SPEAKER_00 0:04

In this Teams Insider podcast, I talk to Jason Morden at Cresttron. We get into how the industry's changing. Jason's got really great perspective on where the industry's changing around Microsoft Teams and AV. And Crestron is kind of spanning that world of uh the you know traditional AV and the new Microsoft Teams world. So thanks very much to Jason for taking the time to do the pod. Really appreciate his insights. And many thanks to Crestron for being a supporter of Empowering Cloud. Really appreciate their support on with the show. Hi everybody, welcome back to the pod. Been looking forward to this one. Jason Morden from Crestron. Jason, do you want to give us a bit of a little bit of intro and a little bit of background? Yeah, I'd be happy to.

SPEAKER_01 0:43

Thanks for having me, Tom. Uh it's great to be here. Uh, I too have been looking forward to this. Schedules crisscrossing all over the place. So a little bit of background on myself. I currently have a role within Crestron. It's a little bit of a strange title and a strange job, but myself and my team, we love being in this position. We have a group within Crestron called Technical Marketing. And so we have two responsibilities. If you think about the normal flow of information within a company, you obviously have your marketing team, you have your sales team, and you have your product development team, if you will. We sit in the middle, my team specifically. And a lot of the work that we do is making sure that information coming from product team to sales has the appropriate context and additional messaging. And then we also work in the other direction to take information that we gather from the field or use uh information in terms of requirements and help to drive that product team. We also influence trade shows, you just mentioned IC and uh experience centers as well. So that's part of it, trying to make sure that we can put the products in the best light. I think for your audience, uh, one of the things that my team focused in on heavily is making sure we replicate the authentic experience. We go to a lot of trouble to make sure that when we are showing the products, it is the correct feature set that Microsoft might choose that all throughout many of our demos and things like that. So that's a role. We just sit in between. Sometimes we call ourselves translators. Other times it's really just looking to pick out pieces and bring that to the forefront for both sides of the company as well as our customers too.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

That's awesome. But I think that role and your history gives you a lot of perspective. And obviously, Crestron have big and small customers all over the world. So what I wanted to dig into on the pod is, and we've talked about this privately before, has the market changed, right? So AV, it feels like there's a lot of kind of commoditization and bars at the low end. There was also the whole COVID thing. Did that change behavior? And is it technology driving the change or is it user need driving the change? I don't know where we want to jump off really.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

We can start with any of them. I think generally, if we let's take a look at changes to the industry in general, I think it's fair to say that a lot of it has been a little bit of an ebb and flow. We had a very traditional path prior to COVID. Obviously, that turned things on its head in terms of usage, whether or not people were going to the offices. And to be honest, I mean, a lot of our technology for Crestron specifically was in those physical offices where people weren't going or weren't attending. However, new sets of requirements have emerged in terms of how are you using the spaces? What else does someone need to facilitate? We also have this new conversation of if I'm going to the office, what's there waiting for me? Does it make it worth it? We have a whole different conversation around that. And for me, it's just been a back and forth. And for those of us on this side of the industry, right, we have our traditional UC and we have our AV and we sit squarely in the middle. A lot of us has been just adapting and trying to figure out ways to draw out features of the product set. Our product development team does a great job of creating solutions that can fit a number of different scenarios. But sometimes there has to be a little artistry to figure out, okay, how can I address this particular challenge or how do I uh meet this particular need with this technology? So a lot of our tech, we've even seen used in different applications than we'd seen before. We had a lot of cases where it used to be just an HDMI cable on the table, walk in with a laptop, your expectation was when you plugged in, you could present. But now with the UC changes and everything else that's happened, being able to use our technology to further enhance or facilitate Teams rooms or other technologies like that. That's been a big part. In terms of your last point there, what's driving what? I think they're both driving each other. I think it's just a matter of being adaptable and being responsive to see when a change is coming. How do I best prepare for it? What else can I do with the tool set I have? So but I think that could to your point there. We could take that back in a number of different conversations as well. Maybe the next one to think about is the product selection in terms of what people are using or which particular set. At ISE, you know, when as we're making this today, we're two weeks, two weeks out from ISE effectively. We had our all-in-one Android product on display. It is not yet available for Teams. That's a near-term goal of ours to make it available for Teams. We were showing it off from a hardware standpoint. And I think that might be one of the most interesting takes that we have. If I had to look at two different paths, number one path is I'm going to make a move to the Android product solution because I want ease of setup. And that's really the key, one product to install as opposed to multiples. However, if we look on the flip side, one of the big things that's happening with another segment of the industry is that we have in another platform, another technology platform, we have a case now where we're looking to extend Android solutions with AV products. How do I place that Android device into a room where I might need additional items? How do I control lights and shades from an Android device seamlessly? So it's interesting if you look at both. We have both trends happening at the same time. You're right.

