**Tom Arbuthnot:** Hi, and welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. Really fun conversation this week with Simon Dudley. Simon has previously worked at Polycom, at Lifesize, at Logitech, a whole career in our space. And he's now working as an independent consultant, and we had a really interesting conversation about his views on the industry. What's going on with all the bar vendors coming into the space, how a customer would choose the right partner for them in terms of devices. And now he's independent, he really doesn't mind sharing his opinions on everything that's going on in our space. So many thanks to Simon for jumping on the podcast, really enjoyable conversation. Also, many thanks to Pure IP who are the sponsor of this podcast. Really appreciate all their support. On with the show.

Hi everybody. Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. Excited to have Simon on the podcast. First time on the pod. We've talked over the years, a number of different things behind the scenes, but this is the first time on the record, Simon. So first off, do you want to just give us an intro, a little bit of background and you've changed what you're doing recently as well, so maybe you can give us the history 'cause you've got quite a strong history in our space.

**Simon Dudley:** I do. Well, firstly, Tom, thanks for having me on the show. Big fan. Hello, audience. Pleased to be here. So, yeah, Simon Dudley. What I've been in the video conferencing space since Noah was a boy, 1992, I sold my first PictureTel Concord. And so almost everything I know is no longer true. At least from a technical point of view in the video conferencing space, I used to sell PictureTel, then I worked for Polycom for many years. Then I was part of the team that built the first high deficit systems for Lifesize. So we changed that market, although ultimately Lifesize didn't quite make as much of, take as much advantage.

**Tom Arbuthnot:** I deployed a couple of Lifesize systems in my time when I was a Cisco partner. Actually, it was an alternate there.

**Simon Dudley:** They were a great product. Probably a little early, whatever we can, they can have a whole other debate about what worked and didn't in that organization. I got somewhat disillusioned with the market back in 2015. Started my own consultancy, wrote some books, which are still available on Amazon. And then a certain guy called by the name of Scott Walton called me, said, would you like to do some consultancy for us at Logitech? He showed me what they were up to, which was Brio and then Meetup, and I said, ooh, the market's gonna change. And I did. I did Logitech for nearly nine years, man and boy, and it was great and we had an excellent time.

**Tom Arbuthnot:** Yeah, what a tear in terms of how Logitech came into and became a huge player in that market as well, from kind of, you know, keyboard and mice to webcam to USB systems, to full room systems. It was an incredible journey.

**Simon Dudley:** It really was. I mean, when I joined, one of the cameras behind me, actually just out of focus was a product that's code name was Colossus because it cost a thousand dollars for a PTZ camera with a speakerphone attached. And it was a great product, but Logitech couldn't get its head around the idea that we had a thousand dollar product to sell. Hence the reason it was called Colossus. Now, you know, they're making seven, eight, $10,000 solutions. Logitech really came in and realized that in a market where all the products are beginning to look the same, then having a high quality, low price, highly available product on a global basis really was a winning strategy. And I did that. Ran sales enablement, competitive intelligence market analysis, sales enablement for them for many years. And then I decided earlier in the summer that, you know what, it's time for a new adventure. So I've gone off and started doing this for myself now because I've realized that most companies only compete kind of, they use what I call half court tennis. They only think about themselves. They never really consider their competitor and they sell on speeds and feeds. And we are living in a world now where increasingly all the products look very, very similar, with a few exceptions, but most of them are pretty similar. So if they look similar, how are you gonna sell on anything other than price? Well, there's plenty of things to sell on, but most companies aren't working out how to do that. And my consultancy is to help companies do that. Be a more effective competitor in a world where all the products are beginning to look pretty similar.

**Tom Arbuthnot:** That's awesome. And now you are not any one particular vendor. We can have a bit more of a no holds barred conversation on the pod, which should be fun.

**Simon Dudley:** Yeah. 'Cause I'm famous for being the corporate guy who only ever tows the corporate line. But yeah, you're right. The shackles are really off now. I'm almost nervous for my own liberty stroke. Sorry, Frank.

