Roopam Jain: But again, going back to our survey findings, going back to what I cover, which is meeting rooms, 37 percent of the companies we surveyed said that they are going to be building more meeting rooms. And this is, this is a pretty impressive number more so, because 24 percent of the companies surveyed said, That they are reducing the real estate.

So what this means is meeting room density.

Tom Arbuthnot: Hi, and welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. Really interesting one this week. We've got Roopam Jain, who's VP of Research at Frost & Sullivan's Connected Work Practice. And she gives us a really deep insight into what's going on in the room space, the kind of back to work, hybrid working, the importance of BYOD and how big actually BYOD is, and how the big platforms are influencing the video market as well.

Many thanks to Roopam for taking the time to jump on the podcast, really appreciate her sharing her insights. And also thanks to Crestron, who are the sponsor of this podcast, really appreciate their support. On with the show! Hi everybody, welcome back to the pod. Excited to do this one. Roopam and I have been going back and forth trying to find a time for quite a while between our diaries, but now we're locked in.

Roopam, thanks for coming. Do you want to just introduce yourself? 

Roopam Jain: Sure. Hello everyone. I'm Roopam Jain, VP of Research at Frost & Sullivan's Connected Work Practice. Uh, for those of you who are not familiar with Frost & Sullivan, we are a global consulting and market research firm. We have, uh, more than 35 office locations globally, if I have the latest count, um, and we cover multiple industries, uh, industrial, healthcare, automotive, many others.

I'm part of the ICT practice at Frost, and I have covered conferencing and collaboration technologies for over two decades now, actually, I just completed 25 years this past August. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Amazing, congrats. 

Roopam Jain: I'm truly an industry insider, Tom. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, yeah, that's, that's an incredible run and what a, what a transformation over that time as well.

Roopam Jain: Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, thanks. Thanks so much for having me on your podcast. I know. And for being patient with my schedule. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Oh no, mine as much as yours. I think we overlap at some, some industry events as well, often on different tracks and things. So it's great to spend some time chatting. So thanks for that.

Yes. Um, so yeah, so Frost & Sullivan, obviously massive, super impactful reporting, lots of good, you know, they do lots of customer surveys and stuff, but your, your space more specifically within ICT and collab is more around the kind of rooms and video market, is that right? 

Roopam Jain: Yes, I mean, I cover meetings video, but that sort of overlaps everything else that's happening in the workplace.

I mean, technologies are not clearly differentiated. We are seeing a lot of convergence across the board. So, um, I, I look at everything tangential to that also. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, and from that point of view, obviously there's been a rise of the UCaaS platforms and collaboration coming together and appliance based video versus standards based video.

Where's a good jump off point in terms of what you're seeing in the market? 

Roopam Jain: I think just taking a step back and looking at how the overall workplace is evolving, because that feeds into technology transformation and digital transformation, um, an interesting thing that we are seeing this year is that the wheels are sort of fully in motion.

In terms of tech adoption, uh, things like office modernization, even contact center modernization, infrastructure upgrades. And really when we talk of, um, office redesign in particular, right? Workplace redesign for hybrid work, meeting rooms are a fundamental part of that conversation. Um, so when it comes to meeting rooms and spaces, and I think you and I discussed this at one point last year was, um, sort of a year of wait and watch for IT DMs, uh, There was a lot of uncertainty around how many employees will be back in the office for how many days.

Um, there was this constant debate whether we should be in the office or not and so on. And this year, we are starting in our customer conversations, we are starting to see the dust sort of settle down on that. And this is the year when we are seeing stabilization and hybrid work plans. Um, so at Frost & Sullivan, we conduct a lot of global surveys of IT decision makers and business leaders.

And our recent surveys show. Um, an accelerated return to the office for sure, you know, and it's, it's been going up consistently and the proportion of remote work time has consistently gone down. Um, so in our latest survey, it was a full 10 percentage points higher in office presence, was a full 10 percentage points higher than previous years.

Um, but. Equally interesting is, um, the fact that the deviation between the current state of hybrid work and the future plans, you know, where companies are today and where they want to be, that has narrowed down quite a bit. So, the deviation was only 3 percentage points in this year's survey compared to where we were in the past, which I think was close to twice as much.

