By Rebecca Gibson |
Unified communications (UC) platform Microsoft Teams has grown rapidly since launching in 2017. Over 300 million users in organisations worldwide now rely on it for everything from instant messaging colleagues to sharing files, hosting meetings and handling customer calls. They cite streamlined and secure enterprise communication, enhanced meeting experiences, increased productivity and operational efficiency as some of the key business benefits.
Established as a traditional voice and business communications software provider in 1998, NUWAVE Communications has developed software solutions to empower organisations to rapidly implement Teams at scale and capitalise on these benefits.
“We help tier-one carriers, cloud solution providers, managed service providers, system integrators and small businesses create complete go-to-market UC offerings for their customers,” says Mark Bunnell, the company’s chief operating officer.
NUWAVE Communications developed its Teams provisioning expertise after it was invited to join Microsoft’s original Technology Adoption Program, explains Bunnell. “We collaborated closely with Microsoft’s experts to learn about Teams and its existing and future features, as well as how to successfully provision them for our partners. We combined this knowledge with our voice expertise to develop iPILOT, our flagship communications-platform-as-a-service solution. It simplifies and automates the onboarding, tenant provisioning, licensing, governance, security and lifecycle management processes for Teams.”
By using iPILOT, partners with minimal technical expertise and experience of working with voice communications can rapidly roll out Teams for their customers.
“Teams is a complex and ever-evolving platform, and many of our partners lack the skills and expertise to quickly provision it and successfully integrate it into their customers’ IT environments themselves,” says Bunnell. “Historically, it could take weeks or even months for these partners to complete a Teams rollout, but with iPILOT, they choose which services and features they want to include in their go-to-market Teams solution and click to activate them. Now, their customers can go from having no Teams platform at all to making test calls within 15 minutes.”
iPILOT also gives partners the visibility and control they need to manage their customers’ entire Teams environment. “They can easily scale Teams to add extra users and new capabilities and features, or troubleshoot operational issues,” says Bunnell, adding that iPILOT can also be used to quickly provision other major UC platforms too.
In addition, NUWAVE Communications has integrated third-party solutions for features such as call recording, cloud fax and SMS into iPILOT, so partners can automatically provision and offer them as part of their complete go-to-market UC solution.
“We’ve worked with Microsoft partners like CallCabinet and Dubber to integrate their call recording and data analysis solutions into iPILOT,” says Bunnell. “All our partners need to do is activate them to enable their customers to unlock insights from their voice and video call data. This gives our partners the opportunity to customise and elevate their offering to deliver additional value for customers, with minimal effort and voice expertise.”
NUWAVE Communication’s partners can also provide their customers with a self-service portal and empower them to independently use iPILOT to port numbers, purchase calling plans, add new users, order licences, provision additional services, toggle features and more.
“This reduces the operational burden on our partners and helps them drive additional revenue,” says Bunnell. “We’ve standardised the iPILOT interface so that our partners and their customers have the same user experience, which simplifies training and troubleshooting. Both our partners and their customers have access to our training academy, which offers various learning modules and certification programmes.”
Bunnell cites US-based cloud communications services provider NWN Carousel as a notable example of a partner that used iPILOT to quickly develop a Teams Phone offering for its 5,000 customers.
“In a very short amount of time, NWN Carousel was able to activate over 100,000 users and increase its profit margins by 50-70 per cent in a much shorter time frame,” he says. “Plus, it can now provide a full range of telephony services, such as paging, fax and connecting analogue phones to a digital phone system or voice over internet protocol network. Meanwhile, its customers can log in to their own white-labelled version of iPILOT to gain full control over their voice network.”
As Microsoft continues to evolve its UC platform by adding features and capabilities, NUWAVE Communications will adapt its offering to ensure the provisioning experience remains simple and intuitive for its partners and their customers. In January 2026 it will launch an AI-powered solution that automatically guides customers through every step of their Teams journey.
“We’re using AI to bring together all the individual Teams modules we’ve created and enable customers to link their Microsoft tenant with iPILOT,” explains Bunnell. “Once they’ve done this, the AI assistant will help them quickly implement various features and capabilities – such as Teams Phone – and build their ideal Teams environment. For example, it will be able to order the right licences or create a list of users, decreasing the time it takes for new capabilities to go live while ensuring organisations remain secure and compliant. Our new AI solution will transform the experience of provisioning and managing Teams and enterprise voice communication at scale.”
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