**Tom Arbuthnot:** Pressure Simon.

**Simon Dudley:** Sure. Because if I go, oh no, I shouldn't have said that. We can maybe edit it out.

**Tom Arbuthnot:** Yeah, maybe.

## The Bar Market Discussion

**Tom Arbuthnot:** So let's talk about that. 'Cause we've had this conversation before offline, but like, particularly in the Teams market, the kind of bar market, I guess broadly and now bar and BYOD kind of all merging together. It feels like there's a running joke in our space that, you know, everybody's got a bar increasingly, many, many OEMs are certified for Teams. So I mean, what's your perspective of that? Why is everybody going in and doing a bar, getting Teams certified, can the market sustain that? What's your thinking there?

**Simon Dudley:** Well, I mean, there's a couple of things, right? So technology goes through basically four levels, right? It starts at effectively science experiment, right? So video collab 20, well, 30 years ago when I was first involved in it, was probably closer to science experiment. Then the technology moves from the user has to work around the technology. A good example of that would be knowing how ISDN connections worked or what an ISDN line even was and bandwidths and algorithms and all those sorts of things that we used to talk about in the video space. If you want a different analogy, something like Word Perfect would be users work around the technology, right? 30 years ago, if you used Word Perfect as an example, you needed to understand how control codes work. And then the market changed. The WebEx is, well it wasn't Teams then, but what became Teams Zoom those sorts of products. They then started moving around the user. So, I don't know about you, Tom, but I haven't spoken to a client about a video algorithm or bandwidth used or any of that stuff for probably thick end of 10 years. And that's because the cloud solutions made the technology move around the users. And then what happens is in a technology that it effectively evaporates or dissolves into a larger thing, right? Microsoft's doing this with Teams. Video is no longer a standalone app. It's built into everyone's workflow, and that's true for what everyone else is doing as well.

So when it comes to things like video bars, what Microsoft has done is quite rightly, if you want to mass deploy this technology, they've made it as simple as possible. They've made it as ubiquitous as possible. And the best way for Microsoft to do that is to have everyone and his brother go and make a video bar and it pushes the prices down. And of course, from Microsoft's point of view, that's an excellent answer. From all the vendors' point of view, it looks like an opportunity, which it can be, but it also can look like a, well, we'll get into this market 'cause the barrier to entry now is minimal. It's really very easy to make video collab. I was joking with someone at the weekend. I think my mum now makes video conferencing bars because literally anyone could go to Qualcomm and have one built for them.

**Tom Arbuthnot:** Yeah, for those not so familiar with the devices space, I don't think they understand that, you know, there are other companies behind the scenes where you can just turn up and say put us together a bar, put our logo on it, and then off we go. And there's some providers in our space that genuinely engineer their own stuff, and there's a whole bunch that essentially order, respect. Maybe you could explain it better how you do that. Say if you were coming into the space.

**Simon Dudley:** Sure. So 10 years ago, seven, eight years ago, when the bar market started kicking off, then it was pretty complicated and hard to build your own solutions. You needed to have your own version of Android. You needed to understand how to use these effectively mobile phone type chipsets that people like, well, Qualcomm make for the vast majority of the market. And you needed to have a lot of serious engineering. In the last few years, a lot of people can go to people like Qualcomm. Qualcomm being the obvious example, and they will give you a bar and then you can adjust it as much as you want. You want better audio, you can go and do that. If you want better cameras, you could go and do that. If you just want to take the standard off the shelf device, put your company logo on it and say, we'll sell millions, then you could go and do that. So I think part of the issue is that a lot of companies have got involved in the market 'cause why wouldn't you? Right. You know, you're seeing it as a multi-billion dollar opportunity. Everyone's got one, we'll just take 5% market share and we're off. But in a world where all the products are looking the same, then you've got yourself a problem. How do you differentiate yourself?

The analogy I use, 'cause I'm a big fan of analogies, some of which work, some of which don't, is the PC industry, right? So I turn around to people every day on video calls and say, what kind of PC are you running? Now, if they're a Mac user, they simply say, oh, I use a Mac. If they're running a Windows platform, they'll go, it's a Dell or an HP or a Lenovo, right? It's one of those three. Almost never do you find anything else. And why is that? Well, because 35 years ago when Windows started coming out, about '92, so 33 years ago, there were dozens, hundreds, perhaps, of PC manufacturers, and they're all different. Everyone from Amstrad to Tulip to IBM, to Compaq, to Dell, to TI. I mean, the list just went on and on and on. And then it concatenated down to three. Now it wasn't because those products were better, the product wasn't better. But the buying experience for the clients was better, whether that's global availability or a broad range of product or maybe a better ESG story or from a vendor that you already had a relationship with. And I feel that we are at that point in the video conferencing space, a much smaller market, by the way, than the PC industry ever was. But there's now 20, I think 28 companies who make Microsoft Teams certified video conferencing bars.