SPEAKER_00 5:33

We see on some of the Android devices now, we see people baking in other people's DSPs or other people's drivers for cameras as well. So you're right. What was the super simple Android is trying to get slightly more mature in terms of its interopering capabilities. And obviously, Microsoft are pushing very hard on the Windows NTR story to make that simple one-tick auto-deploy sub for hours is their goal. So both pieces are pulling from a deployment point of view. I guess it's the customer who decides what mix they need.

SPEAKER_01 6:02

Yeah, and let's be honest too. Many of the spaces if I had to look at my personal and this just from speaking from experience, when things started to happen in 2020, uh, one of the things I was directly involved in at that point was trying to facilitate for customers, helping them stand up even temporary Teams room systems. We had customers obviously buying products for the long term, but I had a number of customers that purchased Teams Room Systems just to take it to a hotel to be able to stand it up, to have a meeting. And it wasn't it wasn't a permanent installation. They put it in a case and they traveled around and they were hosting these Teams meetings as they went all over the place. If you look at all the different room types, we saw cases where the largest room types were addressed potentially earlier in the cycle than we would have imagined. And the reason that some of the bigger rooms were adapted or addressed for Teams room systems at that point, specifically with social distancing, I needed the biggest room possible. Now it might have been two months prior, they had the meeting down the hall where it was a 12-person room, but now they needed to place everyone into a room where you could have that six foot, whatever it would be, two-meter barrier between people. How do I space people out? But I think now that we're back to that, many of the spaces that customers are now looking at adapting are of that caliber, of that tier, those biggest spaces. Even though we have this great momentum going, medium and small, and the rise in the interest in the Android products, we still feel like there's a number of rooms at the higher end that haven't been addressed yet. Some of that might be uh it could be just as simple as just being resistant to want to do it. It may be a case where they it's difficult. So I'm gonna leave it for later and I'll worry about it. Yeah, however, we are reaching that point where we need those spaces for various reasons. So again, to be redundant, right? We tend to be to be orbiting around in in different cases on both sides of technology.

SPEAKER_00 7:52

Um yeah, it's interesting that you have the the kind of MED BYOD and now you've got the Android bar coming, you've got obviously you've had Windows MTR for years, the OneByond at the very high-end just certified. One of the things from ISE that I thought was really interesting is the the the one beyond, which I in my head is high-end, although the price point is more aggressive than you might guess, but like coming out with USB-based one beyond cameras to bring that price point for a multi-camera optical camera solution down even further. Is that customers trying to bring that technology to different rooms, smaller rooms? What's the driver there?

