As CTO, I talk with our customers and potential customers on a daily basis, and with more than 320 million active users, I’m not surprised when organizations say that they’re using—and want to continue using—Microsoft Teams in some form or fashion.

To provide the best experience and service to our customers at 8x8, we focus on collaboration over competition, as evidenced in our Technology Partner Ecosystem and our partnerships with select vendors in our space, including Microsoft.

We work with partners to complement their capabilities. With Microsoft, this has been the case for decades, going back to their NetMeeting offering in the 90s, Response Point in the early 2000s, the many shades of Skype for Business, on through to the now wildly-popular Microsoft Teams.

Today, our related portfolio includes 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams, offering Direct Routing as a Service with full PSTN (public-switched telephone network) replacement in over 59 countries. It also includes the 8x8 Phone App for Microsoft Teams, as well as our latest offering, 8x8 Operator Connect for Microsoft Teams. With this addition, 8x8 is now the only Operator Connect provider that also delivers a Microsoft-certified contact center solution for Teams.

As a trusted customer experience and employee experience partner, our integrations with Microsoft Teams are by design and are a differentiator, delivered with the best customer business outcomes in mind. However we add value, we strive to help our customers reach the summit of their success by using 8x8 in conjunction with our ecosystem of partners.

It’s all about customer choice

To this end, we are excited for and congratulate Microsoft on its recent Dynamics 365 Contact Center announcement. Like other Internet giants, we acknowledge that most are increasingly interested in solving for customer engagement needs natively on their platforms. We get that.

So at 8x8, we remain focused on customer outcomes and are committed to augmenting our partners’ and our customers’ capabilities with a full suite of communications options that can be deployed around the business platforms they choose.

We have supported out-of-the-box integrations with Dynamics 365 for many years, and look forward to augmenting our own customer solutions with Microsoft Copilot. We are also focused on enabling the Microsoft partner ecosystem to seamlessly deliver telephony and other 8x8 capabilities, including 8x8 Engage, to Microsoft Teams users globally.

Long story short: the customer comes first

At 8x8, we want to make our customers the authors and heroes of their individual and very unique innovation stories. And when the customer comes first, the power of partnering technology companies and their unique strengths accelerates customer success so much faster.

Intentionally-engineered success is part of our core DNA. Unlike competitors who look to replace the competition entirely, we work to embrace it where it adds value. Our company and our customers are better for it.