Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. This is a special live recorded episode from Comms vNext. Thanks to Eric Marsi for setting up a podcast booth. There I grabbed both Shure and Neat to talk about their latest partnership. Luke Kannel from Neat and Tyler Troutman from Shure and we got into how Shure's integrating their technology into Neat. Luke also took us through some of the new innovations in Pulse, the Pulse API story in integrations. There. Really great conversation. Thanks to both neat and sure. And also thanks to Partner IQ who sponsored the podcast booth. Really enjoyed Comms vnext, if you didn't make it, you definitely missed out. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Neat and Shure hey everybody, we are live from Comms vNext, really excited to be here. Eric full kudos to this amazing podcast setup he's got going. So we're live streaming now. This will also be a Teams Insider podcast. Show's been amazing so far. I pulled over two of my favorite vendors in the space to have a bit of a chat about the show and what's going on. Luke, do you want to introduce yourself first? Absolutely. Hey, thanks. Thanks for having me on, Tom. I'm Luke Kannel. I'm a product specialist at Neat. Essentially a sales engineering role that works with the product team. Awesome. And Tyler? Yeah, thanks, Tom. My name's Tyler Troutman. I'm with Shure's strategic market development team. My main job is just to make sure that we're building fantastic products that people want to buy, awesome. And there's a reason we brought you both together, but we're going to talk about that in just a minute. First off, Luke, I want to jump in. You've had some recent news this week with the new BAR, but also a lot's been going on with Neat, Pulse, Center. Can you just take us through a bit of the latest news? Yeah, absolutely. Very excited to announce BAR Generation 2 last week, which is essentially an iteration. It's the same but better as our previous generation BAR. It's a little bit sleeker. We've upgraded the video quality, the sensors a lot better. And it still works with all of the existing stuff, so we're all about making equitable meetings and allowing that foreign to just have a better experience, so symmetry is still there supports up to eight different individuals being framed. And it's also got the latest generation chipset, which as many of the devices in the space will be going end of support towards the end of September 2025 this is future proof for future generations of Android and Teams. Yeah, I love the care that you put into that it uses the same mount. That's such a great thing for customers to just be able to pull the old one off, put the new one in, and carry on. Yeah, absolutely. It's also part of our sustainability story, because we don't want people to have to throw stuff away. Yeah. I was thinking more about the cost of install, but sustainability too, definitely. Yeah. Talk about the Center loop, because that's, around now. Is it GA now? It is, yeah. It's shipping, so put your orders in. We definitely have that ready. And that again is about the equitable meeting experience. Throughout the pandemic, we were all, we all had our own square, and we all were treated the same. But in today's meeting environment, when individuals are back in the office or in a hybrid workspace it's tough to have that one box where there are 8 or 10 or 12 people in a room. What Center does is it allows for us to have this conversation now. The camera's looking right now at the side of me and it's not quite as connected for those people. You're saying Eric needs to get a sensor cam to add to his rig. I'm saying that needs to be added to this for sure. But it really is about that, being able to determine where is somebody looking to help that far end get better connected or feel better connected. Yeah, that's awesome. And so let's talk about why we brought Shure and you guys together. I don't know who wants to lead, but it's Tyler or Luke, but what's the story here? I'll start just high level, very excited about this partnership. We have been in the small and medium to medium large spaces for quite a while and the partnership with Shure really allows us to get into bigger spaces and promote a really high quality audio story. Tyler, you want to? Yeah, we've we've long been working with Neat and we've always liked their products and we've really appreciated the spaces that they're getting into. But we also understand that not every space can be covered at all times and it can be tough acoustical environments. There's a whole lot of problems that can happen. So we can step in and solve some of those with, a bunch of different solutions that can be mounted from the ceiling on the table, a whole bunch of really good things. And the integration with the Neat Bar Pro makes everything really simple to deploy. Microsoft Mechanics Awesome. What does that integration look like? Because historically getting third party into Android has been quite a challenge. So how does that work, Luke? Yeah it's, it's uh, really complicated. It's a toggle on the uh, settings screen on the neat device, and it's a single USB C to B cable. Awesome. So this speaks to, it's a deep integration between the two of you. It's not lashing things together and baked in. Yeah, absolutely. And from the deployment standpoint, you just take, our two products, let's say it's a P300 and an MXA 902. You drop those into our Designer 6. 0 software. Hit one button and you're going to get all the Dante routing. You're going to get all the configuration, all the setup. So it's literally one button and you're up and you can make your call and you're off the races. Awesome. What does the use case look like where we jump from the inbuilt capabilities of the bars into the kind of sure is that? Different spaces, wider spaces. Where's the large spaces, maybe reconfigurable spaces with really tough acoustical environments. We're still running into plenty of glass being put into conference spaces. And so that's definitely a great use case where the reverberation can be so bad that getting that microphone out and over your participants is going to be the better way to pick them up. So awesome. And does that mean we can bring in the Shure seating panels, all the Shure desktop mics? