Trond Johannessen: The UK court system is a good example. The whole MOJ in the UK is running on Pexip. And, uh, and all the virtual court cases that take place every day, the requirement is that those data need to be in two specific data centers. Those data can never leave the right needs to be in those two data centers.

Tom Arbuthnot: Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. This week, we have Trond Johannesson, CEO of Pexip. And we get into his thoughts on the industry and of course, Interop, what Pexip is providing to Microsoft Teams customers, and also Pexip have a secure meeting platform where you can have meetings dedicated and private on their platform as well, self hosted.

So a bit of a tour about Pexip and their capabilities and his thoughts on the industry. Thanks to Pexip. I really appreciate their support of Empowering Cloud and many thanks to Trond for taking the time out to talk to us. Hope you enjoy the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. Been excited to do this one.

I've been working with Pexip for a number of years, deploying and now more recently with events. And I'm excited to have Trond on the podcast. We're going to kind of dive into a little bit about him and his background. And also kind of what thoughts on the industry, thoughts on Interop. And so, Trond, without further ado, could you just introduce yourself?

Trond Johannessen: Of course. Great to be here, Tom. I'm Trond Johannesson, CEO of Pexip. Been that since May 2022. Before Pexip, I was working for a global, uh, international technology group out of Norway, uh, for a number of years. I've also done industrial computing for quite a while. And, uh, environmental technologies. And just out of, uh, business school, I worked for a number of years as a strategy consultant with McKinsey and Company.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. I'm excited to hear your perspective on, on this space. Obviously, you're a couple of years into role now, but you've got that other perspective. I feel like our space is quite often quite insular in terms of, uh, people in the industry and leadership. So excited to get your perspective. 

Trond Johannessen: I guess every industry is like that, you know, in its in its own way.

But, uh, you know, Pexip is kind of a bit, it's kind of a Special animal in this industry, uh, Pexip has developed quite a bit over the years, you know, since Pexip was founded back in 2012, uh, it has developed quite a lot, uh, and, uh, where we are today, we are, uh, you know, a pure software company. We deliver software.

and Software as a Service. We basically work as a complementary solution to the large video conferencing players like Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, WebEx and others. And we kind of do things that they don't want to do themselves. So being this extra solution that really complements working in partnerships and not competing.

Uh, which has been an important part of the strategy that we have developed over the last couple of years. So I think now we're at the point where we're quite well understood what we actually do in the ecosystem, which problems we solve. And that's kind of a good starting point. So basically solving two very basic problems.

The first is connecting meeting rooms to meeting platforms. We call it Any2Any, that's the whole intro part. Any meeting room to any meeting platform. And the second is what we call secure and custom spaces. which is for those companies and organizations that cannot or will not use a public cloud platform for all their data storage or communication needs, they need something else.

So, we can offer a sort of a solution that will complement the public cloud platform like Azure or others, uh, that, that enables these organizations to run their meetings in the compliant way for them. So, that's the very basic and very simply what we do. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, that's great to understand. I definitely want to dive into that kind of Secure private cloud meeting scenario.

Let's start with the Interop. I think that's the one that this community will probably be more more familiar with. It feels like that Interop requirement has become more acute in the last few years as we've gone to this more platform based video world. Obviously, there's standards based endpoints with SIP, but there's lots of Zoom rooms, Teams rooms, which are by and large proprietary in terms of how they work.

Is that what you've seen as well? 

Trond Johannessen: No, absolutely. And the way the way the world develops is that we, it looks like we will have more than one meeting platform. And it looks like organizations will be somehow having a need to connect to more than one meeting platform. Teams being the leading player out there, but having also other platforms that need to connect mainly into Teams, but also Teams users needing to connect to other platforms.

And the way we see it developing now is that the requirements on this Interoperability functionality actually being increasing almost monthly. You know, the functionality that you have in your native meeting setting, you expect the same, more or less, when you connect also outside of your, of your sort of native solution.

