Mahendra Sekaran: The realist in me tells me that there will be issues that happen, but when it does happen, we want to have, you know, best in class monitoring so we can actually detect it even before the customers reach out to customer support and open a ticket with Microsoft.

Tom Arbuthnot: This week on the Teams Insider Podcast, we talked to Corporate Vice President Mahendra Sekaran. We get into his role and what he does around Teams Phone and IC3. We talk about the differences between IC3, ACS and Teams and how all those things connect. And we get a little bit of his perspective on some of the big things that dropped in FY24 and what he's looking forward to in FY25.

Many thanks to Mahendra for taking the time out, really appreciate it. Also many thanks to Neat, who are the sponsor of this podcast, really appreciate them and their support of Empowering.Cloud 

hey everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. Been looking forward to this one. Uh, Mahendra and I've been going back and forth with diaries for a while.

So we appreciate your time. Uh, we're going to get into all sorts of things around Teams, both kind of back end and front end. Mahendra, do you want to just start off by anybody that doesn't know you? And I feel like everybody listening to this podcast probably does know you, but, uh, for, for context yourself and your.

Yeah, great. 

Mahendra Sekaran: Good morning, Tom. Great to be here. Um, You know, my name is Mahendra Sekharan. I'm a Corporate Vice President here in the Microsoft 365 team, primarily working on Teams Phone, but I'll support a bunch for the products like Skype and Azure Communication Services as well. So I've been at the company for about just about 19 years.

It'll be 19 years in the middle of August. And have been working on various incarnations of unified communications since I started. Um, worked on Live Communication Server. I'm not sure if, uh, I'm sure some of the listeners on this podcast are probably familiar with the product. 

Tom Arbuthnot: There'll definitely be some that were there.

Yeah, there'll be some that were there. 

Mahendra Sekaran: And then worked on Skype, worked on Windows Phone, uh, and now I lead, uh, what we call as IC3, which is, stands for Intelligent Conversations and Communications Cloud. You can think about us as the set of, uh. Cloud services and core technology that powers, uh, Teams, uh, and Teams phone.

And we also, uh, one of my other responsibilities is managing our global telco strategy. Uh, this is striking partnerships, not just for wholesale, but, uh, a vast number of Operator Connect and direct routing partners. Um, you know, making sure we learn from them on how they can be successful, um, so we can leverage them to take our product out to, you know, the millions of customers that we have today.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. So yeah, you've been there kind of since, since the start. I mean, what's your thoughts on the journey? It's been amazing. I mean, I wasn't here at LCS. I jumped in the OCS timeframe. I was on the Cisco side of the fence back in the OCS, in the LCS days. But what's the journey been like for you from those very early days to the Hundreds of millions of users now.

Mahendra Sekaran: Yeah, it's been a, you know, a fascinating journey, and I would say incredibly gratifying as well, particularly as we enter the pandemic. You know, the pandemic was the time when Teams really took off. It was actually a thriving product even before that. But the role we could play during the pandemic to keep the world connected.

Uh, is something I feel extremely proud of, right? I mean, there was, there was a lot of, uh, things that we needed to do to make it happen. But, uh, one of the things that, uh, stand out to me is the core vision that, uh, uh, Gurdeep, uh, laid out, um, almost 20 years ago, in terms of having, uh, moving communications, having immersive video communication, and, and moving the communication from the standalone devices that you had, uh, like phones, um, Um, to the PC, becoming the center of communication and collaboration, um, was just incredible.

Um, so, you know, 

Tom Arbuthnot: It's amazing what an accelerator the pandemic was, wasn't it? Like, it felt like we were, we were getting there with, you know, Skype for Business. You'd, you'd say to real people, it'd be like Skype Consumers for any enterprise and then, and then Teams. Everybody knows what it is, like, like any normal person knows what Teams is now.

