Preethi Ramarathinam: We do see a lot of customers already starting to shift their workloads over for webinars and kind of there is a set of ours for them to fully shift their workloads over. So we are pretty excited about the momentum we're seeing here and we're hoping to kind of close. All the gaps so customers can fully use the full breadth of offering that Teams has.

Tom Arbuthnot: Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. This week we talk about an area of Teams that doesn't get talked about as much as I think it should. Virtual events. So we're talking webinars, town hall, large events, NDI. Uh, really those multi thousand user events as well. We talked to Preethi who's Head of Product for Virtual Events at Teams.

She goes into the details of the use cases for these type of events and some of the features and also some of the thoughts about roadmap and AI as well. Many thanks to Preethi for making the time and also thanks to Landis who are the sponsor of this podcast. Really appreciate their support to the community.

Hope you enjoy the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. Excited to have this one. We talk a lot on the pod around Teams Phone and meetings and kind of the core knowledge worker scenarios. But there's a much wider story with Microsoft Teams and today we're going to talk about kind of large external virtual events.

It's my pleasure to have Preethi on the pod, first time you've been on Preethi. So thanks for coming on and if you'd introduce yourself and give us a little bit about your role. 

Preethi Ramarathinam: Thanks Tom, it's great to be here. So I'm a Group Product Manager in Microsoft Teams. I lead the Microsoft Teams events and external meeting space.

So really glad to be here. Uh, and excited to talk to the audience about the offering that Teams has in this space. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. So a lot of people in our community are going to know Teams core fairly well and the knowledge worker scenarios. Um, but it feels like particularly in the last couple of years, there's been a lot more investment in beyond that.

And maybe you could kind of take us through that, that mission and that story. 

Preethi Ramarathinam: Yeah, and Tom, as you said, like Teams is well known in the, you know, workplace collaboration sort of experience. We have like a whole like a full product suite with chat and collab and, you know, meeting workspace. But the interesting thing is, you know, collaboration.

We think of collaboration beyond, Uh, those sort of typical workloads, uh, we think of collaboration in a much more broader sense. So when you think about enterprise or a medium to small business, there's a need for employee communication, uh, and the need for leaders to connect with their employees on a frequent basis at all different levels.

And the same also holds true for departmental and organizational leads where a marketing or sales department need to connect with their, with their external customers and, you know, so we think of communication and collaboration in a much more broader sense. So, and we have heard very, uh, from our customers that, you know, they would like to use the familiar interface of Teams for all of these extended collaboration, collaboration needs.

So, uh, and that's why I think we as Microsoft and Teams are investing very heavily in the space to make sure we are able to meet these customer needs across this broad spectrum of communication needs. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. And so from a product perspective, that falls into kind of the webinar type scenarios, which is like a controlled.

Essentially controlled meeting experience, and then Town Hall, which is your much bigger thousands up to, uh, you know, I think it's 20, 000 now, isn't it? Or maybe it's more. You can correct me, like, like, like attendees to a big broadcast type event. 

Preethi Ramarathinam: Yeah, and it's very interesting because when you think about, like, we'll speak a little bit about internal and external use cases.

Um, when you think about internal use cases, especially with, you know, with hybrid, there is a need for, uh, for employee connections and communication at all levels. So, you think about employee resource group events where you're trying to bring a community together, uh, you know, uh, uh, uh, to, to build community and collaboration or to, uh, a leadership level communication where you can think about, AMAs and all hands to larger corporate style events, uh, where you're trying to talk about your fiscal year 25 strategy or, you know, uh, about a significant milestone the company's achieving.

So when we think about events, we think about this, this broad breadth of use cases. And typically these are, you know, what we call it is a lot more, a lot more structured, uh, where there is, you know, a set of, you know, Presenters who are delivering content to attendees. Uh, there could be engagement like two way communication or it's more one way communication.

So we think about this broad spectrum of use cases for internal, uh, internal use cases. And for external it's, It's very similar, but the use cases more span around like training sort of scenarios. We have several customers who use Teams for like external training scenarios and also more of these sales and, you know, product launch, those sort of scenarios that tend to be also much larger in scale.

But those are the varied sort of internal and external use cases that Teams events is targeting. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Let's dig into that internal one first. So I think it's interesting the scale of different companies. I've worked with various enterprise customers, but they can say an all hands and they can mean like 3000 people.

Like it's like the Europe region all hands. It can be scenarios like that, I guess, can't it? 

Preethi Ramarathinam: No, no, totally. And that's where I think, uh, we, we, when we think about our offering, uh, we have a full suite of offering here. Where you can, you can use your familiar, uh, Teams meeting, uh, you know, for doing, uh, uh, like a more of a fully interactive, we see a lot of leaders who wanna do a lot, lot more, you know, closed, interactive sort of, uh, AMA's.