**Tom Arbuthnot:** Yeah, we do. So we track all that on the site. So if people want to get into the weeds, there's some research reports there of who's got what. But yeah, the number of OEMs over the last two or three years has blown up. And like you say, there's a lot of onesy twosy brands that are like, oh, just come out of nowhere with a bar or with a couple of certified devices.

**Simon Dudley:** Sure, and I don't want to suggest that these products aren't perfectly adequate. They're perfectly reasonable. I'm sure I don't know of any bar out there that is not fit for purpose, but that's sort of the point. If you just launch a bar and go, well, I'll grab 5% market share because you know, I will, I've got a bit of, less of what? No, you won't, because if there's nothing to differentiate you, it's like buying an Olivetti PC, right? No one buys an Olivetti PC anymore because the success criteria have changed and now the three big players in the PC industry all look pretty similar to each other, at least as an outsider. And I think that the video conferencing space is going to, it's going to have to do some special things. You're either gonna have to reinvent your technology, your product enormously. I find that an extremely unlikely scenario because ultimately you're all running Microsoft code on these devices and they all want every machine to look identical. It's in their interest for it to be a completely consistent experience, or you work out how to sell it in a unique way. And I think that there's a lot of opportunity there for vendors, manufacturers, resellers, to actually go out there and go, there is a different way to sell this product. And that's the sort of work that I'm looking to do with people. So if you're sitting there and you're looking at a bar and you think to yourself, well, how do I make this thing different? Talk to me rather than spend five years with 200 engineers and come up with something that the market may not even want.

## Customer Selection Criteria

**Tom Arbuthnot:** Yeah, well the PC or laptop comparison is really interesting 'cause Microsoft have, you know, kind of said multiple times, they want the MTR market to be millions plural of devices. And I think we're, you know, I think the last public number is a million in play. I know that we're well over that number now privately, but they want multiple millions. And part of that is making things simpler, faster, cheaper, you know, and by definition, more distribution, more commoditized, more, I can just buy a whole bunch of them. So if you take the PC market as a model, it does ring true that there's gonna be increasing competitive pressure. Let's take the perspective of a customer first and a partner or an OEM second. So, if you were advising a customer now, what would you say to them when they're making their technology vendor choice? Like they've got, you know, a couple of hundred rooms they want to do and they've, like, how do they choose between these, you know, 20, nearly 30 options and OEMs?

**Simon Dudley:** I think that's a good, it's an excellent question. And obviously it's somewhat variable depending on the client's requirements, but there's a couple of things to consider. The first one is just because it's more expensive doesn't make it better. Just because something has, you know, I don't know, more microphones, right? I met someone the other day who told me their device had over 20 microphones and I sat there and went, is it any better than the one with three? 'Cause they're both certified so probably not.

**Tom Arbuthnot:** So it's six times better. I mean, that's just math, right?

**Simon Dudley:** Sure, sure. Yeah. Well, your next car, Tom, is it gonna have 18 wheels on it? I mean, that obviously would be better than the four. It'll go much faster.

**Tom Arbuthnot:** This is not an automotive blog, is it?

**Simon Dudley:** Right. So I think the first thing I would do if I were a client is work on the principle that every manufacturer's gonna have a good enough product, right? There are no terrible products anymore.

**Tom Arbuthnot:** And to be fair, Microsoft have performance bars for getting sort of performance bars, performance levels for getting certified. Right. So they do, it's not just a badge. They do put these things in a lab and do audio video testing. So there is some minimum level there to get your badge.

**Simon Dudley:** Yes. So the initial thought is right. Well, if they're all the same, I'll just buy the cheapest. But I don't think that's the right answer either, because one of the things to consider is where do they make these things and who makes them? So one of the things that we end up with in all of industry is this, is the old ESG story. Now, I'm based as I'm sure you can tell, in Northern Colorado, USA and a lot of my sales team used to say to me, oh, my clients don't care about ESG. Maybe some tree huggers in Europe do, but my clients don't care. And I would go, eh, I bet they do. Now, it may not be on the...

