Will 2025 Be The Year IT Gets Ahead?
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Enterprise IT departments ended 2024 under more pressure than ever to ensure excellent Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 performance. With hybrid work booming, AI everywhere, and businesses increasingly concerned about rising costs, expectations are only likely to intensify in the year ahead.
Fortunately, IT teams have also never been better equipped to deliver — on their own or with the support of partner MSPs (managed service providers) who can bring value-added expertise in cybersecurity, backup and disaster recovery, helpdesk and support, virtualization, network management and compliance.
With the right strategies and right tools, 2025 could be the year enterprise IT takes control of the Microsoft digital experience for good.
In this blog, we take a look at some of the dominant trends influencing the collaboration and productivity software space as the new year gets underway — and what they mean for IT departments around the world.
1. Remote and hybrid work aren’t going anywhere.
Even after many organizations implemented return-to-the-office (RTO) mandates last year, remote and hybrid work remain an intractable fact of life for businesses in the 2020s. (Some managers are going so far as to support ‘hushed hybrid’ work — letting workers continue to work from home to keep them happy and productive despite RTO policies.)
Given that, it’s a safe bet that use of Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 is going to keep growing: up from last year’s 300 million-plus monthly active Teams users generating five billion meeting minutes a day while Microsoft 365 dominated a whopping 46% of the global office software market.
What does all that mean for enterprise IT? Even higher expectations to keep Teams and Microsoft 365 working as they should.
2. Enterprises will want remote work to cost less.
The trouble is, Microsoft 365 and Teams don’t always work as they should. Common issues range from microphone and webcam glitches to connectivity and login problems, freeze-ups and crashes. And those issues have a price tag. Martello’s new cost model co-developed with EnableUC shows that a company with 2,500 users, five locations and 40% remote work can spend $540,000 a year on Teams support alone. That jumps to over $1 million for organizations with 10,000 users and 20 locations even with half that volume of remote work.
The lowdown: As enterprises seek to cut costs generally, minimizing tech support with proactive maintenance on business-critical apps is likely to become a growing priority.
3. AI performance will become another demand on IT.
The 2024 Microsoft Work Trend Index published in June found workers want AI to help relieve their burdens and companies are increasingly looking for employees experienced in using AI tools. Last year’s addition of Copilot to Teams helps meet both needs, providing ways for workers to gain efficiencies as well as the AI skills employers want. But Copilot is a premium service, meaning organizations are paying for cutting-edge AI capabilities — and need to generate returns.
The upshot: IT will be expected to manage highly time-sensitive network performance for Copilot AI.
4. DEM tools for Microsoft will give IT the edge they need.
Another finding of Martello’s cost model is that proactive monitoring and advanced troubleshooting with Vantage DX measurably speed up issue resolution and reduce IT costs, helping cut Teams support tickets alone by up to 60%. And when issues originate on the Microsoft end of the service, IT knows sooner thanks to Martello’s Microsoft Outage Early Warning feature, which sends automated alerts well before Microsoft makes an official announcement — in an October 2024 outage, nearly three hours ahead.
Conclusion: With Vantage DX, IT can check more boxes for the enterprise, users and overall digital experience when it comes to Microsoft 365 and Teams performance.
5. Enterprises will turn to MSPs for help.
KPMG’s 2023-2024 Global Managed Services Outlook found that nearly three-quarters (73%) of companies already make use of managed services — often to access new technologies and pursue strategic priorities. When it comes to Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 DEM, managed service providers (MSPs) offer a convenient, flexible way to bridge internal gaps in headcount, skills and processes. MSPs will have the opportunity in 2025 to bring significant value by simplifying Microsoft Teams/365 licensing, deployment and monitoring, both for standard services and premium offerings such as Teams Phone and Teams Rooms.
In it for the long haul
Martello is committed to evolving Vantage DX and providing the solution-specific support for Microsoft Teams and 365 that enterprises and MSPs are going to require in 2025 and beyond. Learn more about the business case for Vantage DX by digging deeper into our cost study here.
