “We’re no longer tied to an expensive audio conferencing service with user fees. That brings us significant savings over other solutions we’ve used in the past.”

Swift transition to Teams Phone

As a workaround, the company initially continued to use Skype for external calls. “It’s been the opposite to Lync, where we first had the phones and then added videoconferencing,” Bethke explains. “With Teams, we’ve started with meetings, and now we’re getting the phones!” The speed of the switchover in 2021 shows just how deeply rooted the cultural shift toward mobile working has now become at SAP. Following a year of groundwork, which smoothed the way for a swift transition, the migration was over within 10 months. By comparison, it took three years to switch from desktop phones to Lync. There are now almost 150,000 users and devices at over 150 company locations worldwide using Teams Phone at SAP. The largest single migration took place at the Bangalore campus in India, comprising 15,000 users in one day.