Tom Richards: We were looking at like, okay, what is my building occupancy and my room occupancy? Oh, I've got an architecture of sensors and management and data aggregation all built for that one use case. For example, owned by facilities and then another one built by, you know, building management systems that say, well, I need to understand what's going on in the rooms from a temperature and a humidity and an air quality perspective, and there's another stack.

And so it was going on and I think what. What we realize is that we just should be integrating this stuff. It's not expensive for us to integrate it.

Tom Arbuthnot: Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. This week we are talking about the Cisco and Microsoft partnership specifically around Teams Rooms devices, how that partnership came together. How they co engineer and also the recent MDEPEP announcements and also some of Cisco's uniques that they bring to the party in terms of how their platform works, their integration with WebEx and Teams, and also what they're doing with Zoom as well.

Really interesting conversation with Tom Richard at Cisco. Many thanks to him for taking the time to jump on the pod. Also, many thanks to Cisco for being the sponsor of this podcast and supporting the community. Really interesting conversation. Hope you enjoy it on with the show. Hi everybody, welcome back to the podcast.

Exciting conversation this week. Uh, one of the big players in our space, and the first time I had Tom on the pod as well. So excited to have this conversation. Tom, maybe you could just introduce yourself and your role. We can start there. 

Tom Richards: Super. Thank you Tom. Delighted to be on your podcast. So, uh, yeah, Tom Richards, uh, with Cisco.

I've worked with Cisco for, I think I celebrated 25 years, about nine months ago. So, uh, been a long time in Cisco, uh, and. The roles I've had when I came into Cisco, we were bought, we were a small startup. We were bought as an AI company back in like the early two thousands now, um, focused on voiceover IP.

And guaranteeing, uh, services across your IP network for those kind of real time, uh, services. It was voice at that time. I very quickly then transitioned into video, which was the next immediate thing to focus on, and gradually became less and less involved in the core networks and more and more involved in the end user environments.

And so for. A very long time now, I've been on the end points working at the, the devices end of the spectrum and, um, uh, started working with Microsoft. My, my primary role is really in working with kind of, if you like, our customers, our partners, our vendor partners, uh, our technology partners, uh, to be able to understand how we take this out to the market.

Have we got the right technologies? Have we got the right integrations? What else do we need to do? And then bringing those back internally to our, to our organization on the product side. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. And then this is a interesting conversation. We, we were talking offline on the prep, so not sure everybody listening to the podcast will know, but I started in a, uh, Cisco partner doing call manager and, uh, was doing, you know, Cisco voice and then I flipped over to doing Exchange, UM, on, on Call Manager and then OCS and RCC and eventually flipped to a Microsoft partner and kind of, you know, then, then went down the Microsoft road of OCS Link Skype business and, and now.

Teams. Um, so I kind of way, way, way long ago got some, uh, some affinity with the, uh, the Cisco, certainly the Cisco voice story anyway. Um, and, and all that time there was a bunch of big customers, and they still are today, who are Cisco shops and Microsoft shops. And, and, and, and then way back then, you know, this is, God, it's 15, maybe more than more, more years ago.

Um, like, like, it was just like, why, why don't you guys just work together and like, we like this thing from Cisco. We like this thing from Microsoft. And, and interestingly, you know, Enterprise Connect a little while ago, like this kind of coming together came and I think people were initially maybe nervous or skeptical, but we're a few years in now.

Maybe you can take us through that journey from, from the inside. 

Tom Richards: Yeah, it's, it is, it is really interesting hearing your voyage. It sounds like we had a sort of parallel existence, uh, you know, and, and, and slightly different parts, but yeah, very interesting. Kind of similar parallel existences. Um, yeah, the, the Microsoft Partnership, I think.

You know, I mean, Cisco has the WebEx platform, uh, and we were very focused on the WebEx platform. I think that as the years kind of moved on, and particularly during COVID, uh, there was a very clear understanding, I think, of the customers really demanding, as you said, dear Cisco, we love your device footprint.

