I have been involved in IP office since R1.1, hence no hair. I bleed IPO. I have it in my house, connected to an AWS system, again, i am a nerd. When ACO came out, i did fight a bit on it. I though no none would pay monthly, that kind of money forever. I am surprised when they usually dont bat an eye at the cost.
Dont get me wrong, i get (more than my leadership) that cloud isnt for everyone. I get that certain partners or areas, cannot sell it as they are in smaller municipalities where the FCC says that they dont have to port the numbers away. Tons of reasons.
But, if we have a customer that wants to go Teams Direct Routing, with an IP office i cringe. I have partners that are absolutely capable to setting the necessary SBC's, certificates and infrastructure to talk to MS Teams. BUT, there are a lot of points of failure. SBC, IPO hardware, network issues etc...
For Direct Routing for Teams, ACO is an easier option. They get the 5 nines resiliency (like 5 min down time/year) and the sync between ACO/Ring and MS Teams is super easy...the hard part is the config of the teams stuff on the MS side. I was able to figure it all out, and know ZERO about MS/O365/TEAMS. And in the end, this is what the cloud is supposed to be, and easy way to consume the widgets you need.
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