Tom Arbuthnot and Mark Licinio, Service Owner of Video Conferencing & Teams devices at BP dive deep into Marks' experience with Microsoft Teams Rooms and Digital Workplace.
Thanks to Neat, this episode's sponsor, for your continued support of the Empowering.Cloud community.
Tom Arbuthnot and Mark Licinio, Service Owner of Video Conferencing & Teams devices at BP dive deep into Marks' experience with Microsoft Teams Rooms and Digital Workplace.
Thanks to Neat, this episode's sponsor, for your continued support of the Empowering.Cloud community.
Hi, welcome back to the Teams Insider podcast. Great one this week. If you're into Microsoft Teams rooms, we talked to Mark Licinio at BP. He is the service owner for video conferencing and Teams devices there, and we get into his Microsoft and Microsoft Teams journey. Thoughts on BYO devices, thoughts on rollout and best practice. He's a regular at our events and I really appreciate his input and perspective. Many thanks to Neat who are the sponsor of this podcast. Really appreciate their support of the empowering cloud community. And with that on with the show.
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Hey everybody, welcome back to the pod really excited to do this one I've got a good friend here who I have a lot of offline conversations who i've Managed to convince to get onto the pod to have the same conversation here Mark, do you want to give people a bit of a intro? I'm sure some people know you from the community but a bit of intro and background to you and your role
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Sure, Tom. Good to see you. I work in BP's digital workplace team, and I've been in and around various iterations of OCS, LCS, uh, Skype, and now Teams for the last, whatever it is, years, I forget, let's not mention the
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Yeah, yeah, we've both been in it from the start which is uh too long to talk about
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Yeah. So now I work in a team within Digital Workplace, which is called Site Technology Platforms. And it runs some of the stuff that gets put into BP sites from a digital perspective. So that's, global print service digital signage. And the big hot topic for us or for me is the meeting room experience and the meeting room sort of blueprints and technology.
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Awesome. there's so much we can talk about. I feel like we're going to definitely need a part two here, but I want to start with talk, talk us through that rooms journey and the journey to Microsoft Teams rooms and how you've approached it, what you found.
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Yeah. So we. Deployed quite a lot of poly kit. So think back to poly VSX and view stations, then HDX is, and then group series and trios and all of our group series and trios pre COVID was signing into Skype for business at the time. Pretty good user experience worked really well, but we knew. We were going to go to Teams at some point. So this, we started talking about our Teams journey in 2018. Did some migrations in 2019 and actually finished all of those migrations literally just in time for lock, when lockdown started in the UK. So yeah, March, April, 2020. And so we knew if that was going to be our journey for users, what are we going to do with meeting rooms? And we really. Only, it's interesting because at the time there was a big, we had some Cisco telepresence, which was all EOSL and we communicated with our business stakeholders and they said yeah we still need telepresence rooms. So what we ended up doing was putting in a poly real clarity suite, private cloud regionalized three regions. And then we registered all of our devices to that. And then through that, we got the the real connect service. As all of that kind of went live, lockdown kicked in. So we had all of these meeting rooms using this real clarity solution with no usage. In fact, at some point one day, I'll show you our usage slides over comparing year by
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Did it just drop off a cliff? Obviously, I guess,
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Yeah, absolutely. There was still, operations to run. So was still some usage. It wasn't completely non existent. But What's interesting is our leadership team were one of the first to come back to an office scenario and they've very fairly said we want to get people to start coming back to the office soon, but our meeting room experience isn't good compared to what we've been seeing when everyone's at home working from teams. Everyone's got their own little square. And now our meeting rooms are far removed from that. In fact, we've got that whole bowling room, bowling alley layout, and it just, it doesn't sit well with folks who are coming back into the office, especially if we want to entice people back. And so they said, what do we need to do to fix this problem? So we said, the answer is native meeting rooms. And so we've been very fortunate. We've got a great physical workplace team, so we've been working with them. Funding is always a challenge. So we don't have a big, pot of money just to go crazy and upgrade all the rooms in one go. It's site by site take some time this some new sites happening as well. So slowly, but surely we are replacing our. 1600 video conferencing rooms with that legacy poly estate with some new teams, native stuff.