**Tom Arbuthnot:** And that's environmental social governance, right? For those not...

**Simon Dudley:** Sorry. Yes. ESG for those who aren't aware yet. Environmental, social governance. So environmental, you know, are you using recycled plastics, for example? Now my old employer, Logitech, as a good example of that, did a brilliant job.

**Tom Arbuthnot:** Yeah. Really that way.

**Simon Dudley:** Making highly, yeah, and badging it all and everything. Not every manufacturer does that. You could turn around and say, well, as a specifier, I care about the quality of the experience. But if the quality of the experience is pretty much identical, then you're gonna need to look at other things, and the purchasing department is going to look at things like, are you going to affect negatively or positively my company's ESG report, and almost every decent size company now has an ESG report. Anyone who's on a stock market will have an ESG report because funding and people investing in them is predicated on having decent ESG reports. So one of the things, as an example, the G governance, people don't really think about governance. They think about are the working conditions that they use, are the workers nice? Is it recycled plastics? Yes. But do they have things like good quality audited accounts? Some of the players in this market are, should we say, based in locations where getting good quality financials is, how do I put this politely, problematic and many companies in this market are private organizations. They've never even announced any of their financial positions. So if I'm a buyer, I have to work on the principle that if you don't have audited financials to show that you are gonna be in business in five years to support me, I have to assume your financials are terrible. Now the sales rep or the company may turn and go, no, they're great. It's like, yeah, but they're not audited. So that's like me saying I'm the world's greatest, you know, racing driver and lover. It doesn't really mean anything because I said it. You have to have it third party. So I think that as an example, look for a company with good quality financials. Look for a company that looks after its people and its suppliers, and look for a company that's got a good quality environmental story as well.

But there's plenty more to it than that as well, because you want to make certain that as a vendor, sorry, as a customer, you have a solution that fits as many niches as possible. One of my old employers will remain nameless. Put out a thing a couple of years ago saying that they wanted to reduce the number of suppliers to the organization, vendors, different manufacturers by a thousand in one year. They wanted to reduce that number of companies they worked with by a thousand, and at the end of the year they admitted it actually increased by 700. And why was that? Because you know, if you buy pens, and this is a Bic pen, and I don't know, Bic only makes this kind of pen. Well, now I need another supplier that costs me money and another account I need to look after. Well, this is a blue pen and maybe like this company only makes blue pens, so I need a supplier of red pens or green paper.

**Tom Arbuthnot:** Yeah, think we've all felt that probably customer side and vendor side, that onboarding overhead and managing another supplier hanging the net.

**Simon Dudley:** So what you want is a vendor who can supply a broad range of solutions because another angle is for example, management, right? If you are, if you've got an environment where you've got large rooms are made by one manufacturer, midsize rooms are made by another one, and then your low end rooms are made by a third, and then you go, right, I need to manage it. Wow, that's great. Guess you could use Teams, but Teams is really about just looking after the software within the device. It's not...

**Tom Arbuthnot:** Great and certainly not as good as the manufacturer's own. Yeah. Like it's currently nearly always a better together story, isn't it? Like Pro Portal does your core stuff and then you've got camera settings or device settings with the OEM tooling.

**Simon Dudley:** Yeah, I mean, just things like software updates. It's a pretty obvious example and in the old days when you had like a dozen of them around the world, then software updates probably not a big deal. If you've got thousands of them, where many customers do today, software updates are a disaster. So if you've got three vendors at three different sizes of your organization, that's gonna be a bit of a problem from a support, from a management, from a getting a decent pricing perspective. So I came up with this idea, I wrote a book about this recently, and one of the ideas is that there's basically 12 vectors that every vendor should look at. Equally, those same angles should be things that end users are looking at as well. So you should be looking at the portfolio of products, not individual products. You should be looking at ESG. You should be looking at who they've got alliances with. So if, for example, you as a customer, right? You're all Teams, Teams, Teams, Microsoft to the end of time, and then Microsoft quadruples the price of everything. And you go, oh, actually maybe I'm gonna, if I'm allowed to say it on this podcast, maybe I'm gonna make the decision to go Google.