We love how you can scale. We love the robustness, we love the quality. Dear Microsoft, we're all in on Teams across our internal meetings, let's say. That's a very common theme. Messaging and the meetings platform all integrated, et cetera. We really love that. Why aren't you working together? Just to your point, and I think there was, we obviously had such a history because of the, the WebEx and Teams kind of competitive nature of our sales teams competing very hard.

So it took us, frankly, a while for us to get our acts together, you know, across both organizations. But as soon as we sat down together at a technology level and really started to get into the detail, it was incredibly quick. Like I think, I think the realization that. Scaling Microsoft Teams into physical spaces, into the, the, the rooms and the, the, the built premise and leveraging the Cisco architecture to be able to do that equally, the device is providing not just a kind of collaboration footprint, but more and more to be part of a future-proof workplace and delivering data around occupancy and sensor information, all those kind of things.

It just became kind of a no brainer, and I think if I. This was now what, two and a half years ago, maybe a little bit more where we, we started to really work together. I think that the key pivot point, the point where it really was like this is gonna work was where, um, I think we both realized like, we will not be satisfied.

We, Cisco would not be satisfied with providing a. You know, like a, a, a limited MTR experience. It needed to be a full and ongoing UpToDate MTR experience, both when we do the integration and ongoing. And then I think Microsoft's perspective, which is like, we're not investing in another vendor. We have a bunch of different vendors, OEM vendors with whom we work.

What we want from Cisco is we don't wanna dumb down your devices with all of the RoomOS capabilities on our devices, manageability at scale, the AI capabilities at the edge, the ability to do all these sensor data, et cetera. And so as soon as we agreed that it's like, Hey, we're all, we're all in agreement.

Let's get on with this. And as soon as I think we got on with it, it really worked very, very effectively. I mean, I. I was just with Microsoft. Um, had a, had a meeting a couple of hours ago. So we meet very, very regularly and, uh, I, I enjoy it immensely. It's, uh, it, it's very funny to think there was a time when we didn't work together.

I, I must say, never nowadays. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. It's interesting mean such, such, such big players in both with big, you know, big incumbent estates on their respective platforms. It, it, it, uh, it's nice to see that level of maturity of like, there are customers where this is just going to work better for the customer if we, if we play nicely.

Tom Richards: Yeah. Yeah. I think, I mean, I think the other thing that I really like, so now we're, we've been out for some time with a full portfolio of devices. I think what is really exciting to see is that we're passing. Important thresholds really quickly. Um, so for example, customers, you know, we have existing customers with now more than 2000 registered MTR devices on the Cisco, uh, device footprint.

Um, you know, this is growing incredibly quickly. We had actually, one of the customers, one of the largest customers we had, I think they deployed, I wanna say roughly 800 MTR devices in a quarter. Right? That's the, and that was what we wanted, right? Both Microsoft and Cisco. This is a great outcome, but to see this really playing out so quickly, that's, it's, it's, it's very exciting.

I'm really, I'm really encouraged by it. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. And, and, and there was some real engineering effort, uh, here as well because you are not a native Android platform. You are NVIDIA, which is interesting. We'll talk about some of the benefits that gives you in a minute, but like there was, there was work to be done on both sides of the fence here to kind of make this work.

Tom Richards: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it is a good point. Yeah. Were not. We're not an Android platform. We're actually a Linux-based platform running, uh, uh, what we call RoomOS, which is our operating system on Cisco devices. And it's been our operating system for a long, long, long time. So it has a lot of robustness. It's highly secure.

It's in financials and government organizations and military environments and so on and so forth. Um, and I think what we needed to work with the Microsoft team on was like, okay. We will containerize Android and the MTR application inside RoomOS. And so we needed a management architecture that made sure that we could manage that combination of software really, really effectively.

And I think that having solved that now, it's really nice. Like you can configure the devices so that you are. Software is one load, both the latest MTR and the latest RoomOS software with the latest Android version all deployed in one go on the device. So it's very, very straightforward. It's all validated, so there's no.

