We wanted to put in systems that, that didn't always, that didn't only meet the things that we wanted for the user experience, but we wanted op our operations team to be successful in supporting these, right? So, we don't want to have to bring in elevated skill sets to, to troubleshoot or. Bring up a Room, whether it's program, you know, 'cause it has to be reprogrammed for whatever reason.

You swap out a device and it has to be reprogrammed, right? We wanted these things to be hot swap. You know, you take every Room down for an hour, you change the bar, you, you, get it connected to network side in and, and you're good.

Welcome back to the podcast. A really interesting conversation this week with JT at Toyota Financial Services, amazing story of moving to Teams, multiple, Rooms, rollouts and the Rooms journey, hundreds of Rooms and scaling rapidly, how they made their choices in terms of equipment and rollout and partnerships.

Really interesting insights is that journey. Also Teams phone and moving from direct routing to operator to connect. Many thanks to JT for taking the time, jumping on the podcast, and also many thanks to Logitech who are the sponsor of this podcast. Really appreciate their support of the community and everything we're doing at Empowering.Cloud.

On with the show. Hi, really welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. You know, we like to hear the real customer stories on the podcast, and we've got a, a great one here that I love the prep call. We almost recorded the entire pod in the, the prep call. I feel like JT 'cause there was so much to talk about.

So, thanks for coming on the pod.

Thanks for having me. It's, exciting to be here, I can't believe I'm here talking with Tom on the Teams Insider Podcast. This is great. I've watched many episodes on my own, and gosh, I followed your work for a long time, Tom, so I, I know we're gonna get to my story here, but, and spend most of the time on me, which I don't know how comfortable I am with that, but, we'll, we'll get there.

But first, if I could, just a moment of appreciation for you, gosh, I've been following your work for, I'm trying to think of it last night. 13, 15 years maybe, going back to the Tom Talks, blog, which I know is, is still out there, but, gosh, you've helped me in so many different areas. I going back to I guess Link the Link days, you know, Link Interop days, and, trying to learn and find my way through that and do my own research.

And I kept coming across these articles, talks, so they were just hitting right on, right on the money for me.

Oh, I love that. Appreciate, thank you. Learned.

I've learned a lot, through you and I know, people who probably follow you, learn a lot through you, so, I can, I can say that I'm probably better at my, I am better at my job.

, because of you, so I appreciate it.

Oh, thank you so much, much. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. I love it when the heritage goes back that long as well. That's, that's really nice. Nice to hear. So, yeah, well, like actually your journey. Let's start with what your, you and your current role now, and there's an amazing story, at Toyota that we want to get into.

But, if you could start with what you're doing now and then we'll take it back to your journey into, into our world.

Thanks all. I work for Toyota. I don't know if the brand needs much introduction. No, I think every good, a global, iconic brand that I am, I am very grateful to, to be here working for, but specifically I work for Toyota Financial Services.

Toyota Financial Services helps customers and dealers get, get. Get our customers into, financing options and lease, lease options and protection, vehicle protections, products and stuff like that. So specifically, my role for Toyota Financial Services is, my title is a Unified Communications and Collaboration Manager, and I work with a team of what we call productivity engineers who are focused on, on our end user productivity.

, primarily around the unified communications and collaboration. So the voice, the, the meetings, the AV spaces, the collaboration tools, and, Microsoft is, is right in the middle of everything we do. So that's obviously Microsoft Teams and Teams, Rooms. Just, I think it's our focus today, but our team is also responsible for a lot of, SharePoint and OneDrive.

. Other, you know, diagramming tools and just kind of just random productivity tools. We lot, I, I love the title Productivity Engineer

of, that's such a great focus of a title 'cause it's like, actually it's what we are doing for the organization. Like the, the, the tooling that makes them productive as opposed to just Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. You can get kind of obsessed in these kind of roles about, well I own this particular. Product, but actually what's the point of the product? The point is to make the, the business productive.