**Tom Arbuthnot:** That's instant cut off I'm afraid. There's other vendors out there coming to hit me on the head. Yeah, no, I've seen that planning process as well, like, like, you know, usually it's like supporting multiple platforms and or BYOD as well comes up like, like we are not intending to switch, but it's nice to know we've got a plan B with the hardware if we needed it.

**Simon Dudley:** Yeah. And most CIOs have a, whether they're in a position to follow it or not, but most of them have an edict that says, do not get yourself painted into a corner by a vendor. You know, if they can put you in a position where you are stuck with them and you have no option but to stick with them, it's not a great position for any CIO or IT manager to be in. So avoid it if you can. Make certain that you have hardware that can work with multiple platforms. I'll give you an example. Cisco's an interesting example. Cisco runs on a very different chipset than everyone else. So everyone else is running these Qualcomm basically high-end mobile phone chips for one. It's not quite the same, but it's pretty similar. Our friends over at Cisco run Nvidia chips and you think, well, what difference does it make? Who cares? It's doing a video call, but the Nvidia chipset has so much more compute in it. You can do things like run WebEx and Zoom and Teams simultaneously in the same device. That gives their customers an awful lot more options than the sort of company that turns around and says, right, we're running a Qualcomm. You can do a factory reset and reboot this into Google or Zoom or some other platform. So you know, yeah, you are paying extra money for a Cisco solution. There's no question you are generally paying more for it, but for those customers who want that ultimate flexibility, the Cisco solution's pretty compelling. It doesn't mean it's right for everybody, but there are, that's a good example of how someone playing a rather different game can have a very different outcome for users.

**Tom Arbuthnot:** How can the customer assess that kind of, there's the financial, are you gonna be around in five years? Which is one thing, but there's the, are you still gonna be best buddies with Microsoft in five years? And I always find that's interesting when I talk to customers, 'cause a lot of them don't think that far ahead with relationships yet. We see, you know, OEMs come and go with these partnerships.

**Simon Dudley:** They do. It's actually a rather tough question to answer. I mean, how can you know that, I suppose. As an old hero of mine once said, the best way of telling the future is to look at the past. And the only reason we say that is 'cause there's nowhere else to look, right? I mean, what else are you gonna do? So I think the past is a good way of looking at it. So if a company's had a long relationship with Microsoft over as an example, or Zoom or Google or whoever, you know, other as they would say in the BBC, other platforms exist. Whatever those relationships are, if they've had a long relationship with them in the past, are they likely to have one in the future? Well, we don't really know, but it's likely that they will. So, you know, if you wanted to take, and by the way I said 28, I could be wrong, it might be 24, but I suspect by the time we actually put this online, it'll probably be 28. So you could probably take out two thirds of those vendors just by going. Well, I don't use their audio systems, for example, you know, if they're an audio manufacturer and make lovely high-end stuff for boardrooms and you are not a user of that platform, it's hard to see why you'd buy their bar. Right? Just there's not a particularly logical reason to do so. So you could probably exclude them. That would probably get rid of half of those vendors. You could probably then look at, well, I'm a little nervous of anyone who doesn't have high quality financial data or an audit of their working conditions. You know, no company wants to find out that one of their vendors is using, you know, people in slave conditions. You know, Nike, I'm looking at you. As an example. No one really wants to be the guy who finds out that, well, it was $20 cheaper because the working conditions of the folks who work there are pretty awful. Easier simply to solve that problem by dealing those people out as the deal. If you're a really large company, you're probably gonna want to work with a really large company service level agreements, for example. So what you can probably do is narrow down your search before you get to looking at products to four or five vendors. You probably then almost could throw a dart in a board and say, I'll look at two. And if I can't tell the difference between the two, then I'll get more and more granular on the things I decide to pick on, whether it's breadth of solution, or maybe breadth of distribution.

**Tom Arbuthnot:** Yeah, I like you touched on distribution. That's another one I see get overlooked. It's like, we're gonna go with this vendor. I'm like, well, you are in like 70 countries. Can they get units to you efficiently? RMAs, like what's the model like that gets glossed over a lot as well.

