Andrew Wigmore It's always a bit worrying when the CEO of multi-billion pound international company is using the stuff that you're responsible for. The time I discovered he was having a a zoom call with President Zelensky. Was a little bit nerve wracking. Yes.
Tom Arbuthnot: Hi and. Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast, another great customer journey story. This week we talked to Andrew Wigmore, who is Service Owner for Teams at BAE large defense contractor. 65,000 E5s. 41,000 engaged Teams, users, and we talk about his journey through the organization, an amazing journey, from working on things like fighter jets to owning the Team, service, their Teams Rooms, their Teams phone, their migration.
Really interesting conversation. Thanks to Andrew for taking the time to jump on the podcast and also many thanks to Ribbon who are the sponsor for this podcast. Really appreciate all their support. On with the show. Hi everybody. We are back on the podcast. Welcome back. we've had a string of really interesting customer conversations, all different sizes and verticals and scales.
, this is gonna take some beating for, for scale. Certainly. I think Andrew's first time on the podcast. he's definitely a familiar face, in, in the UK and Europe, in the community. Andrew, you just wanna start by introducing yourself.
Andrew Wigmore Of course. Hi Tom. Hi everybody. Andrew Wigmore. I'm the Teams Product Owner at BAE Systems.
, whenever I introduced myself, you know, other people introduced themselves. Oh, I've been in the company for three years. I've been with the company for, it'll be 40 years this September. started off as GEC Avionics back then became GEC Marconi, GC. It's been lots of different names, and we merged with BAE back in 99, so BAE Systems.
, and in that time I've done a lot of different things.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. That is an incredible run. Like, it's amazing on the, we were doing the prep call and some of the stuff you've done before you got into, our space is fascinating
Andrew Wigmore and, and it was never the plan to stay that long. yeah. but yeah, so I, I started off as a, a Trainee Computer Programmer when, when we said one VT220 terminal between two of us.
, you know, one, one desk on the phone between four people. that was a long time ago now. but, but that was, so when I started, I was working on a project. There was a, an unmanned aircraft drone in today's terminology, that, was for the British Army. we had digital maps, we had, thermal imaging cameras.
I went out to the Mojave Desert to do testing. spent a lot of time down at Salisbury Plains doing testing. So. very different from what I do now. after that, UFI to Typhoon, so I was the lead for the flight control software requirements. I spent a lot of time in Germany working with the flight control system lead.
, then bringing those requirements back to us. We then wrote the software and developed the hardware for the flight control computers. And whenever I see either on the news or an air show, wherever those typhoons going off that here stand up on the back of my hand doing,
Tom Arbuthnot: yeah, it's amazing. I did that.
Amazing. This
Andrew Wigmore part of me in every one of those aircraft. That's amazing.
Tom Arbuthnot: So when did you make the transition from kind of working on business deliverables to kind of infrastructure it?
Andrew Wigmore So that was, probably about 20 years ago. We had, so to my time on UF ITO was coming to an end. We had a big IT project come in called Desktop ReLife.
That was. To replace every single PC within the company. So all of those old Windows NT beige Dells with a little three and a quarter inch floppy drives on them.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah.
Andrew Wigmore , replace all of those with, with nice new HP PCs, nice black ones. So all, all look very different. on Windows and we should
Tom Arbuthnot: talk about the, the, the scale of your environment as well.
'cause that's projects like that. Well, you know, were bass and, and and also you've got multiple sub environments as well, haven't you? Yes.
Andrew Wigmore So, so I, I was the, the Program Manager for the, our Rochester site at the time. it was about two and a half thousand people there. The program across the UK. Was probably 25,000 people at that time.
But the whole program was looking at all of the apps that everybody used, getting everybody onto the same version of MATLAB and Pro Engineer and all of those engineering tools as well as the same version of Windows with centralized build, centralized office and all that sort of stuff. A lot of the time was, chasing down people who had very bizarre software saying.
You are not gonna use it anymore, you're gonna use this version the same as everybody else. So that, that was quite some challenge. and then beyond that, that, that was then my introduction into to IT. I then stayed within, what we called retained IT. So perhaps I'll explain about how, how IT works.
A lot of our, IT is outsourced. We have some pretty large contracts from the UK, to a couple of, of fairly well known suppliers, DXE, Capgemini, to run the majority of our IT retained. It is about making sure that what they're doing is not just what the contract says, but what do we actually need? Yeah, that's,
Tom Arbuthnot: that's something that I think, I've seen quite a few finance houses do that, and it seems like a.