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:That's quite a big number of rooms, quite a big a big project.
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Yeah. And it's really exciting to do it. It's what's interesting. It's that analogy of painting the golden gate bridge. You by the time you've got to the end, you've got to go back to the start again. So we're always keeping an eye on what's going on with our. friends at the OEMs, everyone's innovating quite a lot. And so we, when something cool and new comes along we want to test it and get it on our catalog as soon as possible.
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Yeah, I feel like you do a really good job. I get to talk to a lot of enterprises. You are very on the pulse with what's going on in the OEM space. You get to test a lot of kit. You seem to have. The time and resources to really dig in. I see a lot of companies that they try and set a standard for the next three years. They're like we're going to be an xyz vendor shop what's your thoughts on that of having a single standard and choosing once versus the kind of golden gate bridge analogy of what's real now might not be real in two years
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:I'm a big fan of standards. And communicating those standards to all the stakeholders that need to know it. Because if it's just up here in your mind and not socialized with anyone it's probably not a standard. So we, we have defined some blueprints for our rooms. What we haven't done is we haven't gone to a single vendor. And that's mainly because of the supply chain issues that we've just experienced coming out of lockdown. And. It's sometimes it's just easier to get a product in one location than it is in another So we are main blueprint themes We've got a small meeting room medium and large and we've basically said for small And by the way, that's two to seven seats Let's keep that simple BYOD USB C single cable powers the laptop connects to the in room AV medium eight to 12 seats, Teams Rooms on Android, and then the larger rooms, Teams Rooms on Windows, with, suitable ceiling mics or whatever it is.
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:That's really good to know two questions come to mind immediately. So I guess the fact that Microsoft Teams supports different hardware, different OEMs, Android and Windows, and has a similar experience. Has that helped you have options and give the users a uniform experience?
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Yeah, definitely. And whilst we in our minds think of medium rooms, Teams Rooms on Android, larger rooms, Teams Rooms on Windows, users don't need to know or care about the OS of what's in that room. They just want to go in and know, is it a plug in this USB C cable or is it. Tap to join. And that's all they really need to know. We've done some little videos, some I want to say, like viral, they're not viral. Not that many people watch them, but some internal marketing videos, just like three or four minute videos to show some of the cooler things that you can do now that we're teams native. So you may have teams running on your smartphone and you want to go into it. You haven't got time to go back to your desk to get your laptop. You can open up the meeting on here on your mobile and say, join me in from this room and stuff like that.
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:That's great. I think that's very undiscoverable. When I, talk to organizations, not many of them are doing a lot to proactively communicate. Like now we're teams native. You have this video. I was showing somebody the other day, the join a room from their laptop. You know, you can pick the audio video device and have the room. They were fascinated. They've been using teams for ages.
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:yeah, yeah. It is. And you know, we're spending some good money on all of this new AV. And so Let's help our audience, our customers get the most out of it. And, the key point is it relieves a lot of the pain points if you are only using CVI.
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Yeah. Yeah. And is that where your users are seeing a lot of upside in functionality,
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:yeah, I mean, it's great to see we've got a team's channel, of course. And we see from time to time different colleagues from around the world. Trinidad was a recent one where they posted in photos of their new team's rooms. And. You know, always give a big heart,
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Yeah.
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:emoji and, and quite often I'll just follow up with them and saying, what are your users saying? And, uh, I'm pleased to say touch wood. Their customers our users are enjoying the new experience. Yeah,
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:That's cool. How do you handle having mixed OEMs, BYOD, Android and Windows and kind of support and operations? Because each of those have unique support dependencies. Each of those have unique like update processes. How does that look?
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:simplest, cleanest environment to support and operate. We lean heavily on Teams Admin Center and Teams Rooms Pro Management Portal.
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Hmm.