**Simon Dudley:** It does, it does. You know, look, if you are in North America or Western Europe, basically every vendor with a few of the Chinese as examples are gonna be able to supply really easily to you. But if you've got, I don't know, a mine in Chile. Does your vendor even have the ability to sell product in Chile or Guangzhou or Philippines or wherever it is? And of course, by definition, video collab is the sort of tool that needs to be used 'cause people don't want to go to Chile for that Wednesday afternoon meeting. It's a long way from anywhere. So, you know, video by its nature, I think IT managers would much rather put all the video systems in one room because it's so much easier to support and manage them if you do that. But it rather makes the technology a little worthless if you don't actually distribute it to the rest of the world. I think that's where the PC industry taught us something. You know, if you look at Dell and HP and Lenovo, they're all big, they all do an enormous range of products, and they're all globally distributed because that's what most of their clients actually want. I mean, you could argue they all look pretty similar. And it doesn't mean there are no opportunities. I was thinking about this at the weekend. I'm in the middle of writing an article about the parallels between now and 35 years ago. And one company that hasn't come up in my research, but of course I suddenly remembered was Panasonic. So Panasonic make laptops, but they make the kind of laptops you could make a house with, as in you could use it as a hammer 'cause they make the Toughbook or whatever. And they're, you know, they're great if you're in the field and using that sort of technology, nobody else makes one of those. So I suspect Panasonic's probably the highest margin vendor in the laptop business 'cause they don't have to compete with the other guys 'cause they make a device that's basically bulletproof. That may or may not be true.

**Tom Arbuthnot:** Yeah, I'll check their marketing for that. But...

**Simon Dudley:** Yes.

## Advice for Vendors and Resellers

**Tom Arbuthnot:** But it, I love this conversation. It's really interesting and thanks for taking the kind of, we have a lot of enterprises listening, so the customer perspective is really interesting for the OEMs and partners listening. I feel like we've probably just scared a few of them. Like, like what, what can, what conversation can you have? Your kind of framework, how do they begin to think about how they can strengthen their portfolio and their pitch and their conversation?

**Simon Dudley:** Yeah, it's a good question. So, the first one, let's do vendors. Let's do manufacturers. Products first, and then we'll talk about how resellers can fit into this story and distribution for that matter. So the first thing that most vendors do not understand is, are they the A, B, or C brand of their resellers? So what do I mean by that? So if I'm a big reseller or any reseller, and I sell a product for a manufacturer, I'll have the people I lead with, the manufacturer I like. I know, I've got good experiences with, you know, the rep turns up on a Thursday with donuts, whatever the story is that makes me have the A brand. I'll have the A brand. Then I'll have the B brand. The client rings me up and says, I'm already talking to some other company about the product. That's your A brand. So you don't want to offer that 'cause you need to have something different. And these are the players that you probably don't make as much margin with or maybe your relationship's not quite as tight, but you still have them as your backup. The client may turn around and say, yeah, your A brand's too expensive or it has a capability or doesn't have a capability that the B brand does. So you go with the B brand and the C brand for every reseller I've ever met in my 40 years in this industry is the one that's on the shelf. Oh, you'd like the okey pokey mark 7? Oh yeah, sure. We've got it. It's over here. And the reseller probably knows next to nothing about that product, but knows they can get it through distribution. So if I'm a vendor, I want to know, but don't my resellers, am I the A brand or the B brand or the C brand? Because you know what, the reseller's always gonna turn around to the vendor and say, you are our A brand. They all say it, but they don't really mean it. Oh, and by the way, for the really big resellers, the A, B, and C brand can vary by office, by individual rep, which is pretty terrifying. So if I'm a vendor, how do I fix that? And if I'm a reseller, I probably want to get rather a better handle on what am I doing because you're much better off as a reseller working with a few brands than you are working with a dozen brands across half a dozen offices, all of whom buy their own thing. You don't get any economies of scale, both from a financial or from a technical depth perspective.

**Tom Arbuthnot:** And how much of our kind of video systems market, do you think is the customer's making a vendor decision and then going to their suppliers and saying, I want A, B, C vendor versus the reseller or the AV partner is influencing that choice.