So, what this means is, um. People are getting closer to where they ultimately want to be with their hybrid work policy. Uh, you know, whatever version of hybrid work strategy that works best for their business works for their corporate culture. And we know many a times that mandate comes from the top, from the C suite.

So, IT teams, facilities, HR are, uh, Taking those next concrete steps now, because they know where they have landed. They finally are moving on those office modernization projects. They are, uh, moving faster on the digital transformation projects, whether it's the contact central, unified communications or meeting rooms, and then, you know, sort of putting the right technology in the right space.

Tom Arbuthnot: Right, so they're sort of getting stable on what they're, wherever they've landed percentage wise between remote and office, that is kind of how it's going to be going forward. Maybe we want to push it slightly more in one direction or slightly more in the other, but we know enough of what's going on and what the, you know, new normal, don't love that phrase, but like this is how it is.

We can get on with our, our workplace strategy in terms of platforms and rooms. 

Roopam Jain: Exactly. So, you know, I call this a year of recovery, you know, especially for video devices. Last year was brutal. We are seeing a good level of market recovery this year. So, obviously, that meeting room transit transformation is also happening.

But I think, Tom, it's equally important. To note that this sort of workplace transformation is happening in tandem with two other big trends. Um, you can guess, AI, AI transformation, obviously.

Tom Arbuthnot: I wonder how long before we get to AI. 

Roopam Jain: Yeah. Um, and then of course, a huge, huge focus on employee experience. I, I'm not having a single conversation, uh, with anyone either in the tech community or even on the customer side, where they're not talking about ways to improve the employee experience.

Um, so I think these three. So these trends are sort of, you know, really shaking things up. Um, but again, going back to our survey findings, going back to what I cover, which is meeting rooms, 37 percent of the companies we surveyed said that they are going to be building more meeting rooms. And this is, this is a pretty impressive number.

More so because 24 percent of the companies surveyed said that they are reducing their real estate. So what this means is meeting room density. in workplaces going up, you know, so, you know, whether people are getting back into the office. Three days or four days a week, they want more collaboration, more networking, ideation, discussion.

So more collaborative spaces within offices is happening. Different types of spaces are coming up. You know, it's not just your typical, uh, small, mid, large meeting room with four walls. We're talking of open collapse spaces, meeting parts, jump spaces, quiet spaces, I mean, 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I see lots of divisible and high end and like that really resonates anecdotally with what I've seen, which is we're coming to the office to do something, but that's still going to be possibly a hybrid meeting scenario.

So we want, uh, it's not coming in to sit at the hot desk and do meetings all day. It's coming into a space. 

Roopam Jain: Exactly. That defeats the purpose of the commute. Um, so yes. And, and, uh, you know, what I call the emergence of the experiential office, you, you want a certain experience when you do go to the office.

And so, you know, everything is kind of getting redefined and reimagined and video communication is a big part of it, but video is a given, right? I don't remember the last time I had a call that was audio only, and I don't think we will have, you may choose to disable video because, you know, the use case doesn't require you to show your video, but video is a given.

The conversation is also shifting to video plus experiences, like a complete collaboration experience, better content collaboration, whether it's from the device. Perspective from the platform that's going into these spaces. Intelligent audio is just such a huge thing. You know, you just get, you can make the audio better and better so that it becomes.

Perfect. You know, and then, then video follows, content collaboration follows. I think it's, it's all about having these multiple flexible ways of collaboration and it transcends to more than video and just better collaboration everywhere. 

Tom Arbuthnot: That's awesome. So, so you're seeing more interest in those.

Experiential means like it's not just a hundred standard meeting rooms. It's more about how are we going to use the space and like, it does that lean towards higher end kit, like seating mics and kind of kitted out rooms or not necessarily? 

Roopam Jain: It does. I mean, I think at the end of the day, it's all about mapping the technology to your space needs, you know, and, and, and also keeping the user personas in mind, keeping user preferences and use cases in mind.

So the end goal, and this is where we see a huge shift, you know, if you go back by 10 years, um, the technology sort of took precedence, you know, the technology was chosen. And then the users were expected to adapt to technology. And now the end goal is to connect people, to connect teams, and then make technology decisions accordingly and not the other way around.