And this is something that is, of course, a bit tricky for industry. To solve all by themselves, it would mean kind of sharing a lot of APIs and SDKs and details about the changes constantly. It's easier when Pexip does this sort of on behalf of the industry players and ensures this Interoperability solution.

Tom Arbuthnot: And it must be a non trivial effort to be working with all these big players and the standards based rooms in terms of you say there's there's API programs, there's certification programs. So you're certified with the big providers as well. Certainly with teams. Is that a significant kind of effort there?

Trond Johannessen: It has it has developed over time. And you know, our relationship with Microsoft. It goes many, many years back. We've also been working with Google. We've started to work with Zoom and now also cooperate with Cisco. So, so, but the Microsoft relationship has really been where it all started. Uh, and, and, uh, kind of growing into it, I guess you could say Pexip has been doing over, over a number of years, more difficult in the beginning, but now I think it works really well and we are constantly in dialogue with the, with the Microsoft uh, on all sorts of changes and solving problems for customers or joint customers every day. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it feels like it's accelerated certainly in the last 12 months, particularly with Microsoft, with the tighter integration to Microsoft Teams Rooms and some of the stuff coming, the click to dial, the PowerPoint live stuff.

Is that right? Is it kind of getting tighter that relationship? 

Trond Johannessen: Absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, it all started with the, with the cloud video Interop solution CVI, right? Which, which used to have four certified providers, Cisco, Pexip, BlueJeans, and Polly. And now, after Polly outsourced their solution to Pexip, and BlueJeans shut down their service, it's basically only Cisco and Pexip left.

And this has made the whole thing, I also, I think partly easier for Microsoft and for us to sort of to have a close dialogue and make sure that we make things work for the customers. But that's kind of the original Interoperability solution. What we're seeing now is the need for all those MTR users out there to be connecting into occasionally other meeting platforms. And we see the, the, the organizations with other meeting platforms like Zoom having a need to connect into Teams from their native rooms. And this is really, you know, the, the, the new kind of generation Interoperability that, that we are seeing.

And that also requires a very, very close integration. between Pexip and these, uh, and these other solutions to make it work. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, and we won't get into the technical weeds, but kind of the innovation that's coming now is the ability to have a Teams Room dial and connect to another SIP based room or SIP based system.

So that kind of unlocks lots of Interop scenarios where These other cloud platforms also support SIP as a way in, so you can kind of be the middle, middle layer to get these different worlds to talk. 

Trond Johannessen: Historically, or up until now, you have had DirectGuestJoin as your way of connecting from an MTR to another meeting platform that has had a few weaknesses to it.

Uh, you know, HDMI ingest, not working, no support for dual screen and a couple of other known weaknesses. Now with the Pexip solution for, we call it the Pexip or Pexip Connect for MTRs, uh, that's being sold and it's being launched for Windows now in October, late October, early November, and then for Android in 2025.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. And do you see, are there particular customer types, particular verticals that have more, more of a harder requirement for those Interop scenarios? Or is it across the board? What do you see? 

Trond Johannessen: I think what we see is many organizations are kind of in some way, some part, some kind of transition. Many are transitioning towards, you know, a full MTR estate from, uh, you know, a SIP based estate that could be.

And you had, I think you had AstraZeneca as one of your guests on your podcast some months ago. Uh, and they were mentioning using Pexip as a part of their overall solution and in their migration towards, uh, MTRs. And for AstraZeneca specifically, we are basically solving the problem of connecting all the, uh.

All the SIP end points that they have, legacy SIP end points into Teams meetings, but also ensuring that when they have installed MTRs, that those MTRs can be Interoperable and connect to all the platforms when that is needed as well. So, so that's kind of a typical example of a large organization that has a complex need, uh, and a need for Interoperability in their daily, uh, daily work.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it was interesting, the AstraZeneca podcast, actually, I think other ones I've had since as well, where. Most enterprises will have a bunch of standards based SIP rooms, and a lot of them are on a journey to Teams rooms or Zoom rooms, but actually they found that they keep the SIP rooms running, and they end up with more rooms, and they have SIP and Teams for some length of time, and then, as you say, even if they got to that, theoretically they went a hundred percent Teams rooms of BYOD.

