Fewer providers, more countries: ctelo runs global Teams telephony on Telnyx

ctelo is a Moss, Norway company that describes its work as Microsoft telephony made easy. A large enterprise that moves its phone system into Microsoft Teams usually inherits a problem along with the upgrade: a different telephony provider in every country it operates in, each with its own contracts, portals, porting rules and support queues. ctelo exists to take that problem away.

"They want one partner to relate to, which is us," said Jan Andre Solvang, CTO of ctelo. "And then we take care of the complexity."

Taking care of the complexity means guaranteeing reliable telephony in each and every country a customer decides to move onto Teams. For the past two years, the platform underneath that guarantee has been Telnyx.

Consolidation is the product

ctelo's service connects the whole Microsoft telephony ecosystem, from Teams Phone to bots, apps and the Dynamics 365 Contact Center, and delivers it to global enterprises as a single provisioning platform. The customer keeps Teams as its global solution, and ctelo consolidates the tangle of local providers behind it into as few as possible.

"Telnyx is, for now, the most important part of our global Teams telephony provisioning platform," Solvang said. "This is what we use Telnyx for globally, and then we are able to add reliable telco services into the Microsoft ecosystem."

Numbers in every country, one platform to run them

Solvang's team had worked with telephony providers since it entered the Microsoft cloud market in 2014, so it knew what it wanted: fast provisioning, low complexity, and coverage broad enough for customers that span regions and time zones.

"What stood out about Telnyx, I would say, is a combination of the global reach and the developer-friendly infrastructure," he said. "We could get numbers in multiple countries. Being a global provider is really important for us to do the consolidation for the customers, because a lot of our larger customers want to consolidate the telcos that they have into fewer telcos."

"It's about finding a technology partner that really allowed us to create a scalable global communication service for our customers, and being able to operate across regions and time zones," he said. "So it was kind of a no-brainer for us when we discovered what Telnyx was capable of."

Most of the building blocks were already there

A decade of provider integrations had taught ctelo to budget generously for implementation. The budget went unused.

"Honestly, it was simpler than we expected," Solvang said. "Some of these processes have been taking a really long time and being complex in getting things done. But in our experience with Telnyx, most of the building blocks were already there. That made it really easy for us to implement the solution with Telnyx towards our global Teams phone cloud service."

The porting case that would not resolve itself

Moving customers' existing numbers is where the work gets hardest, and Solvang pointed to the United Kingdom as the market that proves it.

"The UK can be a bit troublesome when it comes to porting of numbers, because it's quite a complex number-owning structure," he said. "If the customer actually has the numbers with a reseller of a telco that has probably rented the numbers from a third telco, then it's really hard to find out who owns the numbers."

One number porting case stalled on exactly that question, and without an answer the port could not begin.

"The patience that your support showed in that process, where we had to really try to find out who owns the number so we could get to the porting phase, that was outstanding," Solvang said. "They didn't leave me hanging. They followed up from support and just kept in there to try to figure out where these numbers were."

Four times the business in two years

Solvang measures the partnership in two numbers: the count of countries where ctelo can now deliver its service, which he called the biggest growth the company has had since it introduced Telnyx, and the size of the customer base.

"When we started with Telnyx, we had a few customers, but the growth has been really good," he said. "We have grown by, I think, four times now in the last two years. We started out slow, but then it really picked up when we got the trust in Telnyx and the services that you deliver."

That trust, in his telling, came from consistency: a reliable service over time, transparent communication and responsive support. It also set a simple rule for where new business goes. "As long as we can trust Telnyx, we will just continue and put the customers on the Telnyx services," he said.

Built for global communications businesses

Two years in, Solvang's recommendation rests on the record of the platform itself.

"In my experience, the backend of Telnyx is really stable, and I'm not sure we've had any serious operational flaws since we started two years ago," he said. "It's a really low error rate. If you have something happening, and it always does when it comes to telco services, Telnyx is really quick in fixing it."

"If you are in the business like we are, where you are building a global communications business, where you have an offer for global customers, I think they really should look into Telnyx for that," he said. "For those that want to develop with a partner that is not just a telco but is also very IT oriented, adding these IT services like AI services and so on, I think that makes this a good choice."

ctelo built its global Teams telephony platform on Telnyx. If you're consolidating communications providers across countries, the same phone numbers, number porting, and Microsoft Teams integration ctelo relies on are available to you.