Patrick Watson : Primarily a lot of Cavell's, research focused on communications and technology provides and looking at the opportunity for them. And I think one of the things that we wanted to look at at Spetralink was, you know, how big are some of these markets? So the UK for example, healthcare, nearly 2 million potential frontline workers, manufacturing, 2.6 million. 

You look at Germany, nearly seven and a half million users in manufacturing. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Hi, welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. This week we've got a double guest special, two familiar faces. I think we've spoken to both Patrick and Stuart before, but not in combination. So looking forward to this, and we're talking Microsoft Teams and frontline worker and some of the. Interesting opportunities and needs of the, the frontline worker. 

so for those that don't know you, Patrick, maybe you could give a quick intro. 

Patrick Watson : Yeah, of course. Patrick Watson, director of research at Cavell, Cavell had been doing research on communications markets for, for. Two decades plus now. and I think more and more focus, and I think a lot of the stuff that we'll talk about today is moving away from the traditional, and I don't like the term knowledge worker, but the sort of desk space worker and the focus on their communication needs to much more around the, around the frontline worker and people in, in, in much more challenging environments. 

As we, as we're gonna talk about today and, and then the communication requirements. 

Stewart Wright: Awesome, thanks. And Stuart? Yeah, cheers to I, my name's Stuart Wright, the business development director for Spectralink across EMEA and, ly provide enterprise mobility solutions for such workers that Patrick just mentioned there over the last 35 years, in the form of enterprise mobility and debt and a wifi. 

So yeah, looking forward to having this conversation about how we help customers in those situations. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I first remember deploying some Spectralink in schools, which was good a decade ago, which is crazy to think about now. But yeah, that, that was my first hands on with Spectralink and that was Lync Wow. 

Stewart Wright: Around Lync Times as well. And we still have a device that, can connect to link those out there. And we still have devices connected to Skype, believe it or not. So we've got a long here. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. Skype. My Skype server goes on for some customers, doesn't it? Yeah, it certainly does. Awesome. So, Patrick, you shared some research with me that, the Spetralink team commissioned around like kind of frontline worker and, and what the, what the opportunity was and both kind of as in how partners can help serve them and also what the customers need. 

maybe you could take us through some of the a how you do that. 'cause it's quite interesting. I mean, it's not, not just, not trivial to get this information. Then what did you find? 

Patrick Watson : Yeah, so it's, so it's a really interesting point and I think it goes back to what we were, what we were talking about in the introduction, that when we talk about the, the amount of employees in any market, so you look at the US or the UK or you look at specific European markets, a a really significant portion of that workforce is, is not tied to a desk and, you know, it is mobile on the front line in whatever that environment might. 

Be, and, and at Cavell for a long time we've been trying to categorize types of employees and, and where they work and, and there's been lots of research done by much, bigger research firms at Cavell that say that in terms of the, the global workforce, you know, potentially 80% of the global workforce is what you consider frontline. 

So not, not tied to a desk. and what we looked at specifically at. Cavell in, in, in, in combination with Spectralink was, was trying to categorize the, the different types of workers. So they might be a, a, a fixed location mobile worker. So imagine a nurse within a hospital environment. So they're always going to be working within a particular hospital, but they're not tied to a desk. 

They're walking between different buildings. They're walking between different sites. So first thing we try to do is categorize. How much, how, how, how many frontline workers are there out there? What type of frontline workers they are. So whether they're that nurse example I used or mm-hmm. It might be, you know, in a particular secure or compliant environment in a, in a prison or you talked about, we were talking about schools and, and, and that sort of thing. 

and then. We looked at their communication requirements, so what do they need from their communication solutions? Because ultimately we've had this huge boom in the adoption of collaboration in the desk base worker. But the whole premise of collaboration, Tom, that we've talked about loads of times and, and you, Stuart, is that, that everyone in the business is involved in it. 

But if you've got a potentially huge proportion of your workforce who, who haven't got a laptop. Who, who, their mobile phone, they haven't got signal to be on Microsoft Teams all the time. They're neglected from that collaboration experience, and they're, they're not, included within the entire, within the entire ecosystem. 

And, 

Tom Arbuthnot: and, and very often they're the, customer quote, unquote facing role, like customer being different in different scenarios. But a lot of the tech benefits we've seen in the, the. Back office, non desk based role, whatever you wanna call it, like laptop role basically these days have got all the benefits and yet the other half of the business, or more than half of the business in a lot of organizations hasn't had that technology benefit. 

Not just on voice, but in apps and everything else. And it's, it's a massive growth area for. Microsoft because, obviously all the big tech companies are kind of targeting how we tech enable that space. But the last two quarters they've shown big growth in seat count and it's been down to a lot of, frontline worker and SMB and mid-market has been the growth area. 

Patrick Watson : Yeah. And, and, and you, you make an absolutely key point there. The, the whatever the customer is. So take retail as the classic example, the the, the P people working within a specific retail environment who are actually talking to the customers on the front line. Or arguably you could argue the most important part of the business. 

And if they're not included within that collaborative ecosystem, they don't get any of those technology benefits that we talked about previously. Maybe some of their conversations and all of those key customer interactions aren't tracked. So retailers are. Prime vertical example where, you know that there's a really good case for solutions that, that incorporate them into that collaborative ecosystem. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. The other thing I think is interesting is, like I, I think in the knowledge worker scenario, we're seeing less classic phone call use. You know, it's not all meetings, but in the frontline worker or SMB market much more. Reliant on phone is a business tool, particularly in those scenarios you say when you are walking around, a hospital for example, or, or your frontline worker in retail. 

so actually for people who need phone, these are people who really do need phone and, and there's kind of new ways to serve them. I guess. Stuart, that'd be a good place to bring you in. 'cause just before we started recording, you were talking about like five or six different customer conversations you've had this week and some really interesting kind of scenarios of. 

Of where they need that capability. 

Stewart Wright: Yeah, just to, I'll go into it just to add another dimension to it. Fact, this is a technology part of it, but it's a study by, by UKI group and it basically, one of the, one of the, stats that came out of that was half of frontline workers feel like this, two different cultures, one for the. 

knowledge desk based workers and the culture for the frontline workers. So you end up having half of your organization feeling like they're not part of the organization, not technologically, but also, from a culture perspective. So it's important to, to bring technology together to get rid of that, that feeling that the, the frontline workers have. 

But, but yeah, so