Verizon has announced further integration between Microsoft Teams and its BlueJeans videoconferencing platform.

Verizon purchased BlueJeans in April 2019, in the early days of the pandemic, in an effort to gain a bigger piece of the remote work and collaboration market. Verizon quickly started buildingon BlueJeans’ existing features, and added partnerships to help speed its adoption.

Microsoft Teams is one of the biggest partnerships Verizon has managed to score, and today’s announcement furthers that with enhancements to BlueJeans Gateway for Microsoft Teams (BlueJeans Gateway). Pairing the two services helps companies collaborate, regardless of their physical location.

Verizon has also been named one of Microsoft’s launch partners for Operator Connect, an initiative to create “a direct peering relationship between the Microsoft Teams platform and Verizon’s far-reaching SIP trunking network.” The goal of Operator Connect is to bring PSTN calling to Teams, along with enterprise-grade security, reliability and management.

“The pandemic has intensified the need for organizations to have enterprise-grade collaboration solutions for their global workforces to stay connected and work more effectively from every possible environment,” said Sampath Sowmyanarayan, President of Global Enterprise at Verizon Business. “These latest updates to our advanced communications portfolio with the BlueJeans Gateway and Microsoft’s new Operator Connect platform, further simplify how enterprises can readily deploy solutions at-scale to streamline connectivity, extract the most value from existing investments, and future-proof collaboration infrastructure to meet the most pressing demands of the hybrid workplace.”