Microsoft's UK channel ambitions have intensified following the launch of Skype for Business (S4B) PSTN calling.
The man at the centre of Microsoft's new channel campaign is Ian Woolner, Senior Product Marketing Manager (UK), who said becoming a provider of phone lines was a natural progression for Microsoft following the development of its S4B telephony platform.
The new cloud services enable customers to acquire and assign numbers and provide inbound and outbound calling over the PSTN on mobiles or softphones via MS Office 356.
Speaking at the Cisilion-TeleWare 'Voice in the Cloud' event Woolner said: "We have built relationships with key telcos and are effectively wholesaling their minutes and bundling them to make it cost-effective for customers."
He said that subscribers to Microsoft PSTN services would have 'no concept of phone lines or SIP trucks' and would just pay for bundled domestic or international packages.
There would also be no differentiated rate for calls to landlines or mobiles within the bundles under what he described as a 'fair usage policy'.
"If I have 1,000 people in an organisation and they take the 1,200 minute bundle, that organisation has 1.2 million minutes of domestic calling at its disposal," he said. "It means predictable costs for CFOs and departments."
Woolner's channel strategy hinges on the formation of collaborative partnerships such as the link-up with MS Gold Communications partners Cisilion and Teleware and jointly staged launch events targeted at end users.
"There is an opportunity to grow our partner channel massively," added Woolner.
"Customers are moving away from on-premise telephony. Some may become Skype for Business users, other may want to develop converged solutions. We're building a channel that can remove the complexity."