So that's why you have more of the Teams meetings sort of offering where you can still have a much more structured sort of experience, but have a much more intimate AMA where, you know, people can, uh, you know, turn on their videos. Employees can turn on their videos, ask questions, so you can have a lot more of an intimate sort of AMA to kind of like a broader AMA where you have a larger set of employees like 3, 000 where you want to do an AMA, in that case, the delivery of it becomes more of a one to many sort of delivery and that's where the Teams Town Hall, which is also built on top of Teams Meeting, it just gives you a lot more control to have like more of a one to many Experience.

So, so Teams as such offers both of these depending on, you know, the style of event you want to deliver. You can use a much more collaborative style of delivery with Teams Town Hall, a Teams meeting or go in for a much more one to many sort of delivery with the Teams, Teams Town Hall sort of experience.

Tom Arbuthnot: I don't know if you can talk about customer examples, probably not names or maybe how you guys use it internally as well to give us some context as to where that gets used. 

Preethi Ramarathinam: Yeah, for sure. I think we have some, uh, we have a top pharma who has completely migrated over from a competitive platform over to Teams for all their, uh, use cases for both internal and external use cases.

Uh, and the, and the interesting thing is they're using it across this broad breadth of scenarios I spoke about for internal for more of this intimate AMA style events. Uh, to larger corporate style events, um, the specifically for larger corporate style events. Teams also offers a lot of production and broadcast capabilities for audience who are not familiar.

We have capabilities such as NDI, which allows you to isolate, um, Audio and Video Streams, Composite using an external software and feed it back into Teams. So that gives a lot of these larger enterprise who want to have a lot more polished, highly produced experiences, a lot more control as well. Or if they want to just produce it within Teams, they also have that ability.

So that flexibility is what a lot of these large enterprise customers love about Teams. The fact that they can use it across this varied breadth of scenarios. So. So as I said, like this large pharma just moved over to Teams and they're using it across this full breadth of scenarios. Um, and I can also dive a little bit into how Microsoft uses this.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I'd love to hear that. Yeah, so tell us about the internal stuff. That's really interesting. 

Preethi Ramarathinam: Yeah, so, uh, it's pretty, uh, exciting, you know, like with the, with, you know, like when COVID hit everything was virtual and now we are kind of moving into more of this Steady state where things are becoming hybrid and hybrid sort of experiences.

So, so what we're seeing right now in Microsoft is a combination of Teams room and Teams events kind of being very heavily used in all of our event scenarios. So take, I'll take an example of our organization, Jeff, uh, who, who's our leader. He hosts a set of AMA's and, you know, employee events throughout the course to kind of.

You know, bring employees together, build connections, and he, he's typically using a combination of Teams Room and Teams Event for those sort of, uh, those sort of scenarios. So a typical, give you an example of a Jeff AMA would be a hybrid event. Where Jeff is, is, is, is, is in the, within the, within the Teams NPR or conference room and leveraging some set of events capabilities like green room so that he can set up and get ready before starting the event.

So that really gives them the flexibility to wait for the audience to come before starting to, you know, uh, start the event. So, so that's something which is becoming very much common use case that we see in Microsoft that I think like a lot of our customers, uh, can also start using it, and I think there is also a need there. And then when you kind of go more into more of these more, these large corporate com sort of events.

So, uh, when we talk about Satya, so Satya does his employee town hall like every month, and that's all using Teams event platform. So, uh, one of the interesting things that people might not be familiar with, uh, is, uh, Viva Engage platform integrates with Teams. So, Satya has a leadership channel, communication channel within Viva Engage, and he uses that, uh, that community, the Microsoft community to To host his town hall.

So all of these experiences embedded within Viva Engage. So , 

Tom Arbuthnot: right, so the experience is actually, you are in Viva, engage and it's going live in Viva Engage. And under the, under the covers or behind the scenes? It's actually the, the, the events platform, yes. 

Preethi Ramarathinam: Is the, is the events platform. So that kind of helps really build.

The combination of Viva Engage plus Teams events helps kind of foster that community that a lot of these leaders, leaders would like to use and messages, you know, and continue to, uh, uh, establish the communication with their employees. So it's a very powerful, um, experience for leaders to be able to tell their story and, you know, And, and you and I think events have evolved beyond, uh, being a point in time communication to, to a, uh, to a life cycle.

And that's where like tools like Viva Engage plus Teams Events become super powerful, uh, for employee connection. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. It's awesome to see that being brought to a platform that's in-house as well. 'cause historically that would've been, we bring in this external production crew and it's a big thing and we do, it's some proprietary browser platform and they have to go to this link and this thing.