Version control or anything that the, that the, the end customers need to do on this. So it, that was probably the hardest thing to solve actually, was that, that management architecture. And now that we've solved it, I think it really is proving, it's proving all the value, as I said, in terms of sort of scalable, robust deployments and manageable and so on and so forth.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, the manageability is a big one for you, isn't it? Like the, the, the management platform obviously has a lot of maturity from the, the, the WebEx and RoomOS, then you get to take that maturity and bring it into the MTR estate as well. 

Tom Richards: Yeah, yeah, that's right. So, so I think, um, you know, obviously we're, we're leveraging for the MTR application, leveraging the um, uh, Microsoft Teams.

Management architecture, which I, I think just continues to improve and improve and improve. And then we have Control Hub on our side from the device and the workspace management, um, which consolidates all of the data as well as all of the software manageability and so on and so forth. And I think for, for these very large customers that I'm talking about, uh, really for, for all of them, combining the Microsoft Teams management architecture with the Control Hub management for the workspace and the device.

Is proving to be a really, really fabulous solution. I think for our customer base. I think, I shouldn't throw too many numbers around without knowing exactly, but it is, it is like, let's say 85 to 90% of our customers have that combined architecture to deploy. Uh, just because I think it's so effective. I think for the scale, scale, manageability.

Tom Arbuthnot: And, and how are you finding with customers, are they? Uh, because you can run your devices in the native RoomOS mode and you can do sip join. You're doing some clever stuff with Zoom coming up as well, which I'd like to understand better. And obviously in MTR mode, you have this unique capability to pop WebEx for the duration of a session as well.

Yes. Like how are customers kind of picking between the options? 

Tom Richards: Yeah. And, and I think there's a little bit of, it's, it's a little bit of like, it depends on what you are trying to do to your customer. Like what, what is your environment? Um, I think, yeah, there's got a lot of factors. I'm trying to think about how to do this succinctly.

I think the, the, the main thing is, as you said, if I have other platforms, like if I'm in a very mixed environment, uh, we have customers who have an, uh, an awful lot of external meetings to which. Their employees get invited to, I'm thinking like consulting firms and those kind of things. Mm-hmm. Often they're making decisions which say, you know what?

I need to try to have a balanced view of Zoom and Microsoft Teams and WebEx and Google, and maybe there's even more, and, and, and having buttons for each of those types of meetings to be able to join easily. We often see that's one of the decision criteria to go down the sort of RoomOS UI mode. And then there's the other mode.

To be clear for the, the user community listening to this, these are the same devices, so this is just a configuration option. You can move back and forth between ones you want. Yeah. So it's 

Tom Arbuthnot: not, it's not, it's not, you buy at the SKU level and you're locked into one scenario, so you, you can change later.

Exactly. 

Tom Richards: Yeah. That's really important to know. So it's really like, it might, it might even be, and many of our customers have gone through this where they. They choose the RoomOS UI initially, and then they move to the MTR UI configuration as they get the. Investment of the real estate, of the, of the deployed environment enabled to do the Microsoft Teams.

I've seen that 

Tom Arbuthnot: one. One of the legal firms I work with in the UK, like they were a Cisco house for forever. They were running the newer devices in RoomOS mode, like waiting to get comfortable with where Teams was at, and then they flipped over to Teams. So same hardware, but flipped over to the Teams mode.

Tom Richards: Yeah, so there's, I mean, I think these are sort of the options. We, we have a, it's funny, we have an enormous footprint, both of. RoomOS devices, running Microsoft Teams meetings and MTR devices, running Microsoft Teams meetings. It seems to be a very, yeah, it's very dependent upon these environments, I think, and and I, for us.

From the devices perspective, the key is providing the flexibility for the, for the, for the customer base and providing the ability to, it's not just the flexibility to make a choice at the current investment, but also where are they going so that they have those choices available to them. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. And a little bit off topic for our podcast, but can you talk us through that Zoom announcement?

'cause it's interesting 'cause that's another kind of variant scenario, isn't it? 

Tom Richards: Yeah, it, yeah, that's, that's an interesting one. So, so what we're doing with Zoom, uh. I think one of the things we wanted to do with Zoom, we have a lot of customers who have these multi-platform environments, and I think the, the way, this is something I, I hear a lot of feedback from the customers.

