50 Best Companies to Watch 2022
The Silicon Review
“One of our main focus areas has become adding invaluable Teams features for remote and hybrid workers, part of that entails adding features beyond the voice for Microsoft Teams.”
SCB Global is a leading provider of Microsoft Teams and SD-WAN solutions for the enterprise, delivering workplace transformation for the dynamic workforce. The company was established in 2004 and it continues to deliver cutting-edge voice solutions to its clients around the world.
SCB Global is headquartered in London, England and has US office in Chicago.
The Silicon Review reached out to SCB Global headquarters and spoke with Saif Ahmed, who serves as the company’s Chief Executive Officer. Here’s what he said.
Interview Highlights
Q. What groundbreaking and proactive methodology does SCB Global implement to meet its clients’ expectations?
As far as our methodology, we inculcate three basic components necessary for creating an optimal customer experience journey which is discovery, engagement, and delivery. We couple this with three E’s that is championed by our implementation expert: expectation, experience, and execution.
In terms of meeting client expectations, one major focus we have as a company is making sure we listen and understand what our customers’ needs are before we deploy. Even though it sounds simple, having those in-depth conversations and meetings with our clients makes our team better prepared to be able to deliver a functional solution. At the end of the day, our goal is not to sell a product, but to bring our clients a solution, which will facilitate the way they operate daily and drive efficiency in collaboration .
Q. What can you tell us about Microsoft voice solutions? And how do these solutions address your clients’ pain points?
Microsoft Teams is integrated with our Opto4Teams solution and has the potential to remove six disparate “siloed” systems that are usually deployed in an organization or enterprise.
We see that part of the pain points for many clients is that they must deploy, purchase, and maintain different systems. Additionally, these all add to maintenance and support time being spent on systems that don’t necessarily need to be so heavy on procurement, redundancy and ongoing support.
What we have done is, unified these, and eliminated the traditional PBX, video telephony, SIP, SMS, contact center, and fax provider. The enterprise CRM can be hooked up to Teams for seemless contact centre experience.
By breaking down these “siloed” systems through multiple vendors, we are then able to make them available on one single solution, which all resides within Microsoft Teams and running entirely from Azure. This is only possible through Opto4Teams, the only solution of it’s kind currently available in the market
Q. What are your other focus areas?
One of our main focus areas now has become our enhanced Microsoft Teams security features for remote and hybrid workers, part of that entails bringing the security and policy implementation to the Microsoft Teams solution. By doing so, enterprise administrators will have access to security and policies alongside their Microsoft Teams administration, all in one place. Currently many enterprise administrators do not feel there is enough granularity or widely encompassing security controls within Teams.
Q. In what industries are your clients? Can you provide us with one or two success stories describing the challenges your clients faced and how your solutions helped them overcome those challenges?
Due to our advanced Microsoft Teams Integrated solutions not being a one-size-fits-all, we provide customized solutions to a wide range of industries, including financial, manufacturing, shipping, as well as public sector organizations.
A recent project we have taken on iswith a well-known renowned food manufacturing company. This client has now deployed multiple sites across the world with OPTO4Teams and OPTO4Contact solutions. We have helped the different distribution, warehouse, and manufacturing offices deploy a single vendor solution across potentially over 100 sites around the world. That itself reduced a significant administration and procurement burden on such a large global organization that we have helped eliminate and save over $10 million
Q. How skilled is the SCB team of experts? And how do they bring value to the company?
Our team of in-house certified individuals drives our growth. We wouldn’t be where we are today if it wasn’t for the skilled and expert global staff. Having such a team in place, it becomes easy to deliver industry-leading solutions natively integrated into Microsoft Teams and hosted in Azure.
Q. What new endeavors is SCB currently undertaking?
We are currently expanding by working with various U.S. agencies and master agencies across the country. We have done a lot of work in the East Coast, where we are more widely known, but we aim to continue to grow across all regions.
Through this expansion, we also aim to gain recognition for our expert work around natively deployed Microsoft Teams. For this reason, we continue to make those connections and have those conversations with agents in those areas to convey the message and help the enterprises that need our advanced and specialized solutions running out of 12 Microsoft Azure PoPs around the world.
Q. Given how frequently circumstances change, what plans for transformation are you pursuing to remain relevant now and in the future?
The fact that SCB as aglobal company operates in a hybrid mode, gives us first-hand insight into what we are offering, which is workplace transformation. Hybrid work is a major aspect of this workplace transformation, and we are at the forefront of this by offering Microsoft Teams solutions that go beyond voice or purely Direct Routing.
It’s important to understand that voice is one element and going forward, the way enterprises will collaborate will incorporate far more than just voice. There will be many other aspects of technology and collaboration tools, which we bring to our customers with solutions that deliver communication beyond voice.
Q. Is there anything else you want us to highlight that we might have missed?
It’s important to highlight that we are operating natively within Microsoft Azure and we are on the Operator Connect program, which gives us the credibility and confidence to say we are the most qualified provider for enhancing the Microsoft Teams experience within the enterprise.
Saif Ahmed | CEO
Saif Ahmed is an entrepreneurial and visionary business leader with over 20 years of experience in different verticals (covering retail, B2B, IT VAR, software, and telecoms). Saif has particular interests and a proven track record in growing technology start-ups.
As a leading figure of Comms 4.0, Saif spearheads SCB Global at the forefront of the new era of communication beyond voice. His vision has always been to bring to the market innovative business tools that deliver efficiency in collaboration.