So it's a big jump into everybody understanding, you see in collab and cloud. For 

Mahendra Sekaran: sure, for sure. You know, like the joke that I make is in the past when I used to say I work for Microsoft, people often say, Hey, my PC has this problem and they expect me to be their tech support to fix it. And now when I talk to people and they hear that I work on Teams, they have a lot of feedback about, Hey, we want this feature.

On a Mac, it doesn't work great. So, uh, it's incredible to see the reach that we have with the product, um, and the brand, uh, value that we've earned with this product as well. So, uh, incredibly humbling. Awesome. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, no, it's amazing. So take us through, so people might've heard IC3, it sometimes comes up in like blog posts or in conversation, but how, how does, IC3, Azure Communication Service, and the Teams product.

How do those three things kind of interrelate? And have I missed anything that's worth talking about there? 

Mahendra Sekaran: Yeah, no, that's a great question. And, uh, you know, like the, to the world, we are the Teams product, uh, because that's the product that our customers get to touch, uh, that our admins get to play with, whether it's through the admin center or through the APIs.

Um, but if you want to just build on the old school, uh, client server analogy, you can think about IC3 as the server slash service, uh, that's powering, uh, the Teams experience. And, uh, the reason we have, uh, organizationally, we have IC3 as a separate organization from Teams is, if you think about, The vision behind the Substrate.

The Substrate is our common set of cloud platform that powers all the productivity software, whether it's Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, all the content and intelligence comes into the Substrate, which is why they're able to provide a very unified experience like your most recently used files like on Word and PowerPoint.

It's all, it's all done through this common platform. So we think of IC3 As building on the core substrate, but kind of being the communications collab platform for the company and, um, it involves like, um, you know, a lot of microservices, um, that were that that actually support not just teams, but it also supports a Skype consumer product as well.

So we have a shared infrastructure and cloud service that powers these experiences. So we have a set of microservices for calling, a set of microservices for messaging, a set of microservices for meetings. So you should think about IC3 as the core platform and technology along with the media stack. Like the media technologies, whether it's all the new codecs being built, all happens within IC3 as well.

And we take that, and if you, to, to your question, Tom, about where do Teams and ACS fit in, Teams is, uh, uh, the experience, uh, is, is where our experience lights up, where, you know, like all of you know Teams, but the chat experience, the collab experience, the meetings experience, the calling experience, they all light up in Teams.

And we think that, The way Teams acts as this hub for teamwork where it not only brings communication collab, but it brings all the other office properties in, whether it's Planner or SharePoint, into the experience is what makes Teams stand out as a world class communication collab product. If you think about ACS, it's a slightly different angle where we saw this opportunity where we have this You know, cloud scale or planet scale set of services that are handling, you know, billions of minutes and billions of messages on a regular basis.

And we saw an opportunity where we could actually take, uh, build a set of APIs on top of the core IC3 services and make it available to third parties to integrate communication into their app. So if I am. If I'm at Kaiser and I'm using a healthcare app, so I can, rather than my, my agents or my nurses having to switch to the Teams app, they, they, you take communications to the app our customers live in.

So that was the premise behind ACS. And another big opportunity we saw with ACS as a platform is, if we can provide the glue through, through which these third party applications can interop with Teams, We felt it adds more value to the overall Teams ecosystem as well. So ACS is both are almost like a first party connector that provides, uh, you know, interop capabilities with Teams, but it also acts as a third party solution through which third parties can embed communications into the apps.

Or if I'm an Azure app developer, I want to get, I want to be able to send SMS notifications For whatever app I'm building in Azure, it provides this alternative through Azure where we can actually provide phone numbers and SMS capabilities from within the cloud. So you can think about Teams as a first party client.

Tom Arbuthnot: Great to understand how those fit 

Mahendra Sekaran: together. And ACS almost as a third party extender and first party 

Tom Arbuthnot: interop. So if I'm somebody building or owning a line of business application, I can bring the same foundation that's powering Skype Consumer and Teams in as my, embedded video platform, or I can use it as kind of an interrupt between my app experience and Teams experience.