Exactly. Products, platforms, tools can change, but, but ultimately what we're here to do is provide productivity.

So what are, you know, we, we catch things, all, all the time. So it's not just Microsoft Teams, it's really just whatever the business needs and. So, yeah.

And how big is Toyota Financial Services? Kind of, I know you have a lot of Rooms, for example, which we'll get into it. It's a big ball given saying rice, isn't it?

It's, it's, yeah. So Financial Services, we, we service, just under 9,000 users, and then we have for our Rooms systems, we are currently. Where are we at now? We're at about, we're, we're in a growth stage right now, so we're constantly bringing, we're bringing a lot of Rooms on right now, so we're at about 300 Room systems here at our HQ.

We've got another. 125 split between a couple of regional offices and we're adding another 150 over the next few months. 'cause we're returning to office. We've grown since, since we've been fully off in the office. So, so we are, we are, the gas pedal is, is to the floor and we are expanding, campuses and yeah.

So there's a lot going on in that space.

Amazing. I'm desperate to ask a whole bunch of questions there, but let's take it back, like, like how did you end up in this product? Energy engineer and, and very tied into the whole Microsoft space?

Yeah, so a little about my background is, is I've really came up through AV.

I started in AV, you know, the first AV systems I put in, I was working for my local county. The courtRooms wanted to enhance their, their AV. They, you know, they had the CRT TVs on carts, DVD players with cables dangling everywhere, and they wanted to enhance that. So, integrated system projection systems, Mike.

Mike systems, and then they, they want took it a step further. They wanted to start doing arraignments between the court, the, courtRooms in the, in the jail so they wouldn't have to transport inmates. So we started putting in VTC systems and my experience there led me into, to 7-Eleven. I spent, a good portion of my career, 15 years at, at 7-Eleven, the convenience store retailer.

I was stationed at their corporate headquarters here in, in north Texas, is in the Dallas Metroplex. And, through the 15 years there, you know, led the AV environment. We did multiple campus moves. We did two full campus moves, within that timeframe. So, got my hands and, and knowledge and really understanding what it means to do requirements gathering and design and working with the integrators all the way through the implementation, the construction phase.

Commissioning systems and then the support. We, we kind of, our small team, we were very lean. We just did it all. We, we were responsible for delivery and the operations of it at, at that time. Such,

he's such a great way to learn that when you're like responsible. And also it teaches you, you stuff about, oh, if I'm deploying it and I'm managing it, and, and actually, but I will be.

Right. Got it.

You got it. You got it. Yes. Yes. Do ourselves a favor. Favor on the front end, you know? Yeah. If we, if you have to support it. So, and through that also just. You know, 7-Eleven was very, video conference forward. They were very mature when I got there, but through that time it was, it was updating systems and, and we were Polycom.

So it's, you know, MGC platform to the real presence platform going through generations of Codex. And then comes Microsoft into the space. This is where, you know, Link came in and we were doing Interop with between the Polycom platform and, and Microsoft Link. So you kind of, you could see where this was going.

We were now getting video to, to end users at their laptop. Just great. 'cause now we could, you know, we were beyond just the, the dedicated systems and the offices, we were now able to get these field consultants out in the field in the back of the stores with the store employees. So that was, that was a huge moment.

For us. But it, it got me kind of realizing like, this is where it's going. This, I'm now having conversations with, you know, Exchange admins and, and more network conversations and you can kind of start to see the, the evolution. And that's about the time we, you know, talking about, you know, finding use. So you have to kind of expand, expand the knowledge there and, and now.

Gosh, here we are. We're, you know, here I've been, at Toyota Financial for six years and, when I got here, we were still in the Skype for Business, Polycom at Toyota was also a Polycom shop.

Yep.

, we, we had a global standard that was still Polycom, H323 calls, a Toyota Global. And then, here in North America we were Skype for Business.