Then it's that Interop scenario where their partners, their customers, they need to connect to other meeting systems. That's where it comes into play. 

Trond Johannessen: But we also work a lot with the, with the finance sector. You know, we, we recently worked with a very large, uh, global bank that, that had a mixed estate and that needed to both, you know, with Zoom rooms, with, with Teams, rooms, and having this sort of.

The employees did not want to have an opinion or didn't need to know what type of equipment was in the meeting room or which meeting platform they were connecting to. They just wanted this to be all seamless. So I. Push one button in the meeting room, and I'm in the meeting. That's kind of the ideal scenario, right?

You don't want to know what's going to happen. And for this particular customer, I think we're solving this in a very smooth way by providing our solution for Zoom Rooms, our solution for Teams Rooms, and our solution for, um, SIP endpoints. So all that in combination enables them to take advantage of all the real estate, all the meeting room endpoints that they have from before, the ones they are buying, and enabling the employees to seamlessly connect to all sorts of meeting platforms.

Tom Arbuthnot: And in this, sorry, Trond, in this Teams world, we'll talk about the secure meetings in a second. In the Teams world, there's two options here as well. You provide this as a true cloud service, everything's done in the cloud, and you have an option where customers can choose to deploy if they've got special requirements or they want to do additional things with the platform.

Trond Johannessen: I think two other deployment methods, one is beyond the sort of pure public cloud platform, one is the GovClouds that you have all over. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Ah yeah, because you've got the certifications for those scenarios as well, haven't you? 

Trond Johannessen: Yes. like in the federal space in the US, for example, you would want to have your CVI or Interop solution running in the government cloud.

But you also can have it on prem if that is your preference. So it's, so I know it's deployable in many different ways, depending on the security requirements and architectures that are in place in each organization. 

Tom Arbuthnot: And what mix do you see there? If you can share how many customers are going cloud and how many prefer to deploy their own instances.

Trond Johannessen: It has been, Interoperability has basically been a cloud play for a while. We're starting to see the GovClouds and some Sovereign Clouds emerging, but it's largely a cloud based solution that we offer here. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Is there anything else we want to talk about, about the kind of Teams, Zoom, Interop world before we get into the secure meetings?

Trond Johannessen: I think it's interesting. I mentioned this large bank, uh, you know, and, um, banks also generally are very security conscious and they are very concerned about what type of, you know, how many apps are downloaded on the, on the corporate laptops. And, uh, there are restrictions on what all the employees can do with all the, with laptops.

So the, the question around, uh, is it possible to do Interoperability also from, for example, a Teams client or a Zoom client? Has started to come up. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Oh, interesting. So they're happy with that single client. They'd rather not have people running all the meeting room clients or the web versions. They could see an interesting opportunity there.

Trond Johannessen: Yeah so we're getting those questions and I guess it's something we have to like something the industry has to discuss a little bit if we're seeing the opportunity to connect. to a Teams meeting from a Zoom client or from to a Zoom meeting from a Teams client or any other, any other service. I think it's an interesting discussion to have because it's clear that the preference of the IT department of the large organizations would be to have fewer apps running on each laptop.

So it could be next generation Interop we're seeing in a few years. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, very interesting. So, um, let's jump into secure meetings. This is a whole different thing that you do for some really interesting customers. I'm not sure we can talk about all of them because obviously, um, but like what is this kind of secure meeting scenario?

Trond Johannessen: Some organizations basically have restrictions on the use of cloud platforms. It could be pure compliance like for the health sector in a given country. They might not be allowed to have any data about patients shared outside of the country's borders. So everything needs to be on a data center locally or on a, on in, in a cloud that is within the country's borders.