So I think this is just a very good shift. Um, and then of course, there are so many options. I mean, there's a device. For every space, there is a platform for every space. Uh, you know, there's, there's appliance mode, there's standards based rooms, and there are pros and cons. And, um, those decisions are being based on what best fits each organization or each business's needs.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Um, what are you seeing in terms of, obviously we've had the, these, the UCaaS platforms, like, I know you look across the whole market, so I'd be interested to get your perspective. Like, I feel like, uh, back in, certainly when I started in this space, the facilities team would choose the, the room kit and somebody else would have a decision on the, the desktop.

Is the desktop or the platform decision or the cloud decision, um, Influencing the kit decision. How are you seeing that play out? 

Roopam Jain: Definitely. I, I think, um, a lot of the technology decisions are being Based on the platform of choice, the collaboration platform of choice that the company is standardizing on, but the reality is there is no single platform.

It's it's multiple platforms, right? And it can vary by departments. It can vary by, um, you know, just just different as different locations, you know, those decisions can be made at the branch level. Um, so I think the platform decision is important, but if, if we talk about meeting spaces or rooms, it's also about the form factor.

Um, you know, and so appliances, collab bars, for example, there's been such a massive update for that. And that's essentially because I feel like I feel 

Tom Arbuthnot: like every vendor's got a collab bar at the moment. I think we're up to like, yeah, 

Roopam Jain: it's an overcrowded market for indeed. Yeah. Um, and that's because, you know, it's, it's, uh, an integrated solution, be it MTR or Zoom Rooms.

and just an all in one solution with hardware and software designed to work together seamlessly makes the IT manager's job easy, you know, ease of deployment. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it brings the cost down, brings the price down, like they're relatively simple to deploy, so you're not into multi day projects. So there's a, there's a kind of TCO thing there where you can deliver a good experience for, for a lot less than you used to be able to potentially.

Roopam Jain: Exactly. Yeah. And, and consistent user experience, right? So as users go from one room to another. They have a consistent experience, but often there is a vendor lock in involved, you know, and I think the other end of the spectrum spectrum is standards based systems just give more, um, choice of components, more flexibility, um, better interop between different platforms and devices.

So, you know, there is, there are pros and cons to each, um, but of course, those. Modular, standards based rooms, especially for mid sized and large rooms, you know, they require more technical expertise. So there are cost considerations, cost related to maybe AV integration, but like I said earlier, it all boils down to what kind of meeting spaces you have, what are the use cases you are enabling.

And then of course, what are user preferences and, you know, IT, what is easy for IT from a management monitoring, um, perspective. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Makes sense. And what do you see? We mentioned how many collab bar vendors there are there, like, and you mentioned IT management. How do you see organizations dealing with choice of kit?

Like, cause there's obviously an overhead if mixing lots of different management platforms, lots of different kit. Are you seeing them? Standardize. Are you seeing a flex on that? Any thoughts on that? 

Roopam Jain: I think just as we are seeing best of breed on the type of platform, we are seeing best of breed when it comes to management, um, platform choices.

So I think there are multiple solutions, but it is becoming a critical factor in tech selection. So any, any vendor that lacked a robust management platform, whether it's from a device perspective or otherwise, uh, was definitely losing out. So it's, it's a, it's a big, big deal. IT and, and, you know, there's a lot going on in organizations that are BYOD rooms that are outside of the purview of IT.

IT doesn't want to even know that those rooms exist, but the rooms that they know. exist that they are deploying and you know, those are the ones that they want full visibility into and they want those central management monitoring, all of those, um, you know, advanced capabilities. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yes. That's a, that's a key part of the decision making process is not just does it have these cameras and these mics, but actually what's the, what's the day to management experience and the reporting, those kinds of things.

Roopam Jain: Exactly. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. So you touched on BYOD there. I want to, I want to jump on that because that's really interesting. I feel like BYOD has like got a renaissance at the moment because now we've got network connected BYOD. We've got finally got one cable with USB C. I think you did some research around this as well.

What's your, your experience of the BYOD in the market versus appliances and standard space rooms? 

Roopam Jain: BYOD just, it's just. It's around and it will always be around and it fits sort of squarely into, um, the whole collaboration experience and clear cut reasons for it, right? Users have technology preferences.

They want those. Easy experiences and businesses want the flexibility and cost effectiveness. I mean, I've spoken to quite a few customers that have deployed appliances, but are using it in BYOD mode. So, you know, and, and it's just because of the advantages of BYOD that, um, surpass like those, you know, specific vendor driven solutions in certain rooms.