And then 

Mahendra Sekaran: more often than not, what we do see is we have a set of people who live in these line of business applications, but a good portion of the company may still use Teams for their primary communication and having this interrupt capability almost becomes a necessity. Um, so they're, they're able to talk to their subject matter experts within the company seamlessly as well.

That's 

Tom Arbuthnot: awesome. So you've got this kind of. Planet scale. I love that phrase like platform. One of the challenges I think is you've also got PSTN connectivity, so you've got all the traditional. Telco world as well and connecting those two worlds. Can you talk us through that? Because I feel like that's one of the most interesting areas and it comes into obviously Teams Phone as well.

Mahendra Sekaran: Yeah, you know, um, so we think about PSTN connectivity just as another cloud connectivity option. So I don't know what the latest number is. You probably know this better than I do. I think we have 35 countries where we offer calling plans and we have like over 90 operator connect partners. And, uh, 

Tom Arbuthnot: yeah, 97 now, so yeah, okay, 

Mahendra Sekaran: good, I know you keep count of it.

Yeah, 

Tom Arbuthnot: I watch it carefully. 

Mahendra Sekaran: You know, first, maybe I'll just touch on what does it mean for us to be offering a service in 35 countries? Uh, like first party calling plan service. This means Microsoft is a regulated telco in these 35 countries. This means there are people in my team who are working with our legal team, working with local regulators, um, to make sure that we are following all the compliance, whether it's reporting for outages, Whether it's our taxation, there's all these nuances that from a telco perspective, that we need to, like if you're a regulated telco, that you need to handle that a good portion of maintain basically manages.

So we, we, we often refer to us as almost like a global telco. Like I don't know if there's too many other telcos that have as global a footprint as we. Um, and second, you know, like we also take our same cloud services and provide an easy mechanism for third parties because we feel like, you know, we want to provide the convenience of calling plans to our customers because if I'm a small business, it's just this one stop shop where I just buy offices to buy from Microsoft, I need like five phone numbers for my employees, I just buy it right there and I'm good to go.

But we also see a massive opportunity where. We want to build on the strengths of our partners, whether it's, uh, you know, your Verizon or BT's or, you know, Telstra's of the world. They are the Telco brand, uh, in their local regions and customers gravitate towards them to buy for numbers, but providing an easy mechanism for them to attach their core strength, which is connectivity to the collaborative and productivity power of Microsoft.

This is what Operator Connect unlocks. And of course, you can accomplish the same thing through direct routing as well. So, we, we, we have, you know, we don't have any preference for calling plans. We have this bring your own trunking is what we used to call it initially before it was branded as direct routing and Operator Connect.

Um, where we want to, you know, leverage the strengths of our partners, um, and, and to be able to take the solution to our customers. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it's great to have all those options on the table because I get to work with different enterprises and there's always different fits. Some of them still need, you know, they need coverage outside of the OC countries.

So they need, they need direct routing or SBCs. They might need local SBCs. And you say like small office, they might just be click, click calling plans done so they can mix and match to hit their global requirements. 

Mahendra Sekaran: You know, and one other thing that, uh, uh, responsibility, this, uh, you know, puts on us. It's when people buy a dial tone service, like, I don't know, dial tone is probably becoming a legacy term because my kids probably have never heard a dial tone in their lives.

But, but, uh, but the, but the notion of offering always on connectivity, when, when people have to make a phone call, the phone always works, uh, incoming calls never drop. It puts an increasing, increased onus on us to deliver. You know, carrier grade reliability. So I'm incredibly proud of the work we've accomplished over the years to move from three nines to four nines to now five nines reliability.

Uh, I would say like every semester, as we go through a planning cycle, the focus on fundamentals continues to be pretty massive. We spend a good chunk of our resources on how do we get better, uh, at, at the reliability of our system? Because one, uh, push I have on my team is having this notion of, you know, Zero customer reported incidents.