It might seem from an outside, like an odd thing too. Like we both outsource the need and we have an in-house team to help manage that, but it's all, I've always seen it work incredibly well to keep the partners tightly engaged and on track with the business needs and that there's something about having an, an in-house team keeping, you know, keeping everybody honest about what needs to be delivered and why.
That I've seen work really well,
Andrew Wigmore and, and we've been doing it 25 years now, so. It must work. And part of my time in Retained IT became the interface between the Rochester site and Shared Services, so the Enterprise IT department. and ultimately I got sort of asked, do I want to go rather than being in business, come into the center in the shared service.
IT, that was about 14 years ago. and that's where I am now. My role has changed dramatically, from being the service manager for video conferencing and mobile phones, to collab all of collaboration. with people working for me, not that I enjoy people working for me, but I enjoy the people who work for me.
But the act of having to do performance reviews. Yeah. Managing is different to, managing people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm
Tom Arbuthnot: with you on that. Like, ,
Andrew Wigmore it's, yeah, you have to do it. the, and, and most recently to become the, the Team's Product Owner with an agile squad, an agile backlog, as Azure DevOps and all that sort of stuff.
Tom Arbuthnot: So that, that, that, like, let's, let's, let's zero in on that last bit of that journey from managing phone. And you are obviously a very prem heavy shop to Oh, yes. Going, going, go. Well, I, I guess Skype, Skype would be a good place to start. Was that the first move? Was it from Telephony to Skype For Business?
Andrew Wigmore , so PBX move, or the majority of PBX moved into Lync Telephony. we were the, the first people onto Vodafone's Vone M platform. so it hosted by Vodafone, it was Lync, we had 40,000 phone numbers within that Lync environment, which then became Skype, yeah, Skype for Business. and, and that, that moved from the phone on the desk to phones on your laptop.
That was a long time ago, but I still remember the pain that we went through. people, A phone on your hand, a phone on your desk was something that you always had, and it was almost a, a status symbol to have your own phone. With your own phone number.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah.
Andrew Wigmore , so then giving it up and having headset, I, I, I don't wanna look like I work in a call center, but today.
Everybody wants Telephony on their laptop. Nobody wants a phone on their desk. I've got a phone number. I dunno what it is. I don't care. Everybody's, you click on a name, don't you? You phone even on your mobile. You don't phone a number. You phone a name. so that, that was eight, nine years ago when we moved from PBXs to Lync.
, then, then came along, Teams. w we, we moved from Skype to Teams, the back end of 24. and, and I know you, you love this, sta our, our pilot moved from Skype to Teams was three and a half thousand people.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. I love three and a half thousand people as a pilot, so we'll just try it with three and a half thousand people and see how it goes.
Andrew Wigmore So, so, so the three and half thousand people, that's our shared services, you know. You've gotta do it to yourself first, don't you? Yeah.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. It's a great way to understand. It. Can know way better.
Andrew Wigmore And then you go, and
Tom Arbuthnot: so by, by this point, what's the total number of users? 'cause you've grown over this, this time as well.
Andrew Wigmore Yeah. So, so there've been some fairly significant defense contracts. business has grown significantly. we're up to about 65,000 E5 within our tenant at the moment.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah.
Andrew Wigmore , and not ev, not all everyone's active. So from a Team's point of view, about 41,000 people are regularly, you know, within the last seven days they've done something in Teams.
So, so it's a big chunk of users who are very heavy Teams, users. Yeah. doing lots of minutes. so I'm gonna come out with my, the favorite stat. I've got thirds of a billion minutes of audio in Teams last year, and that's on net. PSTN minutes was about 9 million minutes of PSTN. but this,
Tom Arbuthnot: yeah, that is a, that is a heavily used environment.
That's really interesting. Yeah. Yeah. And how was the rest of the journey from Skype to Teams and you did your three and a half thousand pilot, like, 'cause you've got lots of countries, lots of different coverage. I know you went to Telephony to OC where you, where you could as well. Yeah.
Andrew Wigmore So, We made the decision that Operator Connect was, was the right answer for us a couple of years ago Now, we don't have the need for, regulatory recording or anything like that.