Um, and I, I just want to quote a stat here, and it's actually, you must have seen it. It's a very, Publicized and used stat across the industry that comes from Frost and Sullivan that only about 15 percent of the meeting spaces today globally are video enabled. And so that stat, um. Because it's coming from us, we know it counts only dedicated purpose built video devices.

It does not include BYOD driven video spaces. So if you add BYOD to the mix, that number is probably twice as high. Interesting. 

Tom Arbuthnot: That's a very good important part of that stat. That's interesting to hear. Right. 

Roopam Jain: So BYOD is big. It's roughly 50 percent of all meeting spaces that are equipped with any sort of video. Um, uh, BYOD spaces.

So it's the simplicity, the flexibility to collaborate over a meeting platform of your choice. It's also cost effective. And so it's here to stay. And I, and I know Tom, you, you cover everything, uh, Teams and, uh, Microsoft 365 related. If you look at just the efforts that Microsoft has made over the last couple of years or so, um, you know, they've taken so many initiatives to make these spaces more usable, um, discoverable.

You know, I, I saw a demo of, um, the Teams shared display mode a few months back. Um, things like auto discovery of devices where, you know, Teams can detect shared devices in a BYOD room and add it to the list, um, in the. The Pro Teams Portal. So improving the visibility from an IT admin point of view. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, there's been a real focus at Microsoft on BYOD and accepting BYOD and optimising it as well.

The client now does some clever things around, if it understands the BYOD room, it will throw the correct thing on the big screen. It will auto configure the audio and video. I really feel like there's been a big change in Microsoft in the last few years, it was very much

Microsoft Teams Rooms are the one true way to do it right to actually, if you talk to the Microsoft's biggest customers, they, even when they've got 1000 plus MTRs, as your stats allude to, they still have BYOD in play and they still want that experience to be good as well. 

Roopam Jain: Exactly. And I think the end goal is, um, As IT admins can associate those discovered devices to rooms, right?

They can assign room licenses if they want to go down that road. So that's, 

Tom Arbuthnot: yeah, there's something you touched on as well. It's interesting that I've heard with customers, which is actually for better or worse, people understand how their laptop works because they use it every day and they can be more comfortable.

Plugging in a USB C than they can trying to work the meeting, even if it's a simple meeting room, because they, they, they might only come into the office three times a month and use the room, they're, they're running into work. They kind of, they can understand they've, they've sort of through being, you know, particularly the hybrid period, like constantly using, Zoom or WebEx or Teams.

They know how to switch a device. They know how to use their client, but they might not know how to use a room. So actually that drives them to want to plug in rather than using the room in some scenarios. 

Roopam Jain: Exactly. And they bring their preferred apps into the meeting space. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, that's another, um, a real benefit in terms of platform is everything that works on a laptop or a device is going to work as well.

So versus that kind of appliance model. Yeah. Awesome. So you touched on AI. Um, we have to talk about AI, right? It's 2024. That's, that's the rules. Um, but what are you seeing specifically in room technology? Because a lot, a lot of the vendors are talking about infusing AI direction, cleverer audio. Are you seeing customers see value in that?

Are you seeing in, like, is that, is that changing the experience? 

Roopam Jain: Yes, definitely. I mean, that's, we could probably do a separate podcast on that. But, um, I mean, the thing is the needle is moving fast on AI and just in my conversations with customers over the last 12 months or so, you know, I'm seeing that progression talking to more and more companies that are moving from proof of concept to implementation.

And implementation at scale, right? Because they're starting to see the tangible value. They are seeing the impact on business outcomes. You know, it's not just about AI for productivity sake. It's not just about AI to get things done, um, faster. It's about how can AI help you do things better, right? So creativity, innovation, just things that we don't have the skillset for, where AI can come and complement everything.

So I think employees, the users are getting it. Business leaders are getting it, and we are seeing so much movement on that. Now, when it comes to meeting rooms, I mean, AI has been impacting meeting rooms for a while. So it's not like a net new thing. Um, but just to kind of, uh, lay out where AI is playing in the meeting room, I sort of look at it from a four different category perspective.

The first one is, Language processing, advanced language processing. So this is where we've already seen a lot of adoption, you know, things like transcription, um, and, you know, gen AI, meeting summaries and insights. And I think that's probably the most widely adopted AI feature today in meetings. Um, real time translation.