SPEAKER_01 8:31

Well, there's a few things, really. I would look at it this way that if you weren't familiar with the product previously and you knew about the offering, you might believe that the one singular solution that's offered within our OneBeyond, we've effectively taken the OneBeyond branding and it's part of our product family now. So we're keeping all of the intelligent video work that we're doing within that OneBeyond family. But it's moved to threefold as opposed to the single approach. Previously, large room, multiple cameras, handling and switching. And what's been born out of that for this next generation of products is a continuation and truly an enhancement on what we can do with the largest spaces with the controller that we refer to as Automate VX and the multiple cameras. But to your point, now we have two other initiatives. One initiative is to make sure that the products have the ability to communicate on a almost on a one-to-one basis, as you would. What's maybe surprising is the interest still in optical cameras. There's still a number of people that have moved through their generations and their upgrades over time with products, and they still want to rely on an optical camera, either, you know, one or multiples in the room, but based on size and dimensions and requirements, that's still very prevalent. When we brought out this generation of cameras, the decision was made, of course, we want to be able to make sure that the cameras can both work as part of the larger system, but also on an independent one-to-one basis. So there's that interest. And then the other application or the other design we had a chance to talk about at ISE is that we have a very unique proposition where we're taking two of those cameras, the intelligent with the 12x optical zoom, and we're allowing them in this new application design to link together. And so they can work in tandem with each other while still remaining a single connection into your Team's room system. And the two of them can communicate with each other, determining who's in view, which should be shown, and then effectively that's seamless back. So it's not just, again, going from one to three is how I look at it in terms of the opportunities now available with the One Beyond family of products from Crestron. But I'm pretty excited about it too. There's a number of cases where even internally on campus, we were relying on an optical camera and looking at those and saying, okay, we're going to bring that back into the fold now and we're going to make that one of our products.

SPEAKER_00 10:43

That's cool. What do you see? I work with quite a few uh AV vendors training and working around teams because they're all skilling up in the team space, I feel like. But I also see some specialist partners that are more Microsoft partners and they're coming into AV. So I feel like the world is coming together. The AV specialists are getting more up speed of Microsoft, the Microsoft specialists are trying to get up to speed on AV. I feel that I don't know what your perspective, but I feel like it's harder to get from Microsoft to AV in some ways than AV to Microsoft. But what what do you see? Because you have some like fairly advanced, complex programmable solutions. You're you've got some simpler solutions. Who do you see playing in those areas?

SPEAKER_01 11:22

So your to your first comment there, I do think it is slightly more difficult to move from the Microsoft realm into the AV realm. And a part of that's just the nature of the AV industry, the way that the industry no, there is recognition within the industry in terms of moving towards being more open. I started, I didn't want to say this, started in truly paid AV work 25 years ago. Before that, obviously, in a different capacity. But if you look at that over time, the AV community and the and the industry has matured significantly to be more open door, less barriers for entry, different ways to bring people in. But generally speaking, I've done a lot of that work in working with a more Microsoft-centric company, helping them to pull in or help them to enhance with AV. So that definitely, I would agree. The challenge, right, the going the other direction, it becomes a little bit easier, obviously, to pick up skilling. Microsoft does a great job with making things available. Individuals like yourselves in the MVP community, obviously sharing a wealth of knowledge freely with others, which is something that AV isn't as aggressive with, but is getting better about, I would say. I've seen a lot of change in that space. When you come down to that, one of the things I even do personally, Tom, is I look at, I look at the portfolio that we have, and I start off with the things that are the easiest measures of adoption. And those are the first places I go to with the Microsoft community, if you will. All right, let's look at items that don't require configuration. Let's look at items that don't require programming. Is there a basis where not a plug and play? I'm not a huge fan of the term because obviously there's always something else you have to do from UP and P all the way down. Yeah, it's been a nice term to make people feel comfortable, but I'm not sure how well anyone's ever executed on it. There's little bits and pieces, right? Can I work through a web interface? Can I have a simple configuration? And so I've started there. But that core market on the other end of it, again, there will always be some particular requirement of something special. So many of those cases are driven by individuals or behaviors that are difficult to uproot. I've always used the room this way. I always wanted to have this functionality. But I think over time, as we do see them merge, I think both sides are aware of the other and doing a great job of opening up. One of the campaigns I've championed with within Crestron for A V companies learning or picking up some of the Microsoft solutions has been we have a class that we offer that we've done for three years now, three and a half years, where it's specifically our products through the eyes of Microsoft, through the eyes of teams.

SPEAKER_00 13:49

Yeah, I think I saw you do it at Masters, like the head of workshop. Absolutely something.

SPEAKER_01 13:53

70% of that is Microsoft knowledge and sharing Microsoft knowledge to the community as well. We know that our foundation, they understand the principles, they understand audio, video, network, everything else they might need to do. And so we try to synthesize as much critical Microsoft knowledge as we can into those groups. And there's a lot of things I'm happy about, Tom. I spent hours on account configuration and working with PowerShell and sharing PowerShell scripts. And thankfully, with the advancements within the team's Pro Portal, uh for the room's Pro Portal, many of those things now are you can do it with a click. You don't have to have that knowledge, right? And that's changed, it's changed for the customer's benefit in all cases that way.

