Sports company Puma is known worldwide for relentlessly pushing sport and culture forward by creating fast products for the world’s fastest athletes. The German company is present in more than 120 countries.

When it comes to communications and collaboration, Puma have taken decisive action to deliver the tools and experiences their people need to keep the business at the front of the market.

We’ve been partnering with Puma since 2005, so when they wanted to take their cloud communications and collaboration tools up a gear, we were ready with rapid, effective solutions and support.

Puma were using Microsoft Teams as their core collaboration platform, so it made sense to integrate their voice services into the application too. Their drive was to give employees a seamless working experience, focused on a single application. While Microsoft Teams was already used internally, alongside other applications, Puma also wanted to make it the one-touch solution for communication with external partners and get rid of traditional telephones. From this base, employees would be free to dial out whenever they needed to, and everyone would be reachable via the voice network – removing any barriers to the collaboration and innovation that have made Puma a success.

Eager to unlock these benefits quickly, Puma chose to make a rapid, ‘big bang’ change away from a mixture of legacy and cloud Private Branch Exchange (PBX) infrastructure to one, harmonised platform. Puma wanted a partner that could provide managed voice functionality into Microsoft Teams on a global scale. This needed to include a global SIP service, all number porting and the ability to deliver voice directly into the Microsoft Azure cloud. In addition, the service also needed to connect some analogue devices and fax machines.

We created an integrated solution for Puma that brought together the power of Microsoft Teams with our global voice services. We combined this with full project management support from our professional services team to ensure a smooth and efficient deployment process.

Puma's PBX hardware and local phone lines are now a thing of the past. Our resilient global SIP trunks (secured by Transport Layer Security (TLS) / Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (sRTP) encryption) now connect Puma to the Microsoft Azure cloud in each region to ensure superior quality of service. Our teams took care of all national compliance regulations involved in porting Puma phone numbers and provided new numbers when required.

We included PowerSuite to protect Puma employees’ ability to use Microsoft Teams to call and collaborate wherever they are without disruption. This end-to-end monitoring and reporting tool gives at-a-glance insight into user quality experience. Working across all internet service parts and third-party internet providers, it brings clarity and allows rapid issue resolution. And Puma can call on our worldwide customer service centres for component support around the clock.

We introduced local managed gateways to take care of analogue device connections and we forward all fax calls directly from our global voice platform to Puma's cloud fax service.

In partnership with Puma, we established a global standard for Microsoft Teams-integrated voice services. The initial stage of roll out saw around 2,000 Puma users across Germany, France, Italy, Spain and The Netherlands moving onto our Operator Connect for Microsoft Teams functionality, with the agile implementation process only taking a few weeks.

Today, Puma has the flexibility to scale their voice services up and down in line with business needs, including coverage in South Africa as well as APAC and EMEA regions. With rapid configuration, short timescales and all the complex regulations that vary from region to region taken care of, Puma has a secure, encrypted cloud-based voice service that’s ready to grow with them.

Two years into the project, our voice services have delivered the reliability and stability that Puma needs to thrive; Puma hasn’t needed to raise a single incident ticket after completing the migration.