I think that's such a. game changer, could be a game changer for how we communicate across geographies and so on. Um, AI enhanced audio video. That's like the second category where a lot of, uh, advancements have already happened. Intelligent framing, intelligent tracking. I mean, that's been around for a while.

Um, but now this whole idea of multi directional conversations that happen in meeting space and how can AI capture the best video. View. Um, it's just like multi camera implementation and that's getting better and better. The first generation of multi camera implementation was sort of clunky and not easy and it's getting better.

It's getting more affordable. So that's another leap that we are seeing in terms of just making those meetings more engaging and more equitable. Intelligent audio. I mean, that's huge. I'm really big on how audio can actually change the experience fundamentally. And, you know, it's, it's things like advanced noise cancellation, auto audio enhancement.

Um, I think it will also come into play in terms of accents and differences across languages. It's going to make that experience so seamless that once we move Beyond the audio experience, we can actually capture everything else that's happening around us. The other, so I covered advanced language processing, AI, enhanced audio video.

The other one is the impact on IT management and analytics, right? So it's just, AI is not just for better user experience. When you look at data aggregation and analytics and actionable roaming sites and, um, Things like even occupancy and workplace optimization. It's just helping businesses improve the sustainability posture.

So, you know, I think AI is just going to have a huge, huge role in terms of energy management, um, using the sensors and kind of feeding all that information. So, um, these, these are the, the big areas, but the fourth area, which is not so much a tech advancement rather than, um, Usability. And I think this is a very early stage of simplifying AI for the average user.

And so I think this is where we need to probably, as an industry, make the most progress, is Take AI from complexity to simplicity and making AI more persona based, making it more use case based. So today we have a lot of AI around us, but we have to go to AI to use it, but AI coming to the user. So that's, that's the big change.

So I think, um, It's just a lot. It's just a lot. And it's happening at such a fast pace. And like I said, I'm having some really exciting customer conversation. Customers that have essentially taken the leap of faith and deployed AI across the entire organization to every employee, AI licenses, all the way up to some that are still sitting on the fence.

And that's a small percentage, by the way. It's shrinking. According to our latest survey, Only 20 percent are still just, you know, in the stage of getting to AI awareness and the remaining 80 percent are implementing AI at some scale could be just one focused, you know, app or, um, team within their company or a full scale implementation.

But there are some that talk about, um. AI being scary, you know, because there are so many issues with AI. 

Tom Arbuthnot: There's valid, when you look after data and customer data, there's valid concerns, I think, there to know what you're doing for sure. 

Roopam Jain: Yeah, yeah. So, you know, whether it's security, privacy, regulatory or ethical issues, there's a lot of, a lot that can be done and a lot that will probably also act as putting a guardrail around AI, maybe over the next few years.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I love how you break down those different areas it's impacting because you're right, it's across, it's across the board and like it's interesting when I hear those customers who are like we're not, not doing AI. I'm like that AI is being used in your organization in some, some shape or form. It's just how, how it's being used and how sanctioned or not, not sanctioned it is.

But the, the thing you were talking about, about the AI Coming to the user. I think that's really interesting in our space because potentially moving from, as you, as you said there, I as an individual go to the meeting summary and drive some information out of it, that idea of having agentic, like someone comes in and co facilitates the meeting.

Like I've had these meetings where you have these awesome, you know, Project managers or facilitators who get everybody engaged, all that kind of stuff. If we could bring even a fraction of that in, in AI, I think that's really interesting. 

Roopam Jain: I think these are exciting times. I call it the golden age of technology.

So that's good times to be in. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, yeah, definitely. It's really, really interesting. And AI is just, just accelerating all those conversations. Awesome. Well, I know we're tight on time, Roopam, so thank you so much. It seems like we've got, we came across two other podcast topics. We're going to have to loop back and do another one sometime, but I really appreciate you taking the time and then giving us the insight into the stats.

Um, if you want to find out more about you and your work or Frost & Sullivan, what's the best thing to do? 

Roopam Jain: Well, you can go to our portal, www.frost.com And, um, Or reach out to me directly, um, on LinkedIn and I will, you know, we, we do a lot, we do a lot as a company. So I'll put you in touch with the right folks.

Tom Arbuthnot: Great. Awesome. Thanks so much. 

Roopam Jain: Thank you, Tom. Good seeing you.