SPEAKER_00 14:34

It's interesting though that Microsoft have made that investment because very often Microsoft are, if it's good enough and partners can muddle through, it's good enough and it's getting deployed. I think Microsoft appreciated that both the because a lot of customers have in-house teams doing this stuff, but then for the the A V partners, it can't be to scale, it can't be, as you said, PowerShell scripts and stand on one leg and this happens and that happens, but you have to do it in this order. And in very early days, it very much was like that. It feels like it's definitely got a lot. It's still there's still some tricks, but it's got a lot more mature.

SPEAKER_01 15:04

Yeah, you can see the advancements across the board. And again, what's best for the end customers is best for all of us in the industry leading up to that. I don't get to flex my PowerShell skills or whatever it is, but I'd rather not. I'd rather the customer's up and running with that timetable a little bit faster. I still hold it back for a few things, right? If I'm spinning up a demo tenant and I need to do helping a customer get off the ground, I'll I'll still do that and have it do everything for me. But the day-to-day, certainly the advancements are great. And again, to the customer benefit in those cases.

SPEAKER_00 15:32

Do you do you think we'll get to the point where with I feel like one of the challenges with the Microsoft partners coming into AV is uh a lack of understanding around things like what bar a use cases for? If the camera, if the camera can see the person, then presumably the audio can work, which obviously is not true. And and a slapping gear in where it's out outside the room isn't suitable, for example. Do you think Microsoft partners and customers get better at recognising what those limits are? And also, do you think those systems will get better at configuring themselves appropriately, more dynamically, rather? Because they're not very configurable at the moment, it just is what it is.

SPEAKER_01 16:08

I think over time, I think eventually there will be a case where we may reach a point where self-configuration look the easiest part, I could give you a number of examples for enhancement across multiple platforms that are will make that easier at some point. Will we ever get there to that nirvana where everything just auto-configures itself? Probably not. Uh, because we can't take the human factor out or the expectations of the customer out. Because we could go to docs.microsoft.com or reference as much as we want to. That doesn't mean the customer who's inheriting the system will actually have ever consumed any of that to know what it's supposed to do. They're going to come in with their own expectations. So as much as we would like to. But again, I can give you some simple examples too. What we're seeing. If you look to the video platform, someone like Netgear who is built intelligence into their switches where it'll auto-identify the vendor of the product and help categorize it into the right VLAN so that I don't have to have that secondary knowledge. The work that they're doing to accelerate network deployments is vastly significant for both AV, but it's also been a makeway too for the Microsoft people coming in, because that's another place. And I've shared this advice with some key Microsoft partners here in the States as well, is that when you go to look at A V, there are, you might call them shortcuts, but there are a number of cases in which by simply making a selection or adopting a piece of technology, you can truly accelerate your skill set or your move into the AV space. And the audio teams are doing as well. We've seen the idea of intelligent microphones to be able to send audio through the speakers, measure the distance, make it a little bit more.

SPEAKER_00 17:41

Yeah, we've seen in the consumer space. So I used to act. I used to dent an AV and it had this setup thing, and I'd be able to do that. Remember putting the microphone on your couch in the middle, and that's it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:49

And then the chasing your family out so that they don't have to listen to those high-pitched tones and chasing your pets out of the room.

SPEAKER_00 17:55

Yeah, it's interesting. We've seen that in the residential consumer type stuff, but I feel like there's probably good technical reasons, but I feel like that's something bars could conceptually do. Never in in the immediate term, it's not going to be as good as a human tuning that by any means, but it might be something.