**Simon Dudley:** I think that's very variable on who you ask. If you ask the resellers, and of course, just for the record, no one listening to this or watching this does this, but others. Others will be led very much by what the customer says. If a customer picks up the phone and says, I want the okey pokey mark seven GTI, I can supply it, that's gonna be the answer because it's easier. No sales rep is gonna go, no, you're wrong. I think you should buy this other product. Gonna spend three months convincing you if you're already convinced, I'm gonna supply it. So I think that's not an unreasonable position. It can be a bit nervy though because then you end up with no A, B, or C. You're just sort of blowing in the wind, whatever. I guess every brand then becomes C brand. And then from a client's point of view, I think that a lot of clients don't really understand what they're buying very well and that's not a criticism of them, it's a reality. You only buy a technology once every five, six, maybe 10 years. And by the way, your average life expectancy of a video conferencing room is about five and a half to six years. So you've probably gone through one or two or maybe even three generations of product in that time. So even if you bought product six years ago, when you come to replace it, six years later, the market's changed dramatically and you are a CIO or an IT manager. Do you really have the time to go and learn this market backwards?

I think one of the things that vendors do a bad job of is many, not all, you know, none of the ones watching. All the usual caveats. Yeah. Other ones, but others. Others seem to be under the really interesting perspective that their product is the best. Every vendor believes their product is the best without actually defining what best is. And what they truly seem to believe erroneously, in my opinion, very erroneously, is that the sales job is simply to explain why our product is best. And once the customer understands why we are best, then they will naturally invest in our technology. Well, that's nonsense. It doesn't make any sense at all because what it really means is that you need to be highly technical to sell it, and you need to be even more technical and clever to buy it. Well, clients don't want to become, to have a PhD in video conferencing to make the right decision. They want to go out there and go, this is a problem. I need to fix this problem. I'm probably not even gonna be in most of the video conference calls, but lots of senior types are, they are gonna be demanding. And if it all goes horribly wrong, then I'm on the, I'm on the, you know, on the, I'm Johnny on the spot for fixing that problem. So what IT managers actually want is the least hassle possible. In no way is that a criticism. You want systems that just work. So I think that what a lot of resellers and a lot of vendors get confused by is they talk about speeds and feeds and specs. Most of the clients just want a system that works and the phone never rings. I used to do a bit of public speaking on this topic about support. And one of the things that used to get me booed on a fairly regular basis to CIOs was when I would say CIOs go to work to not get fired. And people didn't like that, but it's a reality in the sense that if you go to work and the phone rings, it's like the fire brigade. Right? You know, it's trouble. Something's gone wrong.

**Tom Arbuthnot:** Yeah. And nobody rings it to say, job well done. It's all been quiet today.

**Simon Dudley:** No. And when I used to get booed at these events, I would say, oh, really? So how many of you have rung your own department to thank them when everything worked today? And they'd all shuffle in their seats, right? Because no one does. You only ring when there's trouble. And video is very high profile. And I think this idea of having as low a number of calls come in as possible.

**Tom Arbuthnot:** Yeah, yeah. And I hear this in my research, talking to enterprise customers. Like we talk a lot about what are you looking forward to in the coming year in terms of features or capabilities? And they will all trade the newest AI feature for stability and robustness. And that's a fundamental before you get to anything smart and like that, that's really, really still unfortunately in our industry, still a challenge in some cases.

**Simon Dudley:** I don't know. I'd agree with everything you said other than unfortunately. Look, my car will do, I don't know, a hundred miles an hour and it's a Nissan Armada, which is like a bungalow with four wheel drive, right? It's a huge thing. Would I trade 130 mile an hour top speed for half the reliability? No. I would trade. I mean, the thing is, it's a Nissan built in Japan, right? It's the most reliable thing short of Toyota there is. But would I trade even more reliability for 95 miles an hour? Yes. 'Cause I've never done a hundred miles. The thing would be terrifying. A hundred miles an hour, it's like driving a chateau down the road. Right. So I think that a lot of people get all obsessed about the specs but they don't care or notice the things that really matter. I'll give an example. Cable management, the exciting world of cable management. Some manufacturers, I'll let the users do their own research on this one. But having cables that don't just fall out the underside of the device 'cause they're all just hanging unretained on the underside of the back of the bar is a thing. And you think, well, it's just some molded plastic with a little clip and a thing. So people, why doesn't every manufacturer do that? I do not know, but when we built the products I worked with in the early days of Logitech, we went, cable management's gonna matter because users, users have this bad habit. Again, no one listening to this, but others have this bad habit of going, oh, my phone's a bit low on charge. I need a USB port. Yeah. I keep unplugging cables out the back of this device. Yeah. Until I find one.

