About Us

Our Story

The founding vision

Founded by Mark Herbert and Richard Carver, Dstny Automate is a fast-growing innovative scale-up, that has established itself on the global unified communications stage.

Established in 2017, the founding vision was to provide a simple and cost-effective way to integrate existing voice and telephony systems with IT and collaborative working tools.

Conventionally telephony and IT systems have been very separate – Dstny Automate’s founders believed that these two massive markets would at some time come together.  The multi-billion-dollar global market for telephony market colliding with the multi-billion-dollar global market for IT.

“Looking ahead we could see that Voice and IT would collide and we wanted to be in that collision zone”

Mark Herbert, co-Founder, Dstny Automate.

How it all began

Bringing 20+ years of Microsoft expertise, as well as entrepreneurial grit, Mark and Richard previously worked together at IntY, a company founded by Mark and the first in the UK to secure a Microsoft syndication agreement for distributing Office 365. They subsequently gained valuable voice experience by building their own telephony platform, One Voice (which has since been sold).

Recognizing the opportunity provided by Microsoft, the first Voice integration built was for Skype for Business.

Following feedback from partners, the business realized that many enterprises had multi-year contracts in place with their existing telephony partners, so while they were interested in the Skype for Business integration, they did not want to move telephony platform.  Thus, the business focused on creating a middleware product that was phone system agnostic. With developments closely tracking Microsoft, Call2Skype transformed into Call2Teams.

The Call2Teams solution

Cloud-native and SaaS-based Call2Teams is sold exclusively through the Channel. Drawing on the experience of operating global enterprise SaaS platforms and developing cloud-based SaaS commerce and distribution technology (developed by Mark and Richard in their IntY days) the Call2Teams platform is multi-tiered and multi-tenant. Built for enterprise use, the service is subscription-based, with a per-user, per-month billing model, with no set-up cost. Call2Teams supports both on-premise and cloud voice solutions, with interoperability for 60+ Trunks and PBX providers.

The Go-to Market strategy

Call2Teams as a product was market-ready in early 2020.  It soon became clear that a channel-only go-to-market strategy would be most effective as channel partners could provide access to high numbers of users in a way that going direct to business couldn’t.

We targeted the world’s biggest UCaaS providers.  In our view, these companies had the most to gain – and to lose – from Microsoft’s development of their Teams product.

And then the pandemic happened…

Suddenly businesses large and small had to adapt very, very quickly to their teams needing to work from home. Use of Microsoft Teams exploded and almost overnight became the collaboration tool of choice for huge swathes of organizations across all sectors.   

These organizations needed voice services as well as video and messaging as part of their collaboration tooling.  Much to the dismay of the big UCaaS providers, Microsoft was ready to step into the breach, offering calling plans with minutes and numbers that would voice-enable Teams.

The big UCaaS providers – and hundreds of voice resellers – all suddenly needed a mechanism to pull their voice services into Microsoft Teams.  There was no time for them to build their own solutions. Call2Teams was in the right place, at the right time with a product that was easy to buy, quick to deploy and already enterprise-grade in terms of availability, security and global infrastructure.

Call2Teams, with its out-of-the-box solution, that took only days to set up, was the perfect choice.

Our success

Driven by both the convergence of IT and telephony and changes in working practice prompted by the pandemic, 2020 saw the business grow exponentially.

The Call2Teams solution, often hidden, is now an integral part of the product portfolio of many global UC solution providers.

Dstny Automate works with 300+ distributors, resellers, and Managed Service Providers (MSPs). Dstny Automate with its Call2Teams solution, has a user base spread across 50+ countries, with access to 100M+ end-users via their channel partners.

In a call requested by an NYSE analyst, Call2Teams was described as ‘the de facto standard for voice enabling Microsoft Teams’.

We are part of Dstny

In March 2022 we joined Dstny Group. Changing our name from Qunifi to Dstny Automate.

This is an exciting new chapter in the growth of our company. With Dstny by our side, we now have additional support to innovate and advance whilst staying true to delivering a great partner experience.

Pictured, left to right: Mark Herbert, Co-founder and President Dstny Automate, Richard Carver Co-founder and Chief Transformational Officer, Dstny Automate, Jeannie Arthur CEO, Dstny Automate and Patrik Sorqvist Chief Operating Officer, Dstny

The next chapter

We maintain a razor-sharp focus on innovation and staying ahead of the game. Developing and improving our Call2Teams solution, growing new geographies, and developing new products.



The Carrier Automate solution

Our latest product solution has been developed in response to Microsoft Operator Connect. Carrier Automate is a cloud service technology that bridges between Service Providers (telco operators and carriers) and Microsoft Teams.  Partnering with Ribbon Communications, we are one of only a handful of approved Microsoft Operator Connect Accelerator partners.

But our ambition and vision for the solution does not stop there.

This product is in early life but promises to be as innovative and class-leading as Call2Teams. With an ambitious product roadmap that reaches beyond Microsoft Teams, with the aim to deliver the plug-and-play integration of the future for voice, IT and UCaaS.

“I am immensely proud of the team at Dstny Automate. We are at the cutting edge of market change, in the collision zone between IT and Voice.

The team has risen to the challenge of delivering mission-critical services to some of the world’s biggest Voice and UC providers. Our flagship solution, Call2Teams, is recognized as the de facto standard for voice-enabling Microsoft Teams.

This has delivered exponential growth for the company. The business remains true to its entrepreneurial roots, we remain agile and innovative. With our next venture, Carrier Automate, promising to be as exciting.”

Jeannie Arthur, CEO, Dstny Automate.