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. They'll all work with our P300s. And the fancy buttons that embed into the desk. Absolutely. Yeah. The additional RMX. Say mute buttons a great little accessory that we have to Hey. Awesome. Yeah. And handhelds. Yeah, and handhelds. We just launched our MXW Next 2 at ISE. And so we're really excited about that. And so I think in a future build from Neat, we'll be able to bring that in and have mute sync and all that functionality to be able to cover training spaces K through 12, high Rad, all those type work where you need that handheld mic. And possibly even a ceiling array to cover your participants or your audience. Yeah, and when I first saw the handheld, I thought it was great, particularly in edu, I see that a lot where you have people walking around and you want to have that wireless mic. Absolutely. Awesome. More generally, Luke, thoughts from the show so far? Have you done comms vNext before? It's been every year. Yeah, I've been here every year. This has been great. Shout out to the organizers for continuing to just. Bring a bunch of really high quality community presenters in best tech conference Teams tech conference that, that I've been at. And this year, I think we feel, we felt the growth just there are more people at the booth more people at the keynotes. And it's just very exciting. Awesome. Todd, how do you feel? Yeah, the traffic's been great. The interactions we've been having are all meaningful and the community that's been built that ComStreetNets has really brought around has been really impactful. And we're having really great conversations with. It's a success because of the depth in users and everybody's attending. Yeah. I feel like it's a show where everybody's coming together in or around Teams, right? The bar of conversation is automatically quite high like we all know the fundamentals. It's what's new? What's different? What do you bring to the table? Where would we like to see that? Yeah. Absolutely. Awesome! Cool. Luke, any thoughts of like we've talked about the kind of center and we talked about the new bar. I also know that Pulse is, now out and about. How's that been going? Yeah, very excited. We had a couple of announcements with Pulse. The first one I'll cover is the APIs. So we're all about exposing cloud APIs. We understand that there may not be 100 percent homogenous environments out there, that there may be multiple manufacturers. And what the Pulse APIs really allow our partners to do starting today. With Utology and Neowits is provide cloud level integration to be able to report on things like air quality, occupancy and a handful of other things. But moving forward, you'll see that API continue to expand. The other thing that we added to Pulse is what we call App Hub and that allows to traditionally Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android or Zoom Rooms have been selectable options on room systems and now this allows us to expand into the Android ecosystem for business specific, workflow specific applications and allow customers to actually load those applications or we'll put, bake them into firmware and then allow customers to ad hoc switch in between them. The most popular that we're seeing right now are going to be digital signage solutions as well as whiteboarding solutions. Yeah, it's interesting you've got that new app capability. What have you seen from customers? Is that are they, Picking a particular board to use in the App Hub mode? Are they using them instead of a room experience? Or are they pairing them up? What's that look like? Yeah, pairing them up is really what we're seeing. The first thing that kind of drove us to App Hub was whiteboarding experience, enhanced whiteboarding experience above and beyond what we're seeing in Teams Rooms on Android today. And then when we pair that with Neat Share it allows us to automatically share from, let's say, a neat board that's in App Hub mode and doing some kind of custom application whiteboarding and actually pair that share that right into the Teams Rooms on Android on a board that's right next to us. It's a very seamless experience, it's a one button press, and it allows for these custom type applications to be shared directly into the Teams meeting. Awesome. And Tyler, flipping back to the Shure story, like we talked about the integration, but there might be some people in the audience who haven't heard of the wider portfolio and you've been releasing a lot around Teams. Can you just take us on a virtual tour of some of the capabilities you have to add to Teams Rooms? Yeah, how much time do you have? We've got a lot of products in this space and we've been really excited with our partnership with Microsoft and how we've been able to grow that portfolio. Shure is a traditional microphone company. And we have plenty of products. I don't feel like you need to say that. I'm sure, is there anybody left in the world who doesn't know that, right? I would like to think not, but no, we have plenty of products from table solutions to ceiling array solutions. We have multiple different ceiling arrays. So we have our flagship, our MXA 920, great for large spaces. It's a true Swiss army knife of a ceiling array. Our MXA 901, which is our smaller 13 and a half inch array. Great for a 20 by 20 space. Our new, brand new MXA 902, which has a built in loudspeaker, which is really incredible. As just a kind of a one product stop, you can put that in the ceiling, get your microphone coverage at your table and a speaker. And then we have a couple different DSP options working right now with with the NeatBar Pro is our P300. And that can take all those different microphones in, the network mute button that we spoke about earlier, can bring all those in. And then we have some other boxes like our anti USB matrix, which is really great for a single array solution. Helps cut down the overall cost on the room and make deployment super simple. And then our next two product that we spoke about briefly with our wireless microphones, That actually has the access point, a changer and full DSP built in with USB connector so you can plug it right into your Microsoft Teams Room and start a call. And it And there's different mics you can use for that as well, totally different mics. Hand held, we can do our body pa conservation with the lavalier, and then we have a boundary microphone option which is certified with Microsoft. I am particularly excited about that, I have seen people doing various Circles Lashing solutions to get mics into rooms. So having that kind of all supported is really cool. Yeah. Traditionally it's been pretty difficult and you're mixing and matching between different vendors. And so we have this one stop shop where you can come and get whatever type of microphone your room might need. Our DSP, we have speaker solutions. We have all that. And as I said, with our new Shure Designer 6. 0 software, you can drop all those pieces in and hit one button and all the routing, all the configuration, all the DSP settings are all taken care of for you. Plug that USB cable into your Neatbar Pro and the room is up and ready. So that's awesome. Awesome. Cool. For anybody who's at the show and there's lots of sessions coming, it's going to be really exciting. If you're not at the show and you're watching live definitely get here next time. It's an amazing show. Luke, Tyler, thanks for taking the time to talk on the show. Really excited about the partnership and what you guys are doing as well. Any last words? No, just thank you. And if you're not here, you're missing out. Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. Eric, thanks for the setup. Really appreciate it. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in and look out for this on demand on teamsinsider. show. Thanks everyone.