Our help desk is in AWS anyway, so we just wanted the, the simple Operator Connect. You know, it, it works for us. The price is right easy. Somebody else manages all of the, the infrastructure for us don't have to do anything. so we are, well we now, I think we are, we've, we've got Telephony in 11 countries.
One of those be in the UK, which is where the bulk of our numbers are. we've got users in a lot more countries than that. There are certain countries where we struggle to get any sort of Telephony. the, the Middle East is the, the obvious one there. There are some companies now doing Telephony in like Saudi Arabia.
But it's really expensive. Yeah. and, and I understand that I'm waiting for lots of other people to say actually we want some of that. So the price comes down for everybody, but at the moment it looks like we are gonna be one of the first to, to have Telephony through Teams in some Middle East countries.
Tom Arbuthnot: Amazing. And was it, like you mentioned, what a cultural shift it was moving from. Desk, phone to Lync comparatively. How was the journey from Skype to Teams? Because I know you've got, you, you've got a lot of internal processes and stuff, but it felt like from that pilot it went fairly fast.
Andrew Wigmore , it did. So I think by 20th of January the majority of people were in Teams.
So yeah, get the Christmas holiday out the way and then write you off and running. Now, we, we kept Skype running in, in parallel for a little bit. Our first Teams didn't have the Telephony. So we, we did, the chat and the on net calling, Telephony happened March time, I think, such a long time ago now.
, but, but that was, that was interesting. so we, we reported all the numbers from Vodafone through to Gamma, who then redirected them back to Vodafone. So. The numbers. That took a bit of a divert for a little while, and then one Friday morning we moved 45,000 numbers from the Vodafone Skype environment into our Teams environment.
, lots of people. That's quite a high pressure Morning. Yeah. There, there were several people running Parashell scripts because it, it, it takes three seconds per user to to, to assign the phone number to them. and when you've got 45, it takes a while. Yeah. So, , and we did that one Friday morning, had to be done in hours.
Really plenty of notice to the business.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah.
Andrew Wigmore Ready, steady go. one ticket and one ticket at the end of the day. And that was a sip trunk fault that Gamma themselves had to fix. There were no incidents from anybody that, that we had to fix or that, that we'd cause. Amazing. That was. That was probably the, the best thing about it, it was that the disruption to use is, we knew it was coming, but nobody was, was left without a phone number.
Tom Arbuthnot: Amazing. That's, that's, that's quite an amazing transformation. And talk to us about the, the video and room side. 'cause that was your responsibility as well. Did that stay with you all through this journey?
Andrew Wigmore Yes. Yeah. So, let's go back to 2020. , lockdown. Remember lockdown. so we, we used to have a number of Poly HDX video conferencing rooms, that Poly announced and end of support for these things.
We go, right, okay, what comes next? Eh, Team? We're not quite ready for Teams, but Teams, rooms are the logical answer. Yeah. so, so, so lockdown happened, which to some extent really inconvenient. In other extent it means that people aren't in meeting rooms, so you can go in and rip them apart and reinstall new stuff because there's nobody to interfere what we're trying to do.
Yeah. we, the, the estate did change, so, so a lot of, so we quickly discovered during lockdown that, and we had some amazing coincidences like. We'd just bought all the infrastructure to upgrade our VPN service, which meant we could put that in in parallel and all of a sudden we could MA manage with, we went from like 4,000 people.
Could was the size of the service so we could do 40,000 people. That was a pure coincidence that the infrastructure was there, ready to install as business. I think we discovered that actually. We could carry on working with people remote. And I mentioned my third of a billion minutes last year on Skype.
In between June, 2020 and, and, and June, 2021. We did a billion minutes on Skype. You, you can't meet face-to-face. So everyone was using Skype.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah.
Andrew Wigmore And that and c come, come the end of the June when my 12 months went up, I was going, I want this to be a billion. And we just broke over the billion minutes.
Were
Tom Arbuthnot: you just having internal meetings for like really long? I wanna
Andrew Wigmore please have more meetings. Yeah. Billion minutes. but yeah, so the, so the, the Team Rooms was, we, we'd never done. Microsoft Teams Rooms before our AV partner. They, they had some experience. Parts of the US business was doing it. The UK business wasn't.
So it was a, quite, quite a journey for us to, to move into that Cloud. Managed. You know, we, we we're a defense company. We don't do cloud.