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:We have chosen at this stage not to dive into the OEM specific management platforms. I think that would be a bit of a burden on our support teams if they had to keep logging into these different support platforms. On the whole it's okay. It's manageable. Sometimes it mitigates. against some issues. If there's a particular issue affecting a particular make and model, and that's the only one that we had, it could knock out all meeting
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Oh, that's an interesting perspective. I hadn't considered that. I feel like you're reducing risk by spreading the platform a little bit.
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:be honest, it's a bit of that, but honestly, It's mitigating against supply chain issues. It is being open to some new cool stuff. So for example, we were on the Logitech site customer adoption program or cat customer acceptance. Yeah. Um, and we were really pleased with the experience we got with the site. It worked. One thing we look for is. consistency, predictability, and reliability when we're talking about video conferencing. And the site, although it was pre release software, worked really well. Great user experience, it, we know it's going to get better because the site will soon work with the Rally Bar camera to give the best view depending on which way you're looking. So I think Logitech did a really good job, especially about that predictability piece. It's not, as you go in and use the room, there's no real surprises. You just go, Oh, that's, that's cool. That's quite nice. So that's good. And, to be honest, the biggest challenge we have when we're talking about video kind of Changing subjects a little bit is what do we do with the bigger rooms like the 16, 18, 20 seaters, the boardrooms, that kind of thing. And we've yet to find really a great video camera solution for that. Now we are investigating some of the multi camera systems.
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:And when you say great, there is the benchmark. the standards based experience you had already or are you looking to go beyond what you had with standards
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:yeah. If you think back to pre COVID, you're building a meeting room and designing it for the people in the room. And maybe someone dialed in audio only
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:I'm pretty much got ignored. Yeah, exactly.
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Yeah, I know. It's bad, isn't it? But of course, now when we think about hybrid meetings, we've probably well, we know we've got Less people in the office now compared to, that's with our leadership team's blessing. So pre COVID expected to be in at least four days a week, in some cases five. Now we've got a nice work from home two days a week back in the office, three days a week, which is a nice mix. And now when we think about meeting rooms, it's actually someone from, I forget who it is, Microsoft said, you've got to, it sounds counterintuitive, but you've got to design a room for the people who aren't in the
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Yes, this is the funniest thing about kit testing as well. I see so many people that are desperate to get the kit to test the experience. And I'm like you want to be the person at home to judge the experience. Like that's the important part of the testing.
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Yeah, very much so. Especially if you're testing like microphones you've got to be at the far end to Perceive how good it is, and that's why it's great, like joining, for example, a shore or Sennheiser in that from there. They're in the demo room. We just join remotely and listen in. And yeah, when we do test devices, we test them in our lab. I have a colleague of mine, Sanj, and we take it in turns. One of us is in the lab. We've even, I'll just, we've recently just got some of these characters. Let me show you this.
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Yeah. I love the lab.
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Meet
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Oh, yeah.
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Yeah. So we got some of these in recently. 10 pounds.
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Yeah. So for those on audio only, that is cutouts of famous celebrities to do the the testing of multi camera, multi person.
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Exactly. Cause to be honest, there's just, there's two of us and we sometimes testing group framing, speaker tracking, and all that kind of stuff. It's good to have a few more faces in the room. So they help us out with that.
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:I'm glad you touched on audio as well, because that's something I think that gets forgotten in our space. I see. I get to work with some of the AV vendors and some of the IT vendors in the space, and those worlds are still kind of colliding at the moment, but there's definitely an on the IT side. I feel like on the whole, there's an underappreciation for the AV skills needed and kind of the inverse, like the AV side often can. Over engineer because they really care of like, well, no, like you need, you need all these DSPs and all these mics. It's like, well, it's a, you know, it's an eight person room with the bar, do the job. Do you see that tension?