So we were had Room systems that were doing both. We had these very complex, highly integrated AV systems. Where the user would have to come in and, and choose for one thing, scheduling the Room was a, was a challenge then. Then knowing what buttons to push, what pages to get to, and then once you're in that interface, how to control the call.

So yeah, you've already, you've already

lost most of the users at this point, like having to press buttons on remotes and dial in.

Absolutely, absolutely. So I've, so with Toyota here the last six years we've been on that journey from, from the Polycom to Skype for Business. So now we're fully Microsoft Teams.

So back in 2020, Toyota made the global standard to go fully Microsoft Teams for meetings. So that means we could really focus on one platform and that just changed the game for Room systems for us. We, we spend a little time. You know, kind of struggling through, gosh, this campus opened in 2017, right?

And we made that, that decision in 2020. Well, we had all this gear that was, that has not gone through its lifecycle yet. We had a lot of expensive cameras and mic systems and just AV switches that we couldn't just completely rip out because we were going Teams. So we were, we're retrofitting these things.

Yeah.

Right. And, everything wasn't Team certified. We were putting MTRs in. We had all these converters for the camera, for the micro mic system, and, and that was a challenge. It was a real challenge from an operation standpoint. Luckily, most of our users were, were hybrid, remote at that time, so they didn't feel all those pains.

, we've been on a refresh journey, a complete refresh, starting about a year and a half ago, and that's kind of, that's kind of, we've just finished that journey here at our headquarters campus. We just refreshed over, about 300 Rooms

and talk. Talk us through that process. 'cause that's a big, a big.

Project that you are now even accelerating further and a big commitment, like you were a, a, a Poly shop with the traditional hardware. Did you look at the different OEMs? Did you test stuff? Where did you land on your kind of vendor selection?

We did, we did, we first started, trying to get some user feedback where your pain points, you know, we started with a number of surveys getting, you know, contacting different business units.

Going through our, our past incident reports and trying to understand where the pain points are, what the users wanted. Mm-hmm. And, you know, one of the things that we really found was, was that users were contacting our, our AV support team to just start a call. Right. I, I, can you guys help me? I just wanna make sure everything runs smooth.

Right. That's a problem, right? Yeah. Like we, we had to, we had to address that first. So when we, you know, we really try to define what experience means for the, for the users. Well, we found that to be first and foremost, we need a reliable, something that's feels inherently native to use. And I kind of compared it back to the old, you know, the old conference Star phone.

You know, there was a, there was a moment in time there where we're deploying Room systems to get rid of these old Star phones that people would call 'em. And, we deploy the system. We'd get a call, Hey, can we get one of the Star phones? I just wanna make sure it works. Like, yeah, okay. So we, we gotta get the AV Rooms to that, right?

There's a

parallel there. I've never thought about. That's such a great comparison because the Star phone was. A dial pad and I know how my phone works and I therefore, I know how the Star phone works. And it is the same concept as we bring that to Teams, isn't it? I know how my Team's client works. I know what that button does.

And it, it's a similar button in in the MTR.

Yes. Yes. And you know, through our user surveys we were, we would get some feedback of, we wish we had that, or we wish we could do that. That was, it was actually hard to get that feedback from the users, like direct feedback of here's what we want. So we really just had to go back as the productivity engineers and, and say, we, hey, we're the experts here.

Let's go see what's in the industry. Let's go, let's go figure it out. Let's understand where the pain points are. And then we, then we, we solved for the solution, so, so that's what we did. So we. We looked at different OEMs, we, stood up some proof of concept Rooms up in our area. We invited people to come through and test them again, trying to get some more of that feedback.

And another thing about the user feedback, excuse me. Another thing about the user feedback we were finding is some of that was subjective, right? When you talk about how maybe a soundbar sounds or how the microphone. Pickup sounds or how the camera tracking is.

Yeah.

A lot of these OEMs were pretty similar in these spaces.

