Author: Howard M. Cohen
Ziro CEO Steven Karachinsky recently appeared on the Microsoft Partner Secrets webcast with Idenxt CEO Per Werngren. The following is a report on that conversation!
For years, telephony was the workload nobody wanted to touch. Complicated. Telco-dependent. Hardware-heavy. A nightmare for partners and customers alike. Steven Karachinsky, CEO and co-founder of Sira, is betting that era is over. And the numbers suggest he’s right.
The Gap Nobody’s Talking About
Here’s a number worth sitting with: Microsoft Teams has 350 million monthly active users. Teams Phone, the PSTN-enabled voice component, has just 26 million. That’s roughly 6% penetration. Which means 94% of Teams users are still paying for a separate phone system that sits outside their tenant, outside their governance framework, and outside the reach of Copilot and AI.
That gap isn’t a problem. It’s an opportunity. And Ziro has built its entire go-to-market motion around closing it.
“Voice today is not that commodity phone system anymore,” Karachinsky told the Microsoft Partner Secrets podcast. “It’s truly a gold mine! A treasure trove of data ready to be mined, used, leveraged by Copilot and AI.” The implication is significant. Every conversation happening on Teams Phone is a structured data asset waiting to power AI agents, surface insights, and drive measurable business outcomes. Ziro is launching those AI-powered communication agents in April.
Microsoft Alignment as Competitive Strategy
What separates Ziro from the crowded field of UCaaS vendors isn’t a feature list. It’s a strategic posture. Rather than positioning as a multi-vendor, Switzerland-neutral solution provider, Ziro made a deliberate choice to go deep on Microsoft, culturally, technically, and commercially.
“We decided to choose depth over breadth,” Karachinsky explained. “We really align almost culturally with what’s happening at Microsoft. How they show up, how they work, what their ecosystem expects.” The result is a platform that amplifies Microsoft’s investments rather than competing with them, reducing risk for partners and accelerating time-to-value for customers.
That alignment paid off!A close relationship with Microsoft’s converged communications CSA team led to strategic funding programs and active co-sell initiatives tied to Copilot and AI. The data Microsoft itself tracks makes the business case undeniable; customers with E5 licenses and Teams Phone enabled are 45% more likely to renew their E5. Activating voice inside the tenant isn’t just a convenience play, it’s a retention strategy.
Channel-First, By Design
Ziro didn’t start as a channel company. They learned the hard way, spending years as a direct enterprise shop before recognizing they couldn’t scale alone. About five years ago, they went all-in on channel, rebuilding their product, pricing, messaging, and delivery model around partner success.
The shift required more than a new go-to-market slide deck. Products had to be restructured to support partners managing hundreds of customers simultaneously. Sales cycles had to be compressed. Messaging had to work without a technical translator in the room. And the company brought in a global channels leader to build the kind of scalable, repeatable frameworks that make partners feel safe leaning in rather than second-guessing.
The payoff is a model where Teams Phone becomes a natural add-on to existing partner engagements — not a separate eight-month sales cycle, but a “do you want fries with that” conversation inside a license renewal or E3-to-E5 upgrade discussion.
The Migration Math Nobody Does
Here’s where Ziro earns its keep in a business case discussion: On average, 30% fewer users actually need a phone number after migration. Customers discovered that a significant portion of their workforce simply wasn’t using PSTN calling the way they assumed. Combined with eliminating the cost of a redundant phone system running outside the Microsoft tenant, often hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, the ROI becomes, in Karachinsky’s words, “unequivocal.”
The question customers should be asking, he argues, isn’t why they should move to Microsoft. It’s why they haven’t already.
What’s Next
Ziro’s fiscal year started February 1st, and Microsoft Marketplace is a declared priority for this year. Karachinsky was candid about underinvestment there to date but committed to making Marketplace a meaningful revenue channel within the year, citing procurement simplification, Azure Marketplace funds, and reduced vendor onboarding friction as factors that make it, in his words, “crazy beautiful” for enterprise buyers.
With AI agents launching in April, a maturing channel infrastructure, and a 324-million-user addressable market sitting right inside the Microsoft ecosystem, Ziro is positioned at exactly the right intersection of voice, AI, and Microsoft’s platform ambitions. The commodity phone system is dead. The intelligent communications platform is just getting started.
To learn more, contact us here.