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Yeah it's interesting because we still have. This kind of siloed approach. We've got some great field service engineers, IT engineers. We've got some great AV engineers, but as we all know, there's this convergence going on and there's only so much. Our internal teams can do. And so actually we have a big dependency on our global AV integrator to do some stuff that we can't do internally now, maybe over time. A good example is let's say a DSP. We need to log onto it and tweak some settings. Currently that's kind of out of our. in house skill set, but over time, I think we're going to have to start bringing a little, not all of it, but a little bit more of that in house. Because Being able to tweak some settings and optimize things. For example, if someone wanted to use a room for a slightly different use case for what we had designed it for, it can mean the difference between a disastrous event and some very happy customers. So, yeah, it's a good point about convergence in general.
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Yeah, I think it's, it's really. Interesting. I mean, Microsoft appeared to be driving to make this, you know, simpler and scalable, but there's definitely a point and we can argue over where the point is where you need to bring in the AV professionals to get that really crisp experience. And audio is one of the things I see forgotten. I'm generalizing, but like the IT partners, like stretching what a bar will do, you know, like, like, this is not a bar use case. You need multi mic at this point, you need to think about the acoustics.
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Yeah, and it's interesting because, of course, once you go to Sydney Microphones, it's a different order of magnitude in terms of cost. But I think like if you're going to spend some money making your meeting room work well for hybrid, to my mind, audio is always the most important thing and then video, and it's probably audio content video, if I'm honest So, I have to say the ceiling tile manufacturers that are team certified are pretty amazing. So it's. Fortunately, I mean, touch wood again,
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Yeah. Yeah.
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:some upgrades to, in some way, we have a learning center, which is a building with a number of different training spaces in. Because people are coming back to the office now, it was really important to, to our colleagues in the learning team to make sure those spaces were Teams enabled. Previously, they had some In room AV for VoiceLift. but they didn't have, any poly or any other kind of video conferencing. so we worked with them. Spent a long time understanding what their requirements were, and proposed a solution, working with our global AV integrator and our partner in the UK. And they've just come in and done a really good job of basically making those rooms teams enabled and it's quite a big room, and. There's a couple of cameras in there that's doing the presenter tracking when you can, you know, no one's stand still for very long. And the audio is just astonishingly good from wherever you are in the room. so the technology, I feel like in the last couple of years have has come on leaps and bounds. And I think probably for me, the next thing I want to focus on is, how do we solve the problem of bringing good video to the. Bigger rooms, you know, like the large conference rooms. And it's great to see. There's a couple of things going on. Crestron one beyond's multi-camera solution. And the see vision now q sys solution looks like really interesting. and Hudley crew also very interesting. So we're keeping a very close eye on all of that.
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:It feels like we're on the cusp of that big room, multi camera scenario and the, the AI, direction or whatever you want to call it. Each vendor has their own name for it, but like the idea that a system can take multi feed and dynamically deal with it because you can do a pretty good job today of AV of. Having different manual play settings, like press this button, like these mics up, like this frame up, but as you said earlier, that's not how people tend to work. You'll give them a boardroom and they'll all decide to sit on the left because they will want to huddle together for some reason. And then the layouts aren't working. So, uh, I'm really excited for the next sort of year OEMs. You mentioned the center of room cameras as well, like they're all going to have to. Compete on both optics and AI direction to get that really good natural experience.
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Yeah. And, one of the things that we got fed back to us was what we want to see is have a good experience is like when we were all in lockdown, we all had our own squares. That's what we kind of want to get to, and Microsoft understands that. And so it's really interesting to see, how, is going to work, especially with the registering your face. I don't know how controversial that will be. I mean, I'm comfortable with enrolling my face into our team's tenant. Uh, I know some people feel a bit uncomfortable about that, like from a privacy perspective, and I kind of get that it's, it's opt in, you can opt out at any time but I think for when you start adding stuff like co pilot into the mix, knowing who's saying what from the meeting room. That's, I mean, like, pretty
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Yeah. I think the copilot stuff will drive the enrollment because there'll be personal value back to you. Slash a bit of kind of social peer pressure of like, we all want the minutes to work properly. I think sans copilot, it would have been a lot harder because there's no. upside to making the individual do it. So, um, but yeah, that's really interesting. It'll also be interesting to see how you mentioned the, the, the squares, like that, that seems to be the minimum bar for a lot of people these days. But do we end up with AI that's good enough to create? Intelligent direction, like, you know, pan outs to give you context of the room at the right point. Like, I can see a point in time. I think we're a way off it, but I can see a point in time where a multi camera system can start to get really intelligent with multi mics to be like, Oh, this is probably the right shot now. And this is probably the right shot now. That'd be really interesting.