What that means is, you know, one would be great if you have no incidents, but, uh, you know, the realist in me tells me that there will be issues that happen. But when it does happen, we want to have, you know, best in class monitoring so we can actually detect it even before the customers reach out to customer support and open a ticket with Microsoft.

Where we are proactively able to detect issues. and Mitigate them, right? Um, so over the last year and a half, as Gen AI has become more mainstream, we've done a lot of amazing work, um, you know, leveraging what we call as AI Ops, where we've been able to streamline, you know, ticket routing from support, uh, to engineering.

We've been able to cut that by half, so we can actually use LLMs to look at the problem the customer's reporting, Provide resolution automatically through our knowledge base and, you know, troubleshooting guides that we have, or when it gets routed, it gets routed to the right engineering team because it reduces, that reduces the time the customer has to wait, reduces the time you waste on one engineering team looking at it and saying, Oh, it's not my problem.

Some of the team has to look at it. Ultimately, so we call this metric as time and engineering. Being able to continuously drive improvement in time and engineering, um, over the past two years. Um, so I'm super proud about the work we're doing. We're not only just doing, you know, the stuff that you would expect us to do, but also leveraging, uh, you know, LLMs to make our job easier.

Um, so. 

Tom Arbuthnot: That's really, I guess the, the, the amount of data and logging and integration points, and it must be, it's crazily extreme. So having an LLM ability to. consume that data and start to, you know, understand trends, understand anomalies, that must be really powerful. Absolutely, absolutely. Otherwise, 

Mahendra Sekaran: you just can't scale, right?

I mean, when you have so many different carrier interconnects and so many partners connecting to us, um, and there's one customer, they may have direct routing, they may have calling plans, they'll have operator connect from two or three providers in different regions. How do we get this aggregate view?

And one thing that, you know, like, I think one opportunity we have to still get better. Microsoft Teams, Copilot, Teams, Teams Insider Podcast, Azure, Outlook, Exchange, Empowering.Cloud, Microsoft Teams Rooms, Um, feedback back to our administrators who are managing this product within our customers so they feel empowered to have the next level of detail on, you know, how their users are experiencing the product.

So if there are these measures they need to take, you know, they are, they feel they have the right insights to take those measures as well. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, that's another area where I'm really excited about AI is even CQD and the dashboards, they're great, but they're fairly technical, certainly for your average customer.

If we could have AI be like, here's where you should spend your time, it's this, this Wi Fi on this site, or it's this egress point, like, you don't need to trawl through 30 Power BI reports, I'm just telling you what the thing you should spend your time on, I think that'd be really powerful. Absolutely, 

Mahendra Sekaran: absolutely.

Having those actionable insights, like you said Tom, is super powerful. Yeah, 

Tom Arbuthnot: awesome. So you mentioned semesters there. We've just hit the end of the financial year. We're in the new financial year now. I'm going to ask you in a minute about what you're excited about for what's coming, but looking back at kind of last year, what stands out for you either in terms of kind of.

Stuff your team worked on or developments, but you mentioned the five nines there as well. I guess that's one of them. 

Mahendra Sekaran: Yeah, you know, there's, there's a ton to be proud about. Uh, we continue to make good inroads in terms of driving Teams phone growth. Um, you know, we are, I think our number, 

Tom Arbuthnot: yeah, 20 million, 20 million users 

Mahendra Sekaran: today.

And. We're also seeing this trend, uh, where, um, you know, VoIP calling continues to grow as well. People for intra business communication, the natural tendency is to have a chat and then hit the call button right there. Um, so to some degree that is also true phone system value because in the past they were leveraging a PBX to make those calls and now they're just using Teams to make those internal calls.

