The New South Wales Rugby League (NSWRL) has officially ended its reliance on aging telephony infrastructure, announcing on June 18, 2026, that it has migrated from a traditional PABX setup to a cloud-based contact centre platform built natively for Microsoft Teams. The new system, AnywhereNow’s Tendfor, replaces an on-premises private automatic branch exchange that had long anchored the organization’s voice communications but lacked the agility required for modern fan and stakeholder engagement. The move signals a strategic push by one of Australia’s premier sporting bodies to streamline operations, cut costs, and deliver a more responsive service experience through deep integration with the Teams collaboration environment already used across the league.
Tendfor is not a bolt-on adapter but a purpose-built attendant console and contact centre solution that lives entirely within the Microsoft Teams ecosystem. For NSWRL staff, this means no separate softphone applications, no clumsy forwarding rules, and no disjointed reporting tools. Agents handle inbound calls, manage queues, access presence indicators, and view real-time analytics—all from the same Teams client they use for chat, video meetings, and file sharing. AnywhereNow positions Tendfor as a way for organisations to “bring their own carrier” while leveraging Teams Phone System, effectively eliminating the need for dedicated PBX hardware and simplifying license management through Microsoft’s existing admin centre.
The project underscores a mounting appetite for Teams-native voice among mid-sized and large enterprises, especially those already invested in Microsoft 365. For NSWRL, the drivers were both operational and financial. Maintaining a legacy PABX had become a drag on IT resources: hardware refresh cycles, specialist maintenance contracts, and the sheer difficulty of integrating with cloud services increasingly turned the old system into a liability. By shifting to Tendfor, the league gains elastic capacity, built-in disaster recovery, and the ability to spin up remote contact centre agents without complex VPN configurations—critical in a sports organisation where staff often travel with teams or work from venues.
Several technical differentiators set Tendfor apart from generic cloud telephony replacements. Because it hooks directly into Teams Graph APIs, the platform exposes granular call statistics, wait times, and agent performance metrics inside a single pane of glass. Supervisors can whisper, barge, or monitor calls in real time, while skill-based routing ensures high-value inquiries—such as media accreditation or corporate partnership leads—reach the right people instantly. Interactive voice response (IVR) flows are configured through a visual designer, removing the scripting burden that often plagues legacy auto-attendant setups. And crucially, all call recordings and transcripts are stored natively in Microsoft 365, aligning with the league’s compliance and eDiscovery requirements without extra third-party archives.
NSWRL is far from alone in abandoning private branch exchanges. Across Australia, enterprises that installed PABX systems in the 1990s or early 2000s are reaching end-of-life, with many vendors ceasing support for legacy ISDN and analog lines. The National Broadband Network’s gradual sunset of copper services has only accelerated the timeline, forcing organisations to adopt SIP trunking or full-cloud models. In the sporting sector, where match-day call volumes can spike tenfold, the elasticity of cloud contact centres provides a compelling business case. The league’s fan engagement team, for instance, can now temporarily expand its agent pool during State of Origin or finals series without touching physical hardware.
Industry observers note that the shift mirrors a wider trend of “Teams as a platform” rather than just a messaging tool. Microsoft’s own Intelligent Contact Center, announced in 2022 and now commercially available, has spurred an ecosystem of independent software vendors like AnywhereNow, Landis, and Luware to deliver certified solutions that fill gaps in native Teams contact centre functionality. By choosing a partner-built platform, NSWRL avoided potential lock-in to a single carrier’s cloud PBX while still enjoying the familiarity of the Teams interface. Pricing models typically follow a per-agent per-month subscription, which aligns operating expenses with actual usage—a welcome change from the sunk capital costs of traditional PBX deployments.
Migration of this scale is never trivial, however. Sources close to the project indicated that a phased cutover minimized disruption. The league first ported its main inbound numbers to a certified SIP trunk provider compatible with Teams Direct Routing, allowing coexistence between the old PABX and the new Tendfor queues during testing. Critical extensions, such as those used by the integrity unit and referee appointments desk, were migrated one at a time over several weeks. User training consisted of short Teams-based walkthroughs, since agents were already comfortable with the Teams interface; the attendant console’s contextual panels simply replaced the physical phone’s button grid. Early feedback suggests that average handle times have dropped as agents now see a 360-degree view of each caller’s previous interactions, including emails and chat messages, without switching apps.
Yet the path was not without its critics. Some veteran staff members missed the tactile feedback of desk phones, and there was a brief adjustment period as the organization fine-tuned its call routing rules. “Any technology shift that touches every employee’s daily workflow requires a change management plan,” said a consultant familiar with the rollout, speaking on background. “The difference here is that because the tool lives inside Teams, the learning curve is far shorter than moving to a completely foreign platform.” NSWRL’s IT leadership reportedly evaluated three competing solutions before selecting Tendfor, citing its tightly integrated analytics dashboards as a decisive factor.
The implications for customer service analytics are profound. Tendfor’s Power BI connector allows the league to merge contact centre data with ticket sales, membership numbers, and social media sentiment—creating a unified dashboard that tracks fan journey touchpoints. For the first time, NSWRL can correlate spikes in call volume with specific marketing campaigns, on-field incidents, or weather events that disrupt fixtures. These insights feed back into workforce planning, helping managers staff appropriately and reducing the dreaded “your call is important to us” hold music that frustrates fans.
For Microsoft, each high-profile Teams voice deployment strengthens its argument that enterprises can consolidate collaboration and telephony on a single platform. The company has been aggressively marketing Teams Phone with calling plans in Australia since 2018, and recent expansions of its domestic calling infrastructure have reduced latency for local users. While Cisco and Avaya still hold pockets of the contact centre market, the momentum is clearly shifting toward cloud-native, API-first architectures that treat voice as just another data stream. Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service, published in 2025, positioned several Teams-native vendors in the Visionaries quadrant, a sign that the model is crossing the chasm from early adopters to mainstream buyers.
Looking ahead, NSWRL plans to extend the platform’s capabilities by integrating chatbots via Power Virtual Agents, enabling self-service for common enquiries such as fixture dates and junior registration pathways. The league is also exploring AI-based sentiment analysis that would alert supervisors when a caller’s tone indicates frustration, triggering a real-time coach to assist the agent. For the 7,500+ grassroots clubs affiliated with NSWRL, the eventual goal is a shared service centre that can triage calls from players, coaches, and volunteers using the same Teams-native backbone.
The switch from PABX to Teams-native contact centre is more than a technology refresh for the New South Wales Rugby League—it is a deliberate step toward a digital operating model that prizes flexibility, data visibility, and user experience. As other state and national sporting organisations watch this deployment, the success metrics from NSWRL’s move will likely shape procurement strategies across the sector. The old desk phone may finally be hanging up for good.