You might hear a different, a different, you know, bar that's in a higher frequency versus a base sound or a faster camera tracking, or they do the, the individual framing differently. You'd get different responses. One person likes it this way, one person likes it this way, but that told me is every camera, camera

tracking is really emotive, isn't it?

Because some people like a fast cut, some people don't want any emotion. Some people like, the Brady Bunch, Hollywood Square. Some people prefer a RE view. So that definitely is very interesting. I don't think you could find a, a complete agreement on what the, the, the favored layout is there.

And that's what we found.

So that, that goes back to our point was like, okay, we're the experts. Let's, let's figure this out. Like it's, it's close enough, it's subjective enough. Let's, let's go figure this out for our users, so. So that kind of leveled the playing field in in some of the OEMs. But what we really liked from Logitech at the time of this decision point and still is the flexibility that they have in their devices.

They were able to meet the most Room sizes for our needs. Mm-hmm. And standardizing was key for us, A unified platform and observability over all these components was key for us. So the Logitech solutions that were coming out of the box, the rally bars, the mic pods, if we could extend from, from those, the tap, all these being able to essentially come out of a box plug and play and view these from Logitech sync, we felt, gave us the, the best ability to have a reliable system, a system that we know is reliable.

Yeah.

Right. So complete observability over these so we could, we could. The flexibility to go into, to more Rooms, standardize, observe these Rooms, from a single system. That was huge, another thing in, in Logitech's favor for us was we were very much in this, and this was the time when we were very much in this decision point of Windows versus Android.

We really like the idea of the window or the Android based systems. So that kind of get back to that appliance type field. 'cause that's kind of what, you know, in the AV world that we were used to. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Not having to scale

the AV team up on Windows and patching Windows and how that world works.

And Exactly. We, we've come a long way with the pro portal and stuff now, but this is, you're going back quite away. So this was early days of those, both those, yeah. This

decision point was about a year and a half to two years ago. Yeah. Was the decision point. Right, so, but one thing that we felt safeguarded with that decision was that the Logitech systems support both, the, the Android and have the USB.

So if we made a mistake down the road, or we needed a Room that we just had to have a Windows base because of whatever feature is supported in Windows and not Android yet, we could simply just add in. Add in the MTR Windows device and yeah, convert the Room without having to overhaul it. So all those things, led.

And how did

that story, how did that story turn out? So you, you, you went with Logitech, obviously, I guess you, you've been happy with that journey by the sounds of it.

Yes, yes. We were, we were been, we've been very happy with. With Logitech, did you end up

flipping any to Windows MTR mode or have you gone Android yet?

We have not. We have not. We we're primarily Android, because Android's

closed the gap in the last two years in all the. Core features. I think there's, there's always some differences, but it feels a lot closer than it used to be.

They have, we, we really haven't missed out on anything. I know they were a little slower to like speaker recognition and stuff like that, but we weren't, we just weren't there yet.

And we knew we weren't gonna be there when, when it was out for Windows and not Androids. We were okay at, at that. We knew it was coming, but, and how many different shapes

of system did you have from Logi? Did you manage to standardize to one type or have you bought different things from the portfolio?

Different things from the portfolio. So we, we did our refresh in really two phases. We, we went for the medium, what we call the medium to large types spaces. And this is generally. You know, eight seats up to maybe 16 or 18 seats. And we, we did the rally bars for those with, mic pod extensions and, in, in the tap for our, small Room systems.

These are our, you know, anywhere for four to six seats. These are huddle spaces, small conference Rooms, maybe some small executive spaces. We were surface of version one in those Rooms, and that was a large port of our portfolio previously. So we had that whiteboard experience in those Rooms. So phase two was to address those, those Rooms.

And we weren't quite sure during phase one what we, what direction we wanted to take. We, we, you know, the surface hub had kind of changed its form factor a little bit and didn't quite fit the spaces that we had 'em previously in, in the, version two and version three. And, so we knew we had to go a different direction.