The customers, you know, the, the Zoom platform customers, and there was a sort of resounding feedback, which was like, Hey. We'd really like the iPad like experience. And what they meant by that was I'd like to be able to see the meetings platforms like I do on maybe on my phone or my tablet where I can kind of move between these meeting platforms easily.

And so I think that was a really fundamental guiding force between how we're doing the integrations with, uh, um, with the Zoom environment. So we are building towards an experience which will be, uh. Native Zoom, but it would be native Zoom when we're in the meeting. And when you're outta the Zoom meeting, you go back to our room, uh, our RoomOS UI.

That's the, that's kind of kind of the 

Tom Arbuthnot: inverse of what we do in MTR mode. So in Mt R mode, you are native MTR, but you temporarily jump into native WebEx. You'll be natively RoomOS, but you'll temporarily jump into Zoom native. 

Tom Richards: Exactly, exactly. Right. And then I think, yeah, one of the things, yes, there's a lot to unpick here.

I think we're. We're trying to get to a place where we can sort of deliver whatever flavor you want, to your customers, sort of where we'd like to get to. Um, one of the things we do, and I, I, I should probably bring up a, a slide on this if I, if I can dig it out, but essentially it's like. If you configure in MTR mode, there are actually things we can do to make a, a Zoom better.

You don't have to rely just on WebRTC, for example. So there's some, there's some things we can do there to leverage like the CRC interfaces of Zoom and deliver that experience even when you're in MTR mode. Um, yeah. So this is 

Tom Arbuthnot: because I guess for, to. Clue anybody in who's not that deep into the meeting space.

So this is CVI and, and like your, your native CVI kind of doing some SIP stuff. 

Tom Richards: Yeah, it's, it's, it's actually, so with Zoom. The integrations we have with Zoom today, right, right now, uh, are WebRTC, which frankly is a pretty basic experience. I, I don't want to denigrate WebRTC as a, as a protocol, but I, I think it's just the implementation of the WebRTC experiences are, are.

A little varied, um, across all of the, all of the, the meetings vendors, frankly. Mm-hmm. But we have that, you know, that WebRTC is available and we can leverage that for Zoom and some people use that for, for guest access, for example. Then we use, uh, there's a, a tighter integration with Zoom using what Zoom calls CRC.

But essentially it's there, uh, it's a ability for us to leverage SIT based interop. To integrate with that, there's a number of different controls that we can provide, uh, through the APIs that they support on that SIT based interop. So we've integrated with that and we've created a very, it's almost a Zoom UI around those APIs.

So it's not, it doesn't have all of the functionality of host controls and lobby controls and things that I get from a Native Zoom integration. But it's, it's actually very robust and I think Zoom has done a good job on those SIT based APIs. Um. So we have that integration that will work in MTR mode. So you can actually have a pretty solid Zoom experience even when you're in MTR mode.

The next step is that, just 

Tom Arbuthnot: so I understand that, so is that effectively MTR mode jumping into WebEx RoomOS mode and then jumping into that scenario? Is that, that's a really 

Tom Richards: good question. It's actually. It's, it is in MTR mode when I, I have the ability because we've containerized MTR in RoomOS.

Yeah. I have the ability, if, for example, I get a one button to push. To join a meeting, I can jump into a WebEx meeting, for example, and I leverage the integration that the RoomOS level. Yeah. 

Tom Arbuthnot: So yeah, that's it. Sorry. Yes. So it's at the RoomOS level that I can use WebEx rather than RoomOS. Yeah, that's 

Tom Richards: exactly, 

Tom Arbuthnot: thanks.

That's exactly it. So that's 

Tom Richards: the same, it's the same model where we're using that RoomOS integration when I'm in MTR mode to provide essentially better meetings, experiences across all the platforms. So a lot to say there. And then the next, uh, the next iteration with Zoom is to provide this native. In meeting experience on Zoom, that will be available in the RoomOS.

Uh, in the RoomOS configuration. Awesome. 