Um, so maybe if I were to pick three things that stand out, uh, in terms of what I'm proud about, one is just the continued focus on fundamentals, like, like you said, you know, our, uh, the, uh, the work we've done and moving from four nines to five nines, people may think it's just one nine. But it's orders of magnitude harder to get from four lines to four lines.

Tom Arbuthnot: Just one more, just one more thing. That's right. So 

Mahendra Sekaran: the amount of hard engineering that goes in to be able to make that commitment is something I'm super proud about. And also the continued focus on security, um, to make sure, you know, customers can trust us with their data and, uh, being able to rely, deliver on this, This, um, core promise that we make when, uh, of, of trust that customers have in us is, is like something that, um, you know, is that, that's just something I feel great about, uh, FY24 as we, uh, now that we're in FY25.

The second thing I would say is, uh, you know, we continue to, um, Um, grow through our operators, our operator channels to become more successful. Um, and, um, you know, like the, the growth of Operator Connect, the growth of Teams Phone Mobile, uh, is something that, uh, I'm also incredibly proud about. There's a lot more opportunity there for us to continue to grow that, uh, because I feel like, you know, one of the things that we lack is, um, there are a few underserved communities when it comes to technology.

Like if you're a very small business or. Um, if I'm a frontline worker, these are, you know, these are, these make up significant portions of our working population in the world, but they haven't been able to fully leverage technology to, you know, do their job more efficiently or be more productive, right?

Most small businesses rely on their mobile phone, but how can we bring like the foundational work we've done, um, to kind of make it, make Teams accessible to those masses? It's something that I'm incredibly excited about and I'm also counting on our channel partners like these telcos and other partners who have the channels with these very small businesses to be able to drive this technology adoption as well.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I think Teams Phone Mobile is a really exciting opportunity and like actually it speaks to that lower end of the market seat count wise as well. Or like you say, it's very part driven. I'm excited in the UK We're.Going to tick up to three operators, mobile operators for Teams Phone Mobile. I think it will really help the market because there'll be different conversations going on in different marketing teams. It's a much bigger change than I had anticipated witih customers to understand they can connect a mobile service to a UCaaS service I guess because we live in this world, I assume everybody knows, but actually I think there's a big education piece to help people understand that they can connect those two worlds. Very 

Mahendra Sekaran: well said, very well said. And you know, like the other reason I'm incredibly excited about Teams Phone Mobile is like, you know, I actually think in the next five years, the world will increasingly switch away from fixed lines.

into, uh, you know, mobile connectivity and, uh, Teams Phone Mobile allows, uh, customers to attach these mobile numbers, uh, to Teams Phone. Particularly if I look at like emerging markets, they are mobile first. People don't even buy fixed lines anymore, right? If you look at India, if you look at Indonesia, these are like massive markets.

where, uh, you know, customers are mobile first. And, of course, you probably know about some of the, you know, directions some of the Scandinavian countries are going through where they want to be 100 percent mobile. I don't know what the time frame is, 2028 or something like that. So, um, Teams Phone Mobile provide 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, they're, they're also very mobile first now, even there is a change there, but they just, they've always been mobile first because they're smaller countries, great, great cellular coverage.

Mahendra Sekaran: That's right, that's right. So, so the work we're doing there is also incredibly exciting. Lastly, you know, the work we did with Queues App and getting that to preview, um, probably is one that, you know, like the, the capabilities that we launched with today are great, but there's just so much more potential there.

You know, one of the things that keeps me excited on a regular basis, on a daily basis, you know, gets me energized to come to work. I think there's a massive opportunity to drive innovation in the core communication experiences. Um, you know, particularly for the B2C experience, like for me calling into my local bank.

My experience remains the same where I kind of go through this DTMF based prompts, press one for this, press two for account balance. And, uh, that experience hasn't changed for like 30 years. Uh, but the opportunity to drive innovation there, uh, whether it's through LLMs, whether it's through visual IVRs, whether it's through, you know, democratizing a lot of these experiences that were in the past relegated to, you know, hype.