That used to be how it was, it's not. The ability now, particularly at the, the regional level for like a regional leader to just do this off their own back with their immediate team without bringing in an external, uh, kind of production team. And then you mentioned NDI briefly, but that I think is really good to talk about, which is this is not just the leader has to be at a laptop.

You can have the fancy cameras, the mixing board, the multi channels, you can do all your external mixing and still pump that into the experience. 

Preethi Ramarathinam: No, that's absolutely right, Tom. I think you hit a very interesting point because when you think about these employee, you know, for these sort of events, you, it's, it's a broad spectrum, right?

Where you have like a Satya level leader, where you have the studio team, who's going to do a fully professional, like hands on experience with tools like NDI and all kind of becomes really useful to someone like, you know, as you, uh, like Organizational sort of leader who may not have all that capabilities or studio team.

But, you know, our vision is to be able to kind of democratize this production so that, you know, an organizational leader could also choose to do a much more professional. Uh, professional event. Uh, so we have a lot of capabilities built into Teams event and we are adding a lot more where you can really, you know, um, control the type of experience that goes out live.

You can really choose who the presenters are that you want to bring on stage and also going to add capabilities, uh, around, you know, branding and layouts and, uh, and you know, so I think we are, that experience is going to continue to improve and make it easier and seamless for anybody to be able to do these sort of professional events. 

Tom Arbuthnot: And are there investments you're seeing in terms of where you put product investment that are benefiting both webinar and town hall, things like green room, being able to control the Q& A, like I'm guessing some features benefit both both of those. 

Preethi Ramarathinam: Uh, yes, that's that's correct.

Because when you think about. The way we are thinking about our strategies, all of this is available across in Teams. So it doesn't matter if you're doing a webinar or a town hall. There's going to be a core set of capabilities that is going to be accessible to both of these experiences. Obviously, webinar is a lot more specific workloads and workflows around, you know, registration, you know, managing, attendee registration, and then integrating with marketing automation software.

So those are some additional. Workflows that we enable on top of it, but there's a set of core capabilities that. It's available across, you know, meetings and webinars or, you know, these large corporate style, uh, town halls. 

Tom Arbuthnot: And there's been a bunch of investment in webinar over the last, uh, certainly the last six months I've seen where, and particularly with, uh, as part of Teams Premium, you can kind of have extra, extra features on webinar where, like you say, you've got the CRM integration, you've got the green room, you've got registration control.

I'm guessing that's all been customer demand for, we love Teams, we'd love to use Teams, we want some single experience, but, you can't do this thing. You can't do this. Is that, I'm guessing that's quite a demanding, because you're working with marketing teams, they've all got ways of working and they want to control the experience.

Is that, is that accurate? Is there lots of kind of a future investment there? 

Preethi Ramarathinam: Actually, it's been pretty exciting because when you talk to our customers, a lot of our customers, they want to move over to Teams. They want to kind of consolidate their communication needs on one platform because, you know, it's beneficial.

At all levels, from an IT admin perspective, they have one system to manage security. All of that is becoming much more important. So they have one system to manage from an end user perspective. It's like, hey, I use Teams. Day in and day out, I'm familiar with the, with the experience of Teams and 

Tom Arbuthnot: The end user one is huge for me.

That's like, we're trying to get our, you know, important person to do the external facing webinar or the, the internal town hall, whatever it may be. They're not a natural IT person or natural presenter. Them knowing they're coming in and clicking the same button and doing the same thing just puts them at ease versus Oh, you have to do this thing.

And where's the mute in this scenario? And how does this work? I think that's so underrated as an experience benefit for the user that they're not, because it can already be stressful doing that kind of event. So you're layering on top, this is a completely different platform. That's really tough for them.

Preethi Ramarathinam: No, that's totally right, Tom. And I think that's where, you know, like your Teams experience is already optimized for you for a lot of these scenarios. So, and the familiarity and everything, you know, the high stress situation using the familiar tools goes a long way. Um, and so that's where I think, uh, customers are super excited and interested and, uh, you know, uh, and obviously we have, uh, gaps in our offering today and that's where we see customer ask, like, hey, we need this XYZ.

So we are really prioritizing all of these customer ask and trying to accelerate and build all of these capabilities. So, as you said, rightfully in the last six months, we have, uh, you know, uh, built in a lot more capabilities across the board, across webinars and town halls, but specifically on webinars.

Uh, pretty excited that we now have a robust set of APIs now available because we know specifically for webinars integration with marketing automation is super critical and important. So we just launched an integration with HubSpot and Zapier, which is available out of the box. Plus, we have launched a robust set of APIs.