And to be able to run a full video conferencing service in such server closed environment without connecting to any kind of, uh, of public cloud, uh, you need to have a special software to do that. And Pexip has that, not that many competing offers in the market at this point in time? 

Tom Arbuthnot: No. I mean, the whole industry has gone to.

Cloud, right? So all the big players are aggressively pushing have MCU in the cloud, or maybe they have hybrid MCU, but the signaling and data is still into Interop-ing with the cloud service. So truly, you can do kind of If you needed to truly, truly like air blocks on private network meetings and it would, it would all still work.

Trond Johannessen: So that's the extreme version. That's the, you know, the, the, the defense, uh, the armed forces of the countries and the sort of top level government, and they will have generally very sort of closed systems. Then you have others that are more moving towards the sovereign systems, where you have a sovereign cloud that you, that you use for certain, certain parts of the public sector or large organizations.

And here you also have, you know, again, this complimentary solution coming from Pexip. So you have, can have Teams, and then you have a secure meeting platform sitting next to Teams that you use occasionally. for compliance when you have your main use case is Teams, and then you have something that you use on the side when that is required.

And the one example could be like the health sector in Norway, patient data needs to be discussed on this private platform. Or, you know, I know the top level government in another European country, they have all discussions between sort of the ministers that's happening on the secure platform, or the kind of the on prem platform that they have on the side.

So it's, it's something that we're seeing. Quite a lot of growth in this, this area, both the sovereign clouds, the self hosted, the solutions. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. 

Trond Johannessen: And I think AI is, AI has been a part of driving that, uh, interestingly has been a part of driving that development because all the AI tools that are fantastic, you know, the copilots and, and what have you, these are fantastic tools, but people are also, Sometimes a little bit scared of what all these tools can do.

Tom Arbuthnot: Oh, interesting. It's highlighting much more visibly the fact that pretty much everything we do can be transcribed and recorded and often is by default in your typical scenarios now. So If they want to be 110% sure it can't happen, then knowing it's on this different platform, in this different use case is interesting to them.

Trond Johannessen: They will have control over it. And, and so that, that can be, you know, everything from law firms to, to investment banks, to others that sometimes have meetings that they, you know, they, they would say some meetings are truly private. And however they define private, it's up to them, but that's, it's, it's kind of enables that possibility.

Tom Arbuthnot: And do you offer this scenario as a cloud service you run, or is this scenario always you give the code and the customer or partner with the customer runs the infrastructure? What does that look like? 

Trond Johannessen: We will generally deliver this just as a software. So it's up to the customer to deploy it wherever you want.

The good thing about Pexip is it can be deployed in the cloud, it can be deployed on the server in the basement or in the server in the cloud or wherever you want to deploy it. And you can shift it around so the users won't really notice. And that's quite interesting in today's world where you are seeing some uncertainty in certain, in a few countries on how this is going to play out.

What will the requirements be? Uh, is cloud okay? Uh, do I need to go server and do I need to go on prem and then Pexip can offer a flexible solution in this respect. So, so we're seeing quite some interest from, from the public sector, particularly in this area. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it's interesting. I kind of see two use cases you're talking about there.

One is trust and risk with the provider, but even if you truly, truly trust the cloud providers, there's this other scenario about we, we need to stay sovereign for this legal requirement or we need to have an absolute kind of governmental defense level DR scenario where when countries aren't getting on and we need to be truly private, truly, truly air gapped, you can go to that level as well.

Trond Johannessen: Absolutely, but then you can take the UK court system as a good example. The whole MOJ in the UK is running on Pexip. And, uh, and all the virtual court cases that take place every day. The requirement is that those data need to be in two specific data centers. Those data can never leave the The demo needs to be in those two data centers.

And, uh, and here Pexip has a custom made solution that enables, you know, a workflow for these court cases, and also takes care of the compliance requirements for keeping the data in London. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. And you mentioned the kind of extensibility or customization there. I've seen that scenario and it's really interesting.