Power Contact Center Agents, to what we call Citizen Agents is what, you know, gives me a lot of, uh, excitement. And Queues App is that first foundational step. Yes, is it perfect today? Not at all. But we have a ton of things that we planned, uh, to make it better. And then maybe one of the things that I'll say, uh, which I said lastly for Teams, uh, for, uh, Queues App, but shared calling is also kind of goes to this previous point we were talking about mobile.

We are seeing a lot of our customers. You know, uh, because cost becomes an important factor because a lot of our customers are trying to find budget to go, you know, where do I find the money to go invest in AI? So they pay a lot of attention to other items on their IT spend and they, they look at, Hey, Joe and Bob haven't made a PSTN phone call.

Uh, they made one PSTN phone call in the last, uh, month. Do they need a phone number? So they look at ways to cut their cost because it's like a few dollars per user per month every time they need a phone number. But I'm actually super excited about shared calling because it is a thing where it is a product where we as Microsoft noticed this trend of people who are revisiting being cost conscious and we wanted to provide a solution that that gives them an opportunity to cut their cost significantly But at the same time, it provides, uh, it meets local regulatory so employees can still make 9 1 1 calls and at the times they do have to place a phone call or have a phone number in the business card which a customer may call them, they're still available to be reached, right?

So it's a good balance between cost and capability. 

Tom Arbuthnot: I'm glad you're like, it's nice to hear Microsoft talking about that kind of, there's two counts there is obviously saving money and the reality that not everybody needs a DDI or a Teams Phone necessarily. Cause I do see a lot of right sizing, particularly in enterprise.

Like it's not, it's not going away, but you say a lot of knowledge workers are VoIP first and meeting first. Uh, the, the other observation that I'm really interested to see if it plays out is with Teams phone mobile, I think as that becomes, there's no license cost on the Microsoft side. As that becomes more cost effective, cost competitive in the mobile area, I'm already buying corporate mobile or cellular devices.

I can just, I can just pick up soft phone for included in the cost of my mobile contract. That's right. That's 

Mahendra Sekaran: right. That's right. Well said. 

Tom Arbuthnot: That's awesome. So looking forward to, you podcast. Looking forward to this year. Is there anything you can kind of share that you're excited about or thinking about for the coming FY?

Mahendra Sekaran: Yeah, you know, 

Tom Arbuthnot: I think lots lots of AI. I'm going to guess. 

Mahendra Sekaran: There is lots of AI, so maybe I'll just build on what I started with the Queues App. You can expect us to deliver a lot more experiences that leverage AI. to not only enrich the B2C experiences through Queues App, but also you can expect us to infuse AI into the core calling experience.

Um, just making it intuitive, uh, if I'm talking to you, Tom, and we say, hey, let me bring Stephanie on the call, uh, my Copilot will be smart enough to know, uh, who is my Stephanie. Uh, let's say, who is the Stephanie that both of us know about, and make an auto suggestion about. Okay, is this Stephanie Tejada?

So we can actually drag her into the call, so I don't have to go type a name. So it's just shaving off those few seconds for every action people take is what we see as overall massive productivity booster, right? So you can actually, you can expect that to happen for sure. Um, the second thing I will say is, um, you know, um, on, on, on the telco side, uh, you can expect us to continue to come up with, uh, simplifications on that experience, uh, whether it's, um, you know, like one common feedback we hear is, hey, your delegated administration is not great.

If I'm a partner, I don't have a great way of managing the solution on the tenant's behalf. So that you can expect a lot of, um, you know, Of course, AI goodness, uh, as well as, uh, you know, delegated admin capabilities, uh, you've, you've probably seen some of this with our, the work we announced for admin units, uh, but we'll continue to make that better, um, so our partners can easily, uh, manage the product as well.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, that's really exciting for partners, I think, to have that opportunity to help their end customers in a constrained way. Like, I don't, my telco doesn't need global admin, but I might want them to do those types of changes. Absolutely. 