Tom Arbuthnot: If
Andrew Wigmore there's an on-prem answer, then that's your answer. but there isn't on-prem answers anymore, so we are, we're like having to, to rethink a lot of policies. Lots of retraining of people remember this on code, so,
Tom Arbuthnot: and the business obviously wants security, but they also want the Cloud scale and agility these days.
It's it, you want it all, don't you? And it's the things, as we've said, things chop and change so often that cloud scale, providing it is secure and compliant is so flexible. The
Andrew Wigmore cost of obsolescence program is, yeah, Cloud, Cloud fixes all of that.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah.
Andrew Wigmore Along with bringing all sorts of other. Concerns and complexities.
, export control is an interesting one. the Cloud, there's no such thing as a Cloud. It's just somebody else's computer. Where is that computer? Which s yeah. It's very important
Tom Arbuthnot: to you where that computer is. Yeah.
Andrew Wigmore , and are you, by having, by sharing a document, are you now exporting it to the US because that's where the Microsoft server is, so lots of.
, not, not retraining of people, but educating how things work and what that now means. Mm-hmm. to us. So what is the, what does the Rooms estate look like
Tom Arbuthnot: today then? Because that's all under your team as well, isn't it? Yes.
Andrew Wigmore Yep. So, so it's all managed by a third party company. they have, engineers dedicated to us who are SE cleared.
They're on our network using our laptops, our, our accounts, everything. managing 180 rooms all in the UK at the moment. and we've been doing that since, yeah, 21. last year was an interesting year because our CEO, all of his first line said CEO's got his own Team's room. I want one there. So, so a along that floor in our head office, there's now the CEO and all of his first line, they've all got their own Teams rooms, own rooms.
Yeah. Nice. which, it's always a bit worrying when the CEO of multi-billion pound international company is using the stuff that you're responsible for having Yeah. Better work. Yeah. Yeah. The, the time I discovered he was having a, a Zoom call with President Zelenskyy was a little bit nerve wracking.
Yes. fortunately the biggest concern on the day was what pictures were gonna be hung on the wall behind him, not whether the technology was gonna work so well. That
Tom Arbuthnot: means the technology's winning. Yes. If you are not the problem, then life is good. Like, like, like it's, it's, there's no, there's no praise for everything working, but no tickets is winning in it.
Andrew Wigmore That, that was one of the first things I was told when I moved into IT. You'll never get any thanks. But if anything ever goes wrong, oh boy will you know about it. Yeah.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah.
Andrew Wigmore It's definitely a no news is good news.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. So talk, talk me through, we've talked about this before, but for the pod, like the, the journey from going to a, a managed server-based product where you guys dictated the patching timelines and everything else, and to a cloud evergreen, always moving service 'cause for a defense company that's a jump.
Andrew Wigmore It, it, it is. Yeah. It, it's. So we are Windows Teams Rooms. so we've effectively got 180 extra PCs with, although we've defined them all exactly the same. They might have different screens, different cameras, but mm-hmm. The build should be one of two builds because we've got two different flavors, but they're all different.
They've all got slightly different, drivers on them. It's all out of our control. It, it, it's, it always, always worries change control people because we're not gonna, we, we used to say the HDX is, oh, new version of firmware on Friday afternoon, Mark's gonna remotely push out that one firmware to all devices.
He'll be finished by seven o'clock. Tested, done. That's it. Now, every minute of every day of every week, there's something happening to change these devices and there's. Nothing we can do it. We, we, we do now have a, a standard change within change control that says, oh, we're gonna do, you know, a, a big update to the Teams app or the Windows app.
Mm-hmm. The Windows, of waiting system. But that concept of it's just going to update itself, took some time for people to, to get their heads around.
Tom Arbuthnot: and the same in the phone and the service. Like it, like not all the changes of client side either. The service is for evolving. ,
Andrew Wigmore so, so yeah. So, the York tell that are managing our Teams rooms and our phones.
It the constant, oh, we've just tested 9.3.1 on the phones and, and, and, and, Teams Admin Center started pushing out. We've only had it in test for like a week, so. it's, it's, it's constant change.
Tom Arbuthnot: And what does that look like between you, your team, and your partners? Is, is there, it sounds like there's a lot of comms back and forth and I guess the wider M365 team as well.
Andrew Wigmore , yes. So I spend a lot of time talking to, to tel. they're a great company. I'm not gonna plug them or anything. They're a great company to work, to work with. some of the people that work there used to work in BAE, so they understand what we're about, which is really important. yes, the, there's a constant, you know, probably my, my top two Teams chats two people from Yorktown.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah.
