When we talk about office communication systems, the landscape has changed drastically compared to the old days. The era where every employee's desk had a physical phone connected to a dusty PABX box in the server room—complete with ISDN/PRI lines from TM—is mostly behind us. Today, the new market standard is Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS). Simply put, it is a cloud-based system that unifies phone calls, video meetings, chat spaces, and file sharing into a single platform.
The world has plenty of industry players in the UCaaS market. We have Zoom, which is highly popular for video, RingCentral, which is great for legacy phone systems, and Cisco Webex, known for its meeting room hardware. However, if you look at today’s corporate landscape, the majority still choose Microsoft Teams. In fact, Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report itself confirms Microsoft's status as the leader in this segment.
The question is, why does Teams always become the top choice over other alternatives that are sometimes more user-friendly? In reality, this choice is driven by aggressive business strategies, ecosystem advantages, and cost-saving factors.
A big mistake when comparing Microsoft Teams with platforms like Zoom or RingCentral is assuming they are all the same type of product. Other platforms mostly started as communication tools—a place for you to make voice or video calls.
Teams, on the other hand, was designed from the very beginning as a complete digital workspace packed with various functionalities for daily work. This difference becomes very obvious when it comes to employees' daily tasks.
Imagine this scenario: on other platforms, when you are in a video meeting and need to edit an Excel file together with your team, you have to download the file, open it in your desktop app, make changes, and upload it back into the chat. The process is tedious and creates multiple confusing file versions.
In Teams, the integration with the Microsoft 365 ecosystem is native. You can open Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files directly inside the Teams chat window. In fact, the team at Kuala Lumpur HQ and their counterparts in Johor can edit the exact same Excel spreadsheet simultaneously during a live video call without ever leaving the app. Behind the scenes, the system uses SharePoint to store files securely with version history. This kind of workflow makes productivity incredibly smooth.
From the viewpoint of top management and the Finance Department, choosing Microsoft Teams is usually driven by very logical budget factors. The reality is, almost 90% of corporate companies in Malaysia are already subscribing to Microsoft 365 packages for business emails and basic software like Word and Excel.
In most Microsoft 365 subscription plans, whether for SMEs or Enterprises, the license for Microsoft Teams is already included in the package at no extra cost.
If a company decides to use a third-party UCaaS platform like Zoom One or RingCentral for their phone and video systems, they will have to pay for a separate license per user. This cost usually starts from RM60 to RM150+ a month for a single employee.
For organizations with 200 or 1,000 employees, this overlapping cost can reach tens of thousands of ringgit a month. By simply optimizing the existing Teams, the IT department can eliminate this wasteful double-licensing cost and simplify vendor management.
All UCaaS platforms today are racing to introduce Artificial Intelligence (AI) features. Zoom has Zoom AI Companion, and RingCentral has RingSense. However, Microsoft’s advantage lies in the maturity of their AI ecosystem through Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Most AIs on other UCaaS platforms only work on a standalone basis. Meaning, the AI can only summarize what was discussed in that specific video conference.Copilot in Teams, however, operates across your entire organizational data within Microsoft 365. For example, while a meeting is ongoing, you can type a question to Copilot like: "Based on yesterday's email from the client in Outlook and the budget file in OneDrive, is the pricing proposal suggested by Encik Azman reasonable?"
Copilot can cross-reference data from emails, cloud files, and real-time meeting chats to give an accurate answer. Once the meeting ends, Copilot doesn't just generate minutes of the meeting; it can even draft follow-up emails in Outlook and build presentation slides in PowerPoint based on those Teams meeting notes. This level of AI integration is impossible to replicate by competitors who do not own their own suite of office apps.
For the IT Department, introducing a new app into the company means adding another potential security vulnerability. This is where Teams scores full marks from cybersecurity experts.
Because Teams is built on the Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure, its security is centrally managed through Microsoft Entra ID (formerly known as Azure Active Directory). Employees use the exact same corporate email account to log in everywhere. If the company enforces Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) or Conditional Access Policies, those rules automatically apply to Teams.
Aside from infrastructure security, Microsoft Teams also helps solve one of IT’s biggest headaches, which is "Shadow IT." This happens when employees use personal chat apps like WhatsApp or Telegram for work matters because the official company app is too clunky to use. Teams solves this by providing a highly responsive mobile app while ensuring business data cannot be copied or leaked (data leakage) into personal apps.
The final advantage of Teams in the UCaaS category is its capability to act as a mature cloud phone system (Cloud PBX) via Teams Phone. Often, companies are afraid to migrate to a UCaaS system because they are tied down by telecom contracts with providers like Telekom Malaysia, Maxis, or CelcomDigi, and they do not want to lose their existing office phone numbers.
Microsoft solves this problem by offering flexibility through methods like Direct Routing and Operator Connect. With this technology, companies don’t need to switch their telco providers. IT just needs to connect the existing telco lines into the Teams system.
As a result, employees can now make and receive calls to landline office numbers (for example, numbers starting with 03 for Kuala Lumpur) directly through the Teams app on their mobile phones or laptops. Whether employees are at the office, working from home, or traveling abroad for business, they can still be reached using their office number. This gives complete mobility and flexibility to the modern workforce.
In the end, the competition in the UCaaS world is no longer about which platform has the clearest video quality or the coolest emoji stickers. It is about which platform can drive overall business productivity most efficiently.
Zoom might win in terms of popularity for casual use or quick external meetings, while RingCentral might be strong in traditional phone functions. However, for an organization that wants a secure, cost-effective, and deeply integrated system, Microsoft Teams remains tough to beat.
In an economy where every ringgit of IT spending is heavily scrutinized, the smartest choice is often not adding a new vendor, but maximizing what you are already paying for.
Ready to explore what Microsoft Teams could do for your organization? AXO Technologies can help your business seamlessly integrate Microsoft Teams into your workflows, from initial assessment through training and ongoing support.
Contact us now to learn more about how Microsoft Teams can transform the way your team works.