It's not your typical use case. So it's like This party needs to be mute at this point. This party needs to do this. This party needs to do that. Talk us through that because that's part of the story as well. It's not just a you get what you're given. There's some kind of APIs and extensibility there, isn't there?

Trond Johannessen: Yeah, on the, on the custom side to make this workflow really work, and of course, the judge has his way of running a court case, he needs to be able to have a witness waiting, that witness cannot hear what somebody else is saying, needs to stay in the breakout room. Sometimes you need to keep someone anonymous for various safety reasons, they know that the person cannot be identified.

And there are many, many, and you need interpreters coming in to the workflow. to be able to interpret in an efficient way to make this whole thing work at all the things you are used to in a physical courtroom. You would want that also to be in place in your virtual courtroom. And that's in every country here is a bit different.

So, we have these solutions operating in several countries. And it's, of course, here we don't deliver ourselves, we have integrators that do this, but it's, it's, uh, it's an interesting sort of custom video challenge to make a court case. Work really almost like it does, uh, you know, in real life on video. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I mean there's, I was going to say there's decades, there's more than decades.

There's, there's in some cases, centuries of precedence and procedure and process there. And we're looking to remap that as best we can to a, Digital equivalent, I guess. 

Trond Johannessen: But imagine the savings, you know, you don't have to transport a witness from a prison or a prisoner from a prison into the courtroom every time a witness can be staying somewhere else.

It's extreme, you know, the efficiency gains here are just extreme. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. Yeah. And I guess the, um, the kind of, um, you know, the notation and, uh, what they call the Stenographs and recording and all that kind of stuff as well, there's options to digitize that, which could be huge, huge savings and, and completely unarguable records of what happened and when and why as well.

Trond Johannessen: Yeah, no, correct. Correct. No, it's interesting. It's interesting. So working in these two kind of very specific niches of the video conferencing industry is exposing us to some interesting problems on a daily basis. I think it's a, it's a fascinating space. The ecosystem is developing extremely fast. The way video is being, you know, used now, just if you just go a few years back and see how it has completely changed, you know, following the pandemic, I guess.

And, uh, and everything we've learned through it. So, no, it's, uh, it's fascinating. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, no, it's a really interesting space. It's great to hear a little bit more about the wider Pexip portfolio. I think a lot of people in this community will definitely know it from CVI and Interop, but that whole background and being able to run, like, pick Pexip up as a cloud SaaS, but also that scenario where you can run your own instance, customize it to business use case is really interesting.

Trond Johannessen: Yeah, yeah. And the way I think the way the industry really has opened up and Microsoft basically being the leading player in terms of opening up, being an open platform, allowing others to connect, um, and also allowing Pexip and allowing certified solutions to make custom solutions that make this experiences for the customers, joint customers even better.

I think it's an excellent example of how an industry is solving problems for end users in a way that is, uh, you know, I think it's a great, great example. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, agreed. It's no, it's definitely nice to have the options and to have a company really thinking about that problem and working between all the big players as well is, is so key.

I definitely think there's a, there's certainly going to be an ongoing requirement for that scenario. It doesn't feel like the industry is going back to pure standards based. It's going to be some, some standards based. You said multiple platforms. It feels like there's, there's a big three or four platforms now that are going to kind of Fight out and people are going to have to have scenarios where they can cross meet on those scenarios.

Trond Johannessen: Now there was an industry expert the other day that told me that one of the biggest concerns that do come up when large organizations are looking at their sort of video conferencing platforms is the whole Interoperability question. How can it be solved in the best possible way and seamlessly connect to all these platforms?

So it's great to be solving that problem on a daily basis. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Well, Trond I really appreciate you taking the time out to jump on the podcast and appreciate everybody at Pexip and their support of what we're doing as well. It's great to catch up and hopefully we can see how things progress and maybe have you on again at some point when all the latest Teams Interop has been released.

Trond Johannessen: It's been a pleasure, Tom. Thank you very much.