CIO

Spark announces collaboration solution Enhanced Teams for the business market

Our holistic approach to enhancing Teams’ collaboration capability is unique in the market, says Peter Vincent, Spark’s Tribe lead for voice and collaboration.

We have positioned Spark Enhanced Teams (SET) solution as a premium full-service product, says Peter Vincent, Tribe lead for voice and collaboration at Spark. 

The business collaboration solution is unique to Spark and includes no upfront infrastructure costs, Spark Voice Connect SIP with bundled calling, consumption-based pricing, OPEX pricing for hardware with lifecycle management and efficient large-scale Teams Events. 

Spark says it worked with partners Microsoft, Ribbon, Plantronics/Polycom, Kollective and Ingram Micro to create the following product suite that can be purchased individually or as a package:

Teams Calling – Carrier grade PSTN calling inclusive of Local, National, Mobile and trans-Tasman calls.

Teams Meetings – Teams meeting room solutions inclusive of design, delivery and hardware support.

Teams Devices – Full inventory and lifecycle management phones and headsets certified for Teams.

Teams Events – Large scale, company or department All Hands style video broadcasts, streamed from the cloud without local internet congestion. 

“Teams is enjoying unprecedented success locally and globally,” says Vincent, in a statement. 

“It provides the complete communications and collaboration solution for enterprise companies, small organisations and everyone in between. 

“Spark’s holistic approach to enhancing Teams’ collaboration capability is unique in the market. And this is all delivered and supported by Spark with the largest team of experts in New Zealand.”

Peter Vincent
Peter Vincent

“We’re at the start of an ‘Intelligent Communications’ revolution, with speech-to-text automatically created for recorded conference calls, blurred backgrounds to reduce attendee distractions, and much more to improve meeting productivity,” adds Mark Walton, Microsoft modern workplace business lead for APAC 

Walton says Spark has built a comprehensive offering that encompasses carrier-grade voice, meeting room solutions, interactive whiteboards, large-scale meeting broadcasts and the ability to deliver these solutions for all New Zealand businesses.

Telesmart, meanwhile, has announced it is the first provider in New Zealand to deliver Cloud Calling for Microsoft Teams. 

Teams is Microsoft’s new hub for collaboration in Office 365, replacing Skype for Business, and provides integrated chat, online meetings and phone system functionality. 

Telesmart’s enterprise version, Enterprise Connect Cloud Calling for Microsoft Teams, integrates Teams into an existing voice platform. 

“Through this process we’ve discovered that installing direct route for Microsoft Teams is the easy part, close to a download, click, click, done scenario,” says Geof Robinson, project director at Telesmart. 

“Getting the back-end infrastructure right, making sure the 365 tenancy is set up correctly, making it supportable and adding functionality to Teams so that caller experience is great, was where the hard work on this project was done.”