Tom Arbuthnot: So coming back to MTR mode, there's some clever things you are doing. Obviously the NVIDIA chip gives you the containerization, so that kind of abstracts you from the Android OS's, which is interesting. But you, you've also got some clever AI stuff you're doing with the power of the NVIDIA chip that kind of pulls through to the experience in NTR mode as well.

Tom Richards: Yeah, it's, yeah, it's, it's really. I'm enjoying this because I, I, what I like is like the edge in the Cloud AI. I think this is an area where there's so much more that I think we, we can and will do with, with Microsoft to really integrate some of the clevers that we, we've got kind of in the in-room environment with what we want to do in the cloud environment.

For us on the in-room environment, I think we, we have this sort of marketing term we call distance zero, and essentially what we mean by that is like. Where would I like to look and what would I like to listen to if I were in the room right now? Right. That's like a really simple summary of it. Uh, for me, that's kind of how I, I, I think about it, and then I want to be able to do this in whatever size of room I'm in, right?

From the biggest rooms with multiple cameras and microphone arrays and all these kind of things down to the, the smallest spaces. And so AI becomes really fundamental to this because it's like. The viewpoint when one thing is happening in meeting is not necessarily the viewpoint I want when something else is happening in the meeting.

Like if there's a dialogue between two people in the meeting room, my viewpoint from a front of room camera may be absolutely not what I want to provide, for example. And so I think where AI becomes really crucial, like you, you've been in the, in the, in this world for a long time. I think historically what we would do.

To support maybe multi cameras and showing different views is we would preconfigure the room to say, when this microphone goes hot, then switching this preconfigured camera view. So you pick up this chair or these chairs, and it's an incredible effort to configure those, those deployments. But it's also extremely brittle.

Yeah, chair. As soon as 

Tom Arbuthnot: soon as you configured it, everybody slightly moves the chairs around and or sits. There's humans, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or they, or they or they, you know, you have this 12 person room and they sit in all four corners for some reason. 

Tom Richards: Yeah. So that, so I think it's, there's an example where you're saying with AI.

I could have, uh, essentially an architecture which says, I've got the microphones, which are just listening to what's happening in the room and beam forming to understand where people are sitting and where there's background noise that I should be removing and so on and so forth. And then there's cameras that are like, well, I'm communicating what I'm seeing in the room.

This information then comes back to the Codec. And the Codec is saying, this is how you should put it all together for the remote participants. And it's happening in real time. And so I'm not having to. Preconfigure or reconfigure or you know, I'm not even having to ask the users in the room, Hey, can you change the view?

Which is never gonna happen. Nobody. Yeah. I think nobody messes with these things. So that's kind of the, the summary of of distance era. There's so much more like having a very high quality background. Noise removal has kind of changed the game for, I, I've been working remotely for about 18 years and it's totally changed the game when I.

Work with the design team in Oslo, for example. And we have a conversation about some of the design plans and it's totally different, uh, now than it was many years ago where I'd have to ask everyone to stop opening their lunchboxes 'cause I couldn't hear anything. I mean, it's those, it's just so much more natural and we don't even think about it.

I think I realize as I go out. Yeah. It's funny, it, it's funny how 

Tom Arbuthnot: quickly, how quickly you adjust to the better experience, isn't it? And it's interesting, I guess when you are inside of Cisco, you are probably constantly being exposed to the optimum experience, if not some stuff that you hasn't even released yet.

And, and, and, and I see this when I work with different customers, I'm like, oh, like you are back to struggling to make a meeting work. Like you're, like your pre MTR one click. Like this is a, yeah, you get used to the bar, 

Tom Richards: you don't, you know, you. You're still struggling to share. Yeah. And I think, and I think realistically we have to recognize that yes, that is exactly where the, you know, a lot of the user community is.

And I think, you know, I, I, I think we just need to be able to show what the art of the possible is. And then I think the other thing that our architecture is really focused on is then making it easy to get to that place. Because I think it's, I think it's one thing to say, Hey, you can enjoy this kind of experience.

