The challenge

Lionbridge, headquartered in the US, operates a world-class language cloud that orchestrates access to a global network of more than 6,000 passionate language and subject matter experts.

When its existing Microsoft Skype for Business platform needed to be upgraded to Microsoft Teams, the company researched extensively how best to make the move. Daniel Hebert, Senior Systems Engineer at Lionbridge, heads the group that ran the migration.

“As we planned our transition, we knew we wanted to voice-enable our Microsoft Teams instance to give our users the most integrated experience when collaborating with our translators and subject matter experts and serving our customers,” shared Hebert. “We spoke with our main telephony providers at the time, and the options they presented all involved us spending at least $100K on session border controller hardware and installation at our many sites. Then Microsoft suggested we look at vendors that do direct routing as a service, but of the ones we’d spoken to, none of them could do it.”

Lionbridge was an existing GTT customer for SIP Trunking in parts of Europe and approached GTT to find out more about a direct routing approach to enabling telephony for Microsoft Teams. Hebert found that GTT was able to deliver exactly what Lionbridge was looking for – and more.

The solution

Lionbridge moved from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams, avoiding the cost of installing its own session border controllers by taking advantage of GTT’s global direct routing capabilities and integration with Microsoft Teams. GTT offers enterprises dedicated SIP Trunks for Microsoft Teams on a single platform by connecting its global, fully redundant and robust network of session border controllers across its own Tier 1 IP backbone. This allows for call traffic to be optimised and ensures better performance and an improved user experience.

GTT has delivered 60 SIP Trunk channels, including more than 3,850 telephone numbers in 17 countries.

The solution enables direct routing for voice applications over Lionbridge’s Microsoft Teams platform in the USA, Canada, Brazil, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK.

Lionbridge also chose to consolidate its voice suppliers for the Americas and Europe by moving to GTT. Site-to-site calling is included at no additional charge, and outbound calls are charged from a single shared-rate card for all sites.

“GTT have provided us with a simple ‘as-a-service’ solution to deploying telephony for our Microsoft Teams platform that matches our strategy overall and which we estimate has saved us around $100K by avoiding on-premises hardware costs.”

Lionbridge

The benefits

A voice-as-a-service model for a cloud-first company

With the GTT SIP Trunking solution, Lionbridge was able to move forward with its migration to Microsoft Teams without the need for hardware expenditure for its locations in the Americas and Europe. Direct peering with Microsoft ensures the lowest latency between the GTT voice network and Microsoft Office 365, which is important for ensuring the best possible user experience. It also makes it much simpler for Lionbridge to manage its voice network.

Hebert shares, “Our goal is to transition to SaaS models across our business because it lessens the work on our operational team and lets us focus on our core business. GTT have provided us with a simple ‘as-a-service’ solution to deploying telephony for our Microsoft Teams platform that matches our strategy overall and which we estimate has saved us around $100K by avoiding on-premises hardware costs. In addition, consolidating all our phonenumbers in Europe and Americas with GTT has helped us save time on things like billing administration, and we benefit from site-tosite calling being free of charge. My advice to anyone looking to migrate or deploy Teams is to look at a provider like GTT that can do direct routing to Teams.”

A great service delivery experience

Lionbridge also found working with GTT an easy and a positive experience, underpinned by GTT’s longstanding Microsoft partnership and years of expertise.

“I can’t say enough good things about working with the GTT team during design, scope and service delivery,” says Hebert. “With GTT’s approach, we were able to receive our SIP Trunks and conduct testing for each site in just one or two days. Then, we simply raised a ticket in the GTT EtherVision portal and ran the script to complete the deployment out of hours. By comparison, with our Asia deployment where we worked with another vendor using devices on site, that process took at least a week each time.”

He continues, “One challenging aspect of our project was ensuring our thousands of numbers were ported correctly, which can be complicated for many reasons. The GTT team was always responsive and worked tirelessly across time zones to help us through, keeping us appraised with timely and up-to-date information throughout.”

Greater insight and flexibility for business agility

Today, Lionbridge enjoys having a simplified telephony environment, with both greater visibility and flexibility across its services, helping the team make changes and respond to business needs more quickly.

“Compared with before, we now spend a lot less time troubleshooting calls as the GTT network is more reliable for external calling than our previous setup,” Hebert explains. “If there is an issue, we go straight to GTT, who owns getting it fixed, which lets us focus on our business instead. The GTT EtherVision portal also means we now have full visibility across most of our phone number inventory, and this helps us greatly with allocating numbers to our staff and being more efficient with what we have.”

“With GTT, we have a flexible and interoperable solution and a great team that has proven its willingness to partner with us to achieve success.”

Lionbridge