As a veteran of the Microsoft Voice Team responsible for launching the company’s journey into becoming a leader in UC, and in recent years working with ecosystem partners, it’s always been so exciting to participate in Microsoft Ignite. As Microsoft’s biggest customer-facing event, it always feels like the “real deal” hearing directly from customers what they are looking for to enhance their IT environments. It’s also a chance for ecosystem partners, like Plantronics, to be showcased as thought leaders on those topics they can make a real contribution to, and for us this year it’s all about cloud voice adoption.
The journey toward a successful Skype for Business deployment always depends on many factors working together successfully. While the technology has evolved to support huge transformations, it hasn’t always been easy on customers to implement or easy on the users to adopt. Today Plantronics joined Microsoft in easing some of the pain points along this journey with the announcement of the addition of Plantronics to Microsoft’s MyAdvisor site (formerly known as Skype Operations Framework or SOF). You can learn about the evolution of this on Microsoft’s blog. We’re one of the first hardware partners to provide Practical Guidance for Cloud Voice on the Partner Asset page.
Through a series of workshops based on the Cloud Voice project lifecycle, Plantronics provides a lens to the stages of Plan, Deliver and Operate giving prescriptive guidance on integrating Plantronics devices and value-add software solutions into customer projects. Included in the content is a deep dive on how to look for and plan for specific user work styles when planning a deployment based on global user research Plantronics conducted in 2017. Understanding user needs and pain points helps to increase the accuracy of choosing the right device for every work style found in today’s enterprises.
However, it’s not enough just to choose the right device to ensure adoption. Through our Plantronics Manager Pro SaaS solution, customers and partners can monitor headset adoption, manage and track devices and easily troubleshoot, predicting and preventing problems before they occur, making the job for an IT administrator faster and easier.
Microsoft + Plantronics has been a great partnership and journey to understand communications challenges and how providing the right tools and insights for customers leads to more successful Cloud Voice projects. It’s not a coincidence that Plantronics has sold over 10 Million certified Skype for Business devices.
Follow me on Twitter @ljneidel
Microsoft Ignite is September 25-29 in Orlando, Florida. Plantronics is exhibiting at Ignite, come see us in Booth 1937.
About Laura Neidel
Laura manages Global Collaboration Marketing for Plantronics. In this role she leads strategic marketing for unified communications products and solutions and also works with the company’s major strategic alliance partners including Microsoft. Prior to Plantronics, Laura managed the Microsoft relationship as an alliance lead for Intelepeer and Sonus. Prior to her work in the Microsoft ecosystem, Laura spent six years at Microsoft where she was a key member of the voice team that rolled out Lync and Skype for Business.