It's another thing to say. And you can get here easily, right? You don't, you can use your meeting platform as it exists. It will give you the full experience that you want, and you can simplify your deployments massively, and your operations become easier. I think there's just, I think that, I find it very, you know, it, it's, it's common that I find I'm, I'm.

Having to realize what the reality for most of the user community out there is that that perhaps is different from what we're doing inside Cisco or Microsoft today. 

Tom Arbuthnot: And, um, uh, like we, we hosted, uh, you guys hosted the user group in, in London, um, a little while ago in the new office there. And there was lots of talk of the, you know, the new POE architecture and everything running off, switching.

And like you, you, you have a bigger conversation and, and spaces of course as well. But we were talking on the prep call around bringing facilities. Back into the conversation. Can you kind of give us a bit of a glimpse of that conversation? 

Tom Richards: Yeah. I, I think, um, and, and I have to confess that we lived through this, like Cisco, we are not immune to all of these kind of pain points and discovering the waste of investments that we'd been making, which we had certainly been doing.

But I think one of the things we realized is that, um, the investments and, and the way we've designed the products now, these are not. Just collaboration investments. They're room investments and what I mean by that, oh, and, and more than that, they're even kind of the workplace investments and, and I think we'd been pushed more and more and more as we started talking to some of the more kind of advanced customer base to simplify the whole architecture around the future proof workplace.

And it's like. When we were looking at like, okay, what is my building occupancy and my room occupancy? Oh, I've got an architecture of sensors and management and data aggregation all built for that one use case. For example, owned by facilities. And then another one built by, you know, building management systems that say, well, I need to understand what's going on in the rooms from a temperature and a humidity and an air quality perspective.

And there's another stack. And so it was going on and I think what, what we realized is that we just should be integrating this stuff. It's not expensive for us to integrate it, but we can aggregate the data into a much more clean and simple place. That then allows for these use cases to become much simpler to get to.

And so I think that we've been doing that for quite some time. I think what's interesting now is the conversations I have with a lot of customers starts off at the AV level, Hey, can you help me to scale my deployment effectively? Can you help me to deploy them much ease much more easily? Can you make it much more robust with, you know, removing some of the complexity?

Yep. We can do that. Um. Do you realize though, that the investment that you're making is also providing data to your brothers and sisters in facilities and real estate and potentially even HR, uh, who want to know things like they wanna provide like the user community with like, Hey, what rooms are available when I walk into the building?

Because. The commonplace situation is I walk into a building, I haven't booked a room, Tom and I need to have, uh, need to record a podcast. I'm not gonna sit in the open plant space and do that. What do I go do? And that's the kind of thing where we're saying the investments in our devices should cover all of those use cases should provide the footprint and the infrastructure to support those use cases and the data for those use cases.

And I think that's the, those are the really interesting discussions where I think we start to see. A lot of cross pollination now between those communities, which also then is the kind of aha moment, which is like, oh. So now I've got all of this budget that I was gonna spend on all of these sensors and management architectures and so on, and I can actually apply that to scaling my collaboration investments more effectively so that I can get my user community to confidently come back to the building.

And be able to find a room with whom they can connect with their remote participants. So these are some of the things that we're really starting to see now. And I this honestly, Tom, when, when you and I were prepping, this is one of the areas that I get really excited about. 'cause I think it's one thing for us in Cisco to experience this.

So I think what's really interesting is I think our customer community are really quickly starting to do all of these kind of things and seeing these, you know, uh. Consolidated investments to be really valuable. So, you know, exciting times. I think there's a lot, there's a lot that's gonna come out in the next Yeah.

I'm seeing a 

Tom Arbuthnot: lot of focus on it with, with back to the office. Like, and obviously there's been various announcements in, in the, the states and different ones over here, but like, like there's a, there seems to be a universal understanding that you, you have to provide. Employees with a, a good experience and a reason to come in and like, like you say, if you come in and you can't find a room or the thing doesn't work or you dunno what's going on, all that stuff is just friction that you want to be giving a great experience.