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Yeah, I think there's a lot of people, a lot of smart people, way smarter than I am, thinking about all these different scenarios, and how to integrate the audio stream, or, you know, the lobes from the mics, camera angles, positions. The key thing, though, is to do it at a price point where we can mass deploy it. Because if it's too expensive, it'll only go into a boardroom, and we've only got... Probably two or three of those in BP, one in our HQ, another one in our Washington office, and, you know, a couple more what we hope I'm hoping to see is something that is more from a price point, more accessible to deploy in any room that's like more than my client. let's say 16 seats to give everybody a seat at a virtual table.
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Yeah, I think that that aligns to what Microsoft's objective seems to be, which is pushing the technology and price point down. So it's more accessible to more rooms. So there's not this us and them experience of like, there's, you know, a 250 K telepresence room and then there's BYOD and there's nothing in between basically.
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Yeah, exactly. It's
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Awesome. So Mark, like you said at the start, you've been in this from the early days. What advice would you give to your peers at other enterprises in similar roles in terms of going on this team dreams journey.
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:really hard. I'm not sure. Um,
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Just, you know, just condense, you know, 15 years of experience into a soundbite. That's all I'm asking for. I mean, something that stands out to me with you is the amount of thought and testing and work you do with, uh, Business side requirements and the OEMs, like I don't talk to many other people that are spending like, like you said, the, the Logitech early access, the taps, the testing that seems to be you and the team put a decent amount of effort into that. Is that fair?
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:it is. I mean, we, what I feel is if we can have some good or great relationships with the OEMs, they genuinely value feedback, you know, constructive feedback. and so that helps them make a Better product that's going to be more in line with what we, feel is right from a user experience perspective, which means we can, deploy more of those. So for me, it's a win win the effort you put in, you know, even taking the time to go to ISE. or another, even some of the community events, certainly that, you know, the events that you put on Tom in person events, and organized, you know, being part of a community. And I have to say, you know, I think when you think about our sort of unified communications. community, the, creators, the bloggers, it's such a nice community to be part of. There's always something going on and it's always interesting to listen and hear what other people are doing. So. for me, it's, I'm very blessed because I do absorb a lot of information that you and your peers put out there. so to be honest, that does make, you know, my life a bit easier. And I would encourage anyone to, who's perhaps starting out on this journey, immerse yourself in, in the community.
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Yeah, that's, that's a really good one, actually, because, uh, yeah, it's a very welcoming space and it'd be great to have more. Enterprise people into it as well because there's so much give get there of all sharing Ideas and sharing experiences and it only adds value to everybody
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:absolutely.
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Awesome well mark, thanks for taking the time to speak to us and uh, I really appreciate you taking the time out and giving us all the insight I think we'll have to revisit at some point because I felt like during this conversation There were a few other rabbit holes. I could take you down on insights, but
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:There's probably many. And by the way, you, of course, you're welcome to, um, come to Sunbury anytime and, uh, see us in person.
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Awesome. Yeah, maybe we'll have to do that. Maybe we'll do some live videos from the lab.
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Cool. I might have something cool to show you in early Feb.
tomarbuthnot-ejni4g53b_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Okay. Okay. It's a date. Early Feb from the lab. Cool. Thanks, Mark. Appreciate
markl-j4ou2jtsq_raw-synced-video-cfr_tom-arbuthnot-mark-l_2023-nov-09-0212pm_podcast_recording:Take care.