Tango Networks celebrates its 20th anniversary this month!
It’s a milestone that not only highlights the journey of our company but also reflects the remarkable evolution of Mobile Unified Communications over the past two decades.
Since our founding in 2005, the mobile landscape has been transformed by technical innovations and shifting workplace dynamics. We are proud to have been at the forefront of enabling enterprises to take advantage of these changes.
From Feature Phones to the Smartphone Revolution
When Tango launched in 2005, most mobile users were carrying flip phones and BlackBerry devices. Voice and text dominated, and mobile integration into enterprise communications systems was limited.
That all changed in 2007 with the launch of the iPhone. Smartphones quickly became mass-market devices, putting powerful computing and app ecosystems into everyone’s pocket.
Tango recognized early that enterprise communications needed to extend to these new mobile devices. We pioneered solutions that connected mobile phones directly into corporate voice networks, making smartphones true extensions of business communications systems.
The Rise of BYOD
Employees naturally wanted to use these devices for work, ushering in the era of “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD).
This shift gave workers greater flexibility and ease of use, but it also raised challenges for IT and security teams.
How do you enable personal phones to use company phone numbers? How do you record calls for records retention or for customer survey quality control?
Early answers to these questions involved placing apps on employee personal phones, requiring employees to use these apps to make business calls. The apps would route the communications “over the top” to the corporate calling platform using the data network.
App Dissatisfaction
But over the years, industry researchers reported that adoption of these apps was uniformly dismal.
The apps were hard to use and not intuitive. The over-the-top communications had poor voice quality. The result is that almost all employees ignored the apps and used their personal numbers to conduct business.
And that carries very serious consequences for many businesses. Regulators in the UK and US have fined financial services firms billions of dollars for allowing employees to conduct regulated communications on personal phones and apps.
We recognized early on that the logical solution to this problem was to enable BYOD phones to utilize the company calling platform, but to do so with the phone’s native interface.
In the original implementation of our solutions, this was accomplished by adding a second physical SIM to a dual SIM BYOD phone. The result was two phone lines in the personal device – one for personal use and the other for business.
The business line would route calls and SMS texts to the corporate communications platform, where IT could enforce policies, record calls and have direct control over the communications. Employees could communicate using business numbers and the corporate identity on personal phones using the simple native interface.
But then the rise of eSIMs became a gamechanger for BYOD integration into corporate communications.
From Physical SIMs to eSIMs
With an eSIM, a business line can be provisioned in a mobile device digitally, by simply scanning a QR code, making it seamless for an employee’s phone to carry both personal and business lines for communications.
Tango was early to leverage eSIMs to simplify enterprise mobile UC. With Tango Extend, employees can instantly activate a corporate identity on their personal smartphone without extra hardware, apps, or clunky workarounds.
Their personal lines remain personal, and their business line is in full company control, with all the bells and whistles of an office landline. Savvy IT leaders also realized this meant costly landlines and office-provided mobiles were no longer necessary, and employees on the move were more productive.
Work-from-Anywhere Becomes the Norm
Even before the pandemic, improvements in cloud IT and collaboration tools were enabling remote work. When the pandemic arrived in 2020, working from anywhere went from a perk to a necessity. Organizations quickly realized that mobility was no longer optional – it was foundational to keeping the enterprise going.
Tango’s solutions empowered enterprises to maintain business continuity by keeping remote employees connected through their mobile devices, no matter where they were. With secure mobile integration, companies could ensure professionalism, compliance, and productivity even outside the office walls.
As the pandemic waned and business returned to normal, it turns out that remote working has become a permanent feature in about half of businesses surveyed by Gallup.
This has even further accelerated the need for enterprises to adopt simple and flexible communications that can enable the distributed workforce to communicate just as they had in the office.
Looking Ahead
From the early days of flip phones to today’s flexible, mobile-first workplaces, Tango has been innovating at every stage of mobile UC’s evolution.
As we celebrate 20 years, we remain committed to helping enterprises unlock the power of mobile communications – ensuring employees can stay connected, productive, and compliant wherever work takes them.