And I, I've seen some new buildings coming together in London where it is been really refreshing to see. From, from day one, like technology and architecture and facilities and HR, all talking about the experience, not how many rooms. We'll put glass everywhere. Someone whang some, some video kit in there, like it's a completely different conversation.

Tom Richards: Yeah, I I mean, yeah, it is a completely different conversation is it's exciting 'cause I feel like our industry. It's really fundamentally changing. Like, like that's the sense I get. We're really kind of at a fairly significant inflection point now, which we've sort of talked about for many years. Like any, any of us who've been in the industry for a while have sort of talked about, right?

We've had the sensor and occupancy information in our devices for a long time. What's really happening, I think, is we're now learning and getting feedback from our customer community about this is actually how we want to go use this. This is how we want to plan for it. And so, yeah, I, I think we're gonna see a really accelerated, um, sort of change now in how, how we're organized, how we're investing, how we're planning, uh, planning these spaces, which is exciting.

Tom Arbuthnot: Nice. Last thing I wanna touch on, Tom, was the, uh, you just had the MDEPEP announcement at WebEx one, so another example of kind of, uh, you guys and, and Microsoft working closely together. Can you just take us through what, what that is, what it means to you guys? 

Tom Richards: Yeah, I, I mean, I think, I think the MDEP initiative, uh, anybody who's not not aware, this is, uh.

A kind of corporate wide initiative in Microsoft to deliver a kind of platform, a common platform environment for Android applications to ensure that it delivers, you know, consistency, uh, particularly around security. That was a really fundamental aspect, I think, of, of the desire to have a sort of Microsoft.

Ecosystem platform, right. Uh, um, uh, on Android. And I think that Microsoft's desire to get this rolled out, I think there's obviously an enormous amount of overhead to get that rolled out. And I think that what we realized, uh, from the Cisco side is like we really wanted to support that. I think it just made a lot of sense to be able to kind of lean in and make that happen effectively.

And so we, we sort of made the decision between, uh, you know, the two groups to say, look, um. We want to, we want to see this go forward. We wanna see this kind of accelerated. One of the big things, I think for Cisco is that I think what we see is that Microsoft is really leaning into that Android architecture.

I think there's sort of been a, a Windows, an Android kind of. You know, discrepancy if you like. And I think that's been improving. I think MDEP is a means by which that then becomes, you know, much easier for the, the Microsoft and the Microsoft Teams, you know, rooms group with whom we work to really be effective.

To sort of simplify that, um, the details of this, when we then said, well, how do we want to go and implement this? Remember I said a containerized architecture with software manageability at scale in a single package? Really easy. For our, for our customer base to handle at large. We were like, let's make sure we don't undo that as we move to the MDEP architecture.

So that has been kind of the big piece of work. We've, I think we've got an answer to that. Uh, you know, very clearly, I think we've been working now for some time on this. So having that architecture that the model that I described remains exactly the same, but now leveraging the MDEP, Android, uh, platform now as we go forward, so.

Yeah. Super excited to be able to kind of see this, see this now deployed as I say. I'm delighted to support it, I think from the Cisco side because I think it's, it's like that's how we stay really in lockstep with the Microsoft developments and the feature set and stay, you know, right up to date. So, yeah, so some, 

Tom Arbuthnot: some future date, there'll be an Android up up update that will essentially switch.

DOS from your current Android to the MDEP Android. That's right. And 

Tom Richards: going forward there, there's some interesting nuances, uh, you know, around, um, you know, how to support this, but I think, you know, more details to come over the next, let's say probably three or four months. Uh, but yeah, MDEP is front and center for us going forward, I think on our, on our new devices.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Well, Tom, thanks so much for coming to the podcast. So this, we've gone, gone in all sorts of directions, so I appreciate you, uh, humor, all my different questions around the, the portfolio. Um, but yeah, really exciting times and, uh, I hopefully we'll cross paths again in, uh, in some, some future show or something.

But if not, love to have you back on the podcast again sometime. 

Tom Richards: I'd be delighted. Tom, great to, great to join you. Uh, look forward to the next round. Thanks 

Tom Arbuthnot: very 

Tom Richards: much.