Andrew Wigmore , it's constant. have you seen this? This is happening, I'm doing this now, or I haven't got purchase order for this. This is, it's. It's everything technical, it's non-technical, it's contractual. Everything seems to come through me at the moment.
Tom Arbuthnot: and how does, how's the, how's the business side coped with, more of an evergreen service in terms of features and functionality?
Or have they not noticed so much
Andrew Wigmore so, so I don't think they've noticed. It's sort the, the sort of, sorry, we've gotta take it all away and update it. It sort of disappeared and, and nobody said, oh. Hang on a minute. You haven't taken it down to do an update.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah.
Andrew Wigmore , so that, that cloud is evergreen. again, like we said, it's just working.
Therefore nobody's made a comment about it. But the, the other thing you, you mentioned then is about the other M365 Teams, all things Teams is me and all things collaboration. So email and WebEx and things all sort sort of come under me, but I'm, I also seem to have the role of being chief Microsoft Message Center Coordinator.
Using this wonderful product, Tom, I dunno if you've heard of it. ChangePilot. I might have heard of
Tom Arbuthnot: it. Yeah. Yeah.
Andrew Wigmore , so to all of the changes come in and, and I say let, let, we're gonna look at our Teams ones and everyone else. There's your things. Oh, nobody's looking at Copilot, right? We don't have a product owner for Copilot at the moment.
We're just using chat, so, okay. I'll, I'll pick up Copilot. There's not a lot in Copilot chat for us to look at. Well, what about Loop? We better, we better have a look at Loop Veeva. So starting to look at more and more of those Microsoft 365 services, solutions, whatever you want to call 'em, capabilities.
It's really
Tom Arbuthnot: common that ends up with the person who owns Teams or M365. Yeah, because it's like it's whatever's the leading. Service and, and, and, and like the, the pace of change Teams has been the leading product for change up until Copilot. So it's natural the Teams person leans into that change management challenge.
And
Andrew Wigmore look, just December teams wasn't top Copilot was top.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He started, it's taken that long to flip Teams and, and a lot of the Team stuff in the last sort of six to eight months has been security and fundamentals, all good stuff. But whereas Copilot has been, you know, different models, different, different bit of pieces, it's been, it's where was
Andrew Wigmore like four years ago.
It's that totally big bang new features coming in. Yeah. , we, we, we, we do have an, several other product owners. We've got one. Specifically for SharePoint. so we've got a lot of SharePoint online, sorry. Mm-hmm. On-prem. Alright. Nothing online other than Microsoft forces used to have some bits. so, he's got a big team and they'll go in, oh, Cloud.
, started be
Tom Arbuthnot: kind of the jour, kind of the journey you went on a few years ago. Yes, exactly. When you went Skype server to, to Teams, the same thing. Then they're going, oh yeah. They've got, they've got data and probably custom web parts and all that. Fun, fun stuff to deal with.
Andrew Wigmore Yep. Hang on this, we can't be putting this data in the cloud, so what?
We can have to have some on-prem and on cloud. We've got so much data, are we going to. Move it all for everybody or are we gonna say, Nope, it stays OnPrem and that becomes read only and you get a new site on, online. And we've got another, product team that's looking specifically at all things tenant related.
So Azure, Entra side of things. and, and so, so they've got plenty to, to be looking at. We've got a, an old tenant that we need to shut down. all of my Teams rooms are managed by that old tenant. The accounts are running to the new tenant, so needs a bit of a plan for, how do I take them off there?
But you can't move them. You've gotta factory reset.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah.
Andrew Wigmore , start again, but that means taking a room offline. So let's get a spare nook. Let's build that. Let's take that to site. Quick swap. Oh. In the meantime, I've said, you can't have GC8's anymore. You've gotta go for TC10's, which means you can't use the old nooks anymore.
So, so there's, there's quite a big program of work coming up to not just move them from one tenant to the, the new tenant, but then do an obsolescence update on those rooms as well, all whilst maintaining those rooms. Operational, as much as possible. Yeah. but we, we've only got 180 biding rooms. I know there are companies smaller than us with way more rooms than us.
,
Tom Arbuthnot: it's still, it is still enough that may make a project. And you guys are a, a 24 7 operation as well, aren't you? So, there's, there's that to consider.