You know, we, we do hear customer ask around, you know, building customer integrations with their marketing automation software. So that full set of robust APIs are available for customers to use. So teams can now interoperate with any third party marketing automation and learning management system. So we're starting to see a lot of customers also build.

Customer integrations, uh, on top of Teams for a lot of their use cases. So, which is pretty exciting to have that, you know, robust offering in market. Um, having said that, we still have work to do. So, we'll be, you know, uh, you know, there's a lot the customer ask around scaling webinars to, you know, beyond thousand and, you know, having support for recording webinars.

So, So we do see a lot of customers already starting to shift their workloads over for webinars and kind of there is a set of ours for them to fully shift their workloads over. So we are pretty excited about the momentum we're seeing here and we're hoping to kind of close. All the gaps so customers can fully use the full breadth of offering that Teams has.

Tom Arbuthnot: That's awesome. Can you give us a bit of a, as much as you can, a bit of a perspective about where you're thinking is for the next investment? So what's, what your priority areas are? Any, any thoughts there? 

Preethi Ramarathinam: Yes, Tom. I think definitely, I think our number one priority is to Close a lot of the, the, the, the, the, the customer ask that we are having right now for, for Teams to kind of be able to scale across this full breadth of scenarios.

So we have a very robust roadmap that we are kind of prioritizing and working towards. Um, but in addition, obviously, you know, uh, with the advent of AI, there is a lot more, you know, uh, we can do here in this space, uh, with, with, with events. And when you think about AI and how events, there's a lot, lot more opportunities that I think Microsoft is uniquely positioned to be successful in this, in this space.

So, you know, as you think about creating an event, which itself is a much more is a complex task or set up and making sure everything is correctly hosted. So, you can see how AI can really simplify those workloads in terms of. Creating assets and descriptions. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, particularly in webinars, it's a high pressure for a marketing team.

They might not do it every day. So like knowing what the options are, how it works, that's a really interesting scenario. Having someone or an AI help you along that I'm trying to do this. I like, I want the lobby off and I want this and I want that. Like, that's really interesting. 

Preethi Ramarathinam: Yeah, and that's a very interesting use case.

We hear because people don't know what's the right set of things they need to set up very often. So leveraging AI, I think, you know, will be super interesting. Also thing like we talked briefly about production, which is also another high stress production and moderating the event, which is again a high stress situation.

So really, Yeah. You know, as a moderator, trying to keep track of the agenda, you know, and ensuring you're gathering questions, redirecting questions to the right folks. So there's a lot of value that, you know, we think AI can really help to simplify the moderator and as well as a producer role on making sure the lighting is good, making sure the right people are on and off stage.

There's a lot more of that. So we're pretty excited. I think an opportunity. there for AI. And then lastly, after the event is over, recap and summarization, the highlights. So there's a lot that goes in there as well, which is all manual. So we think AI can really simplify those sort of workloads as well.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I think just recently, I think it's now GA, the ability to have the recording turn up at the same link as the event. You can see how potentially in the future that could be a really nice presented event. Summary with takeaways with chap like the thing we get internally with intelligent meeting recap.

You could see how that could apply external and then you're taking all that production effort off of people who want to just leverage the AI to do it. It's really exciting. 

Preethi Ramarathinam: Yeah, so it's pretty exciting. So I think like for us, like kind of closing the gaps and then kind of. Really simplifying and making, uh, making these, taking the pressure off, right, and making it really seamless, uh, for our event host.

I think that's kind of where, where we are marching towards and, uh, you know, we're excited about that, uh, that roadmap, robust roadmap. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it's a nice, I think it's obviously AI is the big talk at the moment across all different workloads, but you get to leverage that investment Microsoft are making in all sorts of ways.

And I feel like, yeah, meetings and events, certainly in meetings, it's been a huge hit. The potential in events is really exciting as well. 

Preethi Ramarathinam: Yeah, and the exciting part of it is all our offering is built on top of Teams meeting, so we are able to kind of leverage all the assets and investments that Teams meeting is leveraging, and we'll be able to kind of accelerate on some of those even for our event offering, so pretty excited about that.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Well, Preethi, thanks for jumping on the pod. It was really great to get a perspective on kind of what happens in those meetings and town hall events, workloads and webinar, really good stuff. And, uh, yeah, maybe we can, uh, I know you've got plans to ship various features in the coming months. Maybe we loop around again and do a recap at some point.

Preethi Ramarathinam: We'd love to, Tom, and really great to, you know, have this conversation and chat excited about the future of events, Teams events. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Thanks a lot. 

Preethi Ramarathinam: Thank you.