**Tom Arbuthnot:** I'm scared. I'm scared of this system. I just want the HDMI yank.

**Simon Dudley:** Yeah. Or that thing's looking at me, it isn't anymore. Yeah. And you know what, they never repair the room when they leave. So things like MTBF, mean time between failure, things like total cost of ownership. They're the sort of things that I would encourage end users to go and investigate and look at.

**Tom Arbuthnot:** And this is where I would say to people in the community, and we talk about this a lot, you know, talk to your peers, talk to like different vendors. Like people will share these stories and like we've all been through these stories. I find that's some of the best ways. I love it. We do some in-person user groups in London. It's amazing hearing some really big organizations sharing with each other. You know, like, oh yeah, we tried that too. Yep. We found the same thing. It's like, you can save yourself a hell of a lot of time by just talking to your peers about experience.

**Simon Dudley:** You can. I started a group, which I know that you know of, Tom, and I know the work you do is great in user communities. I've always been a big fan. I actually started a group, well back in 1999, called the AV User Group in London where I got half a dozen of the biggest...

**Tom Arbuthnot:** Yeah, it's still going strong now and it's still, and I have nothing to do with it. It's a great group, but, you know, I moved on from it. But they've flourished that group and the primary reason is because they can sit there and talk to each other and go, yeah, but what's it really like, and I'm not suggesting salespeople would lie to customers because that wouldn't happen. But they simply don't have the experience.

**Tom Arbuthnot:** Yeah. They might not know the negatives. That's what you're saying.

**Simon Dudley:** We'll go with that. Yes.

## Closing

**Tom Arbuthnot:** Awesome. So Simon, we could talk for ages. I have to have you back again, but I really appreciate the, yeah, the point of view, particularly now, your free and consulting for anybody who wants to talk to you more about either choices from a customer point of view, or probably more likely from a vendor point of view. Positioning a portfolio, how can they get a hold of you?

**Simon Dudley:** Well, Simon at excessions events, which is E-X-C-E-S-I-O-N-S events dot com is the best way of getting me. I'm sure we'll have some links at the bottom of this.

**Tom Arbuthnot:** Yeah, you can share all links.

**Simon Dudley:** I'm fairly active on the LinkedIn and other locations as well. And in fact, I will say I hadn't really considered this before our conversation. I have thought that my primary opportunity to help people is at the vendor level. Right? You know, I have a bar. How or anything else. It doesn't have to be a video conferencing device. It could be a tractor. How do I differentiate myself from my competition, which isn't about adding another HDMI lead on the back, right? So that's one part of what I do. I think resellers also don't really know how to differentiate themselves from their competition.

**Tom Arbuthnot:** Yeah. There's a whole, there's a whole other pod there.

**Simon Dudley:** There is, but that's something that if anyone's interested in talking about it, I'd be delighted to swap notes on that one. And then from an end user perspective, if someone is out there and they're like, I don't know how to even begin to pick which vendors I even stick on my short list. If people want to chat with me about it, I'd be delighted. I, you know what, it's interesting information for me. I've got a wealth of it. If people want to gimme a call, feel free. You know, find me on LinkedIn, find me on the bottom of this. Ask Tom, he's got my home address.

**Tom Arbuthnot:** Yeah, happy to make the intro. And, yeah, I think it would be high value to any of those groups of people to suck up your wealth of experience in the space. And it's definitely an interesting time for this space. I think it's gonna get more and more competitive.

**Simon Dudley:** Yeah, I agree. In a world where all the products are good enough now, how are you gonna differentiate yourself from the competitors? That goes way beyond product is a very interesting topic and I feel I'm in that point in my career. I know I look 42, but I'm 57 now. I want to spend the rest of my time in this world, in this industry at least, looking at how to compete more effectively. It's so much more interesting than, oh, we've got another camera angle or there's 57,000 different types of streaming or I can put people in different size boxes. It's like, shoot me now. Let's actually talk about something that customers actually care about. Much more interesting.

**Tom Arbuthnot:** Awesome. Well, thanks much for joining us, Simon. Appreciate it.

**Simon Dudley:** Oh, you bet, Tom. It is always a pleasure my friend. Thank you for having me on and I'm looking forward to any feedback we might get on this. Thanks a lot.