Andrew Wigmore Yes. Yeah. I don't work 24 7. we, we, we do have operations teams. they do on call. but in my team service, yeah. We've got people in Australia, which is the furthest east, and we've got people in Canada and America.
So we are not far been, operational 24 hours a day. And we've got people in, Malaysia, we've got, people in Saudi, so we've got. Sunday to Thursday, working week. So gone are my days of being able to do updates on a Sunday. That's a working day for sound. Yeah. it start and it starts to make, your contact centers expensive because when it's a, let's do seven till seven in the UK, you can cover that with a few people.
But when you need to do overnight and the weekends. People time off. It suddenly goes from three people to you need eight people.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah.
Andrew Wigmore , and that you, it's a big increasing cost. we are yet to go there. We are still 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM UK time. Sev-1, Sev-2 incidents we will respond to on the weekend. And if we can get on-call people in to fix it, we will do.
, yeah. It's, it's a challenge that. He is only gonna get worse. Yeah. Well, as the more defense contracts that come in,
Tom Arbuthnot: as these services become more and more important and Teams obviously being a comm service sits at the center of a lot of that world. It's, like it's one of, if one of those services that people do rely on and notice instantly if it's not working, obviously.
Andrew Wigmore Yes. so when the network goes down, CloudFlare goes down. Power failures, whatever. It's Teams that people notice and say Teams is not working. Yeah. Actually Teams is working. Yeah. You can't get to it. You can't get to it. Yeah. Which, so it's one of the stats I've done for the last year is look to the number of incidents that were raised against, Teams that were justifiable against Teams and it wasn't a network outage.
And we had 10 tickets on Teams that took all of those out. So we had what worked at an average of one ticket for every 10 people within the business across the whole year. That's not per month. That's across, the entirety of last year, which I dunno what Microsoft say should be a number. But again, I was, I was quite pleased with one ticket between 10 people.
, and of those two thirds were. How do I do this? Why haven't I got a phone number?
Tom Arbuthnot: Right? So they're questions, not service issues. So there's question. So
Andrew Wigmore you, you can see like the, the, the resolution codes and hand me your first call fixes and user training is the resolution code. But two thirds of them were we user training.
So then if you want to look at it, it, it's even better statistics to people that actually have problems. that's awesome. That's licensing. use it or lose it. You know, you go on maternity leave or offline for whatever, for three months, your account gets disabled, your refi license disappears, you come back, it all gets put on.
Oh, you haven't got your old phone number anymore.
Tom Arbuthnot: Oh, right, yeah. Because you've recycled. Yeah. That's interesting.
Andrew Wigmore Because that doesn't come back automatically 'cause it gets dropped back into a pool that could have been reused. so yeah, so there there's been some interesting challenges that. It's only after a year of running it that we've realized some of these things.
Tom Arbuthnot: And how have you found, like in your personal kind of experience, moving from managing more prem products to more cloud products? 'cause like, it's a, it's a different level of change and data flow and people you need to talk to.
Andrew Wigmore So probably the biggest change is, is the number of events that are available for me to go to.
Are now relevant again. So, you know, things like the uc expo and comms and, and user groups and all sorts of things like that mm-hmm. Suddenly become really relevant and really useful. and, and, and I dunno, there might be, Microsoft webinars and things that. It, we, we've, we started to catch up again. So it's all
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah.
You are back. You are, you are on the cloud platform, so the changes are relevant to you again. That's interesting. So there's lot, lots
Andrew Wigmore of knowledge out there that it is here and there rather than, oh, hang on a minute. I need to find an article that somebody wrote for five years about Skype, that there are no experts anymore.
Yeah, we, yeah, we, so when, when we upgraded Skype to 2019, a few years ago. VO or the company that actually did it for Vodafone, they actually got somebody outta retirement to come back and support the team to do that upgrade. That's how scarce those skills had become.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah.
Andrew Wigmore , we, we've had him back since again because, I, I, I dunno, he topping up his pension.
Whatever he is doing, he keeps coming back, keeps him his name there. but yeah, it, it's, it's refreshing to be. Doing the same as everybody else.
Tom Arbuthnot: That's good to know. Awesome. Well, Andrew, thanks so much for sharing your journey story. It's a fascinating environment and some amazing numbers of, both kind of speed of migration and usage.
It's really impressive. And, yeah, I'll see you wherever the next user group is. No doubt indeed.
Andrew Wigmore Thanks so much.
Tom Arbuthnot: Thanks.