SPEAKER_01 18:10

True. But I think the other thing we also should keep an eye on too is cloud-based processing. In the bigger rooms, we rely heavily on physical DSPs, which do a phenomenal job. I've spent hours of pouring over different configurations and working to set up systems and things like that. However, we will reach a point when in somewhat of a, I won't say near term, but there will be a point where we reach that the available computing power of the cloud has the ability. Now we obviously there's latency to keep in mind there with the difference in local and cloud, but the sheer power may change the audio platform as well, in which you're simply offloading everything to the cloud and respective delays reaching other clients, things like that, that we may see more of that lifted out of the room as well. No, we'll still have the physical need for speakers and amplification and all those things. But I think that also may be another factor in terms of improving audio performance. Or I think what we would love to see from a, and solely speaking, not from a manufacturer, but even from a customer standpoint, we'd love to see a case where you place the device into the room and the room, the device then tells you, I'm probably not in the right room size, right?

SPEAKER_00 19:14

That that's that's what I was getting at. What I want to see is if the camera has perspective and it could do vision sense to be like that wall's 22 meters away.

SPEAKER_01 19:23

I'm not completely maybe not maybe not a big display that says, take me out of this room, but more of a case of based on the room I'm in, here are the expectations, right? I don't know if we as manufacturers would ever be able to move there, but you'd think, though, that from a customer standpoint, that'd be phenomenal. Here's my sizing, here's my scale, here's what I'm working with. Probably wouldn't be great for the AV end of the industry from a sales standpoint. But that's the type of clarity you're really looking for in many of these cases. And the other thing, too, is that there's the design element of choosing the right space for the room, but there's also the purchasing element, right? If I'm going to order, and we've seen we saw this heavily at the start of the room refresh in late 2020 and early 2021, is we saw customers who are buying pallets of Android products, if you will, and or whatever it might be, some type of UC platform. And again, they were overkill maybe for the smallest rooms, they worked perfectly for the medium-sized rooms, and then they struggled with the large rooms. But it wasn't just someone, and it there was no sinister approach of saying, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna use this for everything. It was more of a case of convenience, or this is what I can get. We saw a lot of that too, where that was the only product I can get my hands on. And I know that in certain rooms it's gonna struggle. And so that leads into some of the bits, right? If you were to look at, I mentioned it before in the product that we have coming to market with our Android all in one piece, it is targeted towards medium and large rooms. In a small room, the field of vision of the cameras won't perform well. It won't meet your expectations if it's placed in a small space. From an audio standpoint, it would probably be great. It'd probably be overkill. But there's that too.

SPEAKER_00 20:49

But then just what we said there is that's a classic example, right, isn't it? Because you you take that as a given because you understand the analogy. Whereas I can see a buyer being like, okay, it's large and medium, it's bound to be fine for a small because that's less. But it's like actually it's suboptimal because of the optics.

SPEAKER_01 21:03

Yes, yes, very true, very true. And that's again, that's what we're what we'll continue to move through. And then again, brand loyalty, product availability, whatever the factor might be that might choose you to or um encourage you to choose a particular solution. Again, there's that human factor we can't necessarily work out of the equation.

SPEAKER_00 21:20

Yeah, makes sense. Cool. Well, Jason, thanks for sharing your perspective. I appreciate you you spend a lot of time in the community sharing your knowledge. So thanks for that as well. We'll loop back around when the uh the Android certification for the bar comes, no doubt, and have a conversation about that.

SPEAKER_01 21:33

Yep, quite a few things, Tom, too. We have that. Again, there's another number of things we showed at ISE on the horizon as well that we're really excited about this year. To and look, for us, it's the tool set. We want to make sure the customers have the right tool set to be able to put the right products in the right room. That's the end goal, is to make sure that end customer gets the right solution for the right size space.

SPEAKER_00 21:53

Yeah. And I appreciate you and Christian supporting us, and it'll all be in the newsletter as well. So look out for those announcements as I get satisfied. In the meantime, Jason, where can people find you, get hold of you, ask you tricky questions?

SPEAKER_01 22:03

If you can, right? Everywhere in between, LinkedIn or or otherwise. Again, Jason, last name Molden, M-O U L D E N. You can find me on any of the platforms if you do have things. And we'd love to hear from you and feel free to reach out.

SPEAKER_00 22:16

Awesome.

SPEAKER_01 22:16

Thanks, Jason. My pleasure, Tom. Thanks for having me.