Mahendra Sekaran: Absolutely. Lastly, you know, like one, uh, one missed opportunity that I feel like we haven't done a great job is when I talk to customers about, hey, what's your, you know, why are you still on this PBX that you've had for like 10 years, 15 years?

And they say usually two reasons. One is, You know, that's really not on the top of the priorities from a, from a IT perspective because they have other burning priorities and the phone kind of works. They do see the value, they want to move to the cloud, uh, but they just don't know where to start. So there is a lot of, you know, complexity, um, in, in, in understanding the current telephony estate.

What do they need to do? What is the face manner they can go do? There's a lot of partners out there who provide solutions to address that gap, but we feel that, uh, at Microsoft, we can actually do more in building in product capabilities. To demystify the journey for our customers. Right? Um, so you'll see, uh, you'll see us talk more about it, uh, in, in detail later, but just supporting this, um, you know, phone adoption, um, and simplification, uh, is, is another investment area, um, that, that you can expect for FY 25.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Appreciate that insight. Um, as we wrap up, thanks so much for taking the time. I know you're super busy with everything you've got to manage there, but is there anything else you want people to kind of take away around Teams or Teams Phone or IC3? 

Mahendra Sekaran: That's a good question. Like, you know, like I first want to since a lot of the listeners of the podcast are a part of our extended community, I just wanted to say a huge thank you.

What you do in terms of amplifying our value, advocating for us and driving adoption with our customers is something that we are incredibly thankful for. So keep doing what you're doing. And I really also appreciate the feedback that this community is. It's always open to sharing. I know Tom, you and others are never shy about sharing feedback with us.

It's that feedback that makes us better. Right? I mean like you know, to just probably quote one of our core cultures that we practice at Microsoft is the growth mindset culture. When we do something wrong. And 

Tom Arbuthnot: I'm so glad it is well received, right down your team and the Teams product team. People want the feedback.

to do the best they can and they want the feedback and it's well received. 

Mahendra Sekaran: Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate that. Appreciate that. Lastly, I'll probably say that, you know, I'm incredibly excited about the opportunity we have in front of us in modernizing communication for the world. Um, with us building on the hundreds of millions of existing Teams phone users.

It's breaking into new segments so we can actually serve some of our current underserved segments like frontline workers with better technology to make them more productive. You know, one thing you can always count on us at Microsoft is, you know, we'll continue focusing on our fundamentals. You can count on us to continue to deliver innovation and, uh, you know, and it will keep making the product better.

Um, so, you know, we, we work amidst a lot of great products. Um, you know, our competitors are pretty strong as well. They have, they have great products, but competition is what makes the products better. And, uh, you know, us listening to our customers, we try to focus more on our customers. And obsess more over our customers than our competition.

So you can count on us continuing to obsess over what our customers want and tailoring our product to make it the best product for them. Um, you know, it reminds me of a quote somebody had, like, a technology becomes very powerful when it blends into the background. You can think about Teams Phone as this product.

Anytime you want to communicate with somebody, it is there for you. You don't have to worry about, you know, how to use it. And, uh, it'll Make you, uh, connect with the world better. So, you know, like, uh, last week, uh, I was talking, we had an all hands meeting and, uh, uh, my, my boss asked me, Hey, what is your one line mission for the future?

And my response, it was just the thing, the first thing that popped in my mind was, Connecting the world. Um, so I feel incredibly humbled for us having the opportunity to keep the world connected and continuing to drive, deliver great experiences that make our customers more productive.. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Well, thanks for taking the time, Mahendra

maybe we'll catch up again, maybe towards Ignite timeframe or something when some of that FY25 stuff can be talked about, but I appreciate the time and talk to you again soon. For sure, 

Mahendra Sekaran: Tom. Good catching up with you. Sorry it took us a little long to get a schedule, but I appreciate everything that you do for the product and the community as well.

Thank you.