So, you know, Logitech is. Being great partners in NDA, we, we understood that they had a, a, all-in-one, system

come. Ah, so you were in the inner circle, you knew that was coming early. That was, so we, yeah,

so we put, we put the brakes on the small Room systems and kind of wait to see what, what Logitech was, was coming with there and, and, which is the Rally Board?

Rally Board 65. Yeah. So that was our solution for these small spaces. And we just completed the deploying those, this last July. So.

So the, the rally board obviously has that awesome stand where you can do the, the flip to bring it desk level or to have it, that kind of, stand around the board scenario.

But I hear from Logi, lots of people are buying them just as a standard and, wall mounting them and almost touches secondary, but they're just a great device and all in one full stop. Where did you land on that? Have you got them on wheels, you wheel around, or are you mostly mounting them?

We're wall, we're wall mounting them.

Yes. And we are using primarily as a, as a conference system. 'cause that's what we found. Even, you know, we, we had a lot of experience in the whiteboard solution being a surface hub. So we kind of understood, you know, they didn't. The service hubs weren't quite used like we, like they thought they would. At the beginning we thought it'd be this highly collaborative, everybody's whiteboarding and everybody's idea doing ideation.

Well, that's, it's a small, very small percentage of, of people who are doing that. The people who do it love it, it's a great feature, but it's just not for, it is just not for everybody. At least in our business, it's not, so we, we, we move to the, the solution need to be primarily a, a. Do meetings well.

Mm-hmm, get a nice large screen in there. Great camera, great microphone. That was the primary function with whiteboarding. Is is a nice to have. Right, so we all mounted them in these Rooms. We put the camera on top and. They've been, they've been a great, device for us. Yeah.

And, and is the, I mean the, the, the, the, the, the pitch on the all in ones is it saves in terms of deployment is easier, support is easier, like Lifecycle is easier.

Is, has that that been true in deployment of them?

It is. The deployment, the incredibly easy, we deployed, 125 units. About six weeks.

Amazing. Wow. And we could have gone,

we could have gone faster. We just didn't wanna block out that many Rooms from the business. I mean, we, it was easy to, to knock out three in a day.

And that's Decom Decom, the Service Hub and mounting the, the, the, the rally board and connecting the tap. Amazing. And then obviously, what did you, what did you do for that

project that you doing that. In-house. Do you have a, a partner you work with on that? What's that look like?

We, we have a, we have an, integration partner.

Yeah. We work with AVI- SPL on, on integration, for a lot of our, our campus projects. Oh, awesome,

awesome. So it's, it's kind of, you guys work with them, so like they, they, they could scale up that resource to go that fast with. Rolled out.

Absolutely. Absolutely. But hey, they, they're a great partner of us, of ours.

We can't do these, these projects successfully without them. We also have a, a great set of, of engineers here at Toyota. And, and, I have worked with one of the best, Josh on my team. He's, he's incredible, but between him and, and our, our, our great partners at AVI-SPL, it takes a lot of careful planning.

Preparation and then when it's go time for these implementations, it just went so smooth of, super proud of both the AVI-SPL and and our team for, for pulling that off. Amazing.

Yeah, it is really interesting to me to see where the, the line is dropping on these projects in terms of deploy and, and ongoing support.

'cause a lot of it's getting. Streamlined. So finding the right partner that can move at the pace the business wants to and fit where the fit the line between the customer and the partner and where like, how you work tightly together. 'cause sometimes you can see projects where the partner wants, they have a, they have a way of doing things and like, well, we do it this way.

But that doesn't work for organizers just as yours. You want to have a true partnership.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And you, and you need somebody on. On your side advocating for this is how the deployments should go. Yeah. And this is what we know of our building. These are the challenges you're gonna run into ahead of time, rather than the integrator getting out here and, and finding those during the project.

Whereas maybe we can't route cables to this wall or we don't have this, the space on the floor, or we don't have, you know, the right floor box or those, those type of things. So doing all that pre-work ahead of time, understanding the environment, not just the technology's going in, but it's understanding that the environment, right, the facilities aspects of it all.

So,

and you've got plans, you mentioned that the intro, you've got plans to continue to ramp to more Rooms now.

We are, we are in scale mode now. So we've, we've gone through, you know, redefining our standards, so those are set and now it's, we're doing these expansion projects, we've got a building, we're expanding into another building across the street, and then our remote campuses are adding, adding floors and square footage to their buildings.

So, yeah, it's, it's, it's a scale time. And here in the next, let's see, February, March is. When all these projects kind of come in and implement at the same time. So it's gonna be a little crazy.

Awesome. And what, what does the operational model look like? And I guess that's changed over time because of the technology and, and the platform shifts.

What's that look like?

Yeah, we, we have an onsite managed services team that we, we also use AVI-SPL for, so it's nice to have, the same, the same. Partner as both your integrator and your, and your operations. So, well, back to back to that, you're

on the, you're on the hook day too as well, so, it better go well.

Exactly. Exactly, but look, that was something that was important to us when we designed these systems and when we looked for a solution, is the, the operations aspect of it. Mm. You know, we wanted to put in systems that, that didn't always, that didn't only meet the things that we wanted for the user experience, but.

We wanted our operations team to be successful in supporting these, right? So, we don't want to have to bring in elevated skill sets to, to troubleshoot or. Bring up a Room, whether it's program, you know, 'cause it has to be reprogrammed for whatever reason, you swap out a device and it has to be reprogrammed, right?

We wanted these things to be hot swap. You know, you take every Room down for an hour, you change the bar, you, you, get it connected to network side in and, and you're good, right? So, that's helped a lot. Although we don't see many failure, we haven't seen many failures yet, so that's a good thing.

But, so yeah, that was, that was key, was, was, deploying systems that, that were, that could set our operations team up for success. Yeah.

Yeah. And I guess the, a combination of pro portal and, Logi tooling for, for management.

Oh gosh, we've come such a long way, now with, with both Pro Portal and the Sync Portal, we're using both and that's fine.

We're, we're okay with that. You know, pro Portal is, it's still coming along in the Android space and Logitech does a great job in the, in the sync area in those, they were very mature in that when we chose them, it's interesting how much of an

important part of the conversation that is. We obviously have lots of, customers on the podcast and it's, it's something that I think once you.

Gone to any kind of scale. You really understand, like a lot of our industry spends a lot of time talking about the, the cameras and the quality of the screen and the touch points, and then that's all important. But actually when you get to bars, sometimes you can argue, you know, like, like they're, they're in the ballpark.

But when you get into scale deployment, management tooling, that's where. People separate support as well is a big one. You know, being able get stuff, report that there's so many non hardware decisions that I think are important. Strategy

for sure. I, I think rebel reliability is the number one, for, for a cus for end user experience, right?

Reliability is, is key to experience. Having observability, you know, that's how you know if it's reliable or not. If you don't have the observability, you don't know if it's reliable. You don't know where the failure points are. Yeah. So, so those, those two come hand in hand. So that, that was huge for us.

, and we're. Gosh, we're at a state now where we have every device in the Room is being monitored, and if it fails for a certain amount of minutes, it then sends a notification, which we then have a flow that sends that to not only an inbox, but to a Teams channel where all the technicians are notified of that failure.

, and then we have the dashboards that they check every, you know, throughout the day, in case there's anything they've missed, we can track where everything is at from a firmware standpoint.

Yeah, we

can globally manage firmware updates, through both, you know, pro portals coming a long way.

And that sync does a great job in that as well. So it's a really great, great, we're in, in a, in a good spot right now.

So you guys are also a, a Teams phone shop as well. Talk us through that journey.

Yes, we are, so. Obviously we have a, a big customer care center that is, uses another, call center, nice in contact.

But our team, supports our, our end users and their voice services, and we do that through Microsoft Teams, we have been direct routing. We just actually recently, migrated over to Operator Connect and that was a decision based on, we had, we had some, some legacy SBC systems, that were in a data center.

, ones lifecycle management, it was time to do something with those, and then two, the, the data center we're, we're actually moving outta that data center. So it was a great opportunity to just take a step back and say, Hey, is this still the right way to do this? Yeah. Given R need, I'm

seeing a lot of that towards OC for the fact that managing SBCs is a specialist and high impact skillset and requirement as well.

And actually, can I push that? Responsibility out to my operator now.

Right, right. And, so we looked at, we, we looked at, our solution. We realized that we didn't need complex, routing systems for what we were doing and what, what was offered in operator connect and the carriers, what suffice for our needs.

, yeah, so it, it was a fairly easy decision once we kind of, got requ with what's going on in the operating connect world. We said, yes, this makes sense, you know, we have initiatives here to, to be more Cloud native anyways. So it, it just kind of aligned with, with our organizational strategies. Did, did you port

numbers and change operators during that process?

Did you go through that as well? We,

we did, we did. We changed, we actually changed carriers and, ended, a series of, of cuts to port numbers. And how was that? 'cause that's

always a scary, scary journey when numbers are going between operators.

, well for me it went great because I wasn't on the calls, but, my, my, lead engineer, voice engineer, Kanal.

He managed all that. He's, he's an expert. He, amazing. He scheduled all the cutovers and, and the portings and, and feedback. Again, this is where having got from him,

having talent in-house as well as having good parties Absolutely. Is so important because you've, they've got the, the enterprise's, needs at heart, obviously, and they have the history and they have the, you know, the kind of responsibilities of the business.

Absolutely. Absolutely. But it, it, it went smooth. We didn't have any issues. We, we ma we completed all the migrations without a user, a single user knowing. That's amazing. That's what we wanted, right? That we didn't have any, any services down. Yeah.

I, I hear a lot more of that now. I've obviously worked in the carrier space as well a bit.

So I have a bit of a inside track on that and it's, it's, it feels like its net got better, but it's still a very nervous time. 'cause you are, these are business phone numbers and they're going between, you know, let's kind of like a swap over period where you're like, has everybody got the ball? Like, is the ball over here now?

It was, it was a little nerve wracking, but after the first, the first, you know, we kind of did a POC and that went really well. Then did, we did a small group and that went really well. So it's like, okay, let's, let's go. And, and it, and it did, it went very smooth, so now you know what we're looking on for next on that is a way to automate the, the phone number provisioning, you know, maybe it's based on role or department or whatever.

So maybe, they're forthright at a, a, a phone, phone number. Yeah. And, so that's something that we're looking into next on that.

Awesome, JT thanks so much for sharing the, the journey story. So much insight into the, what you guys have done, and it's great to share that with the community, any, any kind of closing thoughts for other, other customers and enterprises around, what you guys have learned or what you guys have done?

You know, I would, I guess, I would say we, so. Challenge your own assumptions. You know, we had to go through this, we had to kinda look in the mirror, both myself and, and our lead AV engineer. Long time in the industry and went through, you know, highly integrated systems and, and those, so we had to kind of look and say, alright, what we knew may not be what, what should be, right?

The, the landscape is changing. Let's, let's understand that, let's really see what, where the industry's going. And that's a tough personal journey, isn't it? '

cause you, you have a bias of like, I've done this. Before I know how it works. That's what I'm comfortable with. So that's not tri. For

sure, for sure.

And, and you know, we've, we've built up great relationships in our network with, with different vendors and manufacturers that we were working with before. And it was like, well, that, that's not our journey. That's not part of our next journey. You know, and, and even just because we were doing it doesn't mean that's what we need to be doing now.

Mm-hmm. And so challenge, you know, challenge your own substance, you know, it's, it's what I would say.

Awesome. Well, JT, thanks for joining the pod, we'll see you around the community and really appreciate your time.

Great. This was a pleasure. Thank you very much for having me on, Tom.