AudioCodes leverages Azure to cut Teams Phone deployment time and facilitate native CCaaS offering for Teams

Founded over 30 years ago, AudioCodes has established itself as the leading provider of advanced voice communications solutions, operating in over 100 countries. Its customer base includes more than half of the Fortune 100 enterprises and many other large enterprises, relying on its high-definition voice technology and solutions for superior communication experiences.

In recent years AudioCodes has made a shift towards managed services and developing applications that enhance customer experience. This effort is underpinned by the company’s AudioCodes Live solution that is designed to ease customers’ transition to Microsoft Teams Phone.

Helping companies migrate to Microsoft Teams faster

AudioCodes accelerates the migration to Teams Phone and personalizes each customer’s journey by meticulously designing, planning, and executing the move to Microsoft Teams. This approach is essential to ensuring a smooth transition, particularly for enterprises navigating the complexities of integrating Microsoft Teams into their legacy telephony and communications infrastructure. AudioCodes also enables customers to adopt new artificial intelligence (AI) applications, integrated with Teams, to enhance both customer and employee experience.

As customers became more open to cloud solutions, AudioCodes migrated most of its solutions and applications—including AudioCodes Live—to Microsoft Azure, enabling them to be delivered in a more scalable, reliable, and secure way.

“Before we migrated our solutions to Microsoft Azure, a proof of concept (PoC) trial typically took six to eight weeks to set up. Now, we can set up a PoC within a day and, in many cases, fully onboard a new customer to Teams Phone within a week,” remarks Benny Matityahu, VP Unified Communications and Collaboration, AudioCodes. AudioCodes’ move to Azure not only accelerated the deployment process for its customers, but also offered improved service level agreements (SLAs) and streamlined issue resolution, thanks to AudioCodes' expertise in voice and its direct ownership of the underlying products and technology.

Having most of its solutions running on Azure is also more cost-efficient for AudioCodes. With a shared computing infrastructure, the resources used by each customer at any given time can be optimized along with the associated costs.

Latest technologies for advanced solutions

Additionally, AudioCodes takes advantage of cloud services, such as Azure Communication Services and Job Router, to simplify telephony workflows for operators, and Power Virtual Agents (PVA) to create sophisticated applications for call handling.

For example, Voca is AudioCodes’ Teams-native contact center solution that caters to enterprises requiring a powerful customer interaction solution to support their customers. Leveraging Azure Cognitive Services and AI, Voca helps organizations handle customer calls effectively, without skimping on features like intelligent routing, conversational voice responses, queuing, call automation, or integration with customer relationship management (CRM) software.

More reach, more impact

AudioCodes has been able to reach an even broader audience via Azure Marketplace. “We launched our offering on Azure Marketplace, and today, customers who were onboarded through Azure Marketplace generate over 11 million usage hours a month,” explains Ran Inbar, Chief Technology Officer at AudioCodes.

As AudioCodes looks to the future, it plans to take offerings like Voca and additional AI-driven voice applications, including Azure OpenAI Service and Copilot, and combine them into a single platform. “We see that our customers prefer to have a unified platform which serves as a one-stop-shop for streamlining operations under one role-based access control system,” notes Inbar.

AudioCodes is also planning to incorporate Azure OpenAI Service and Copilot into its other solutions. As Inbar explains, "We are constantly monitoring the latest and greatest technologies that Microsoft has to offer and evaluating how they can help us enhance our current solutions, develop new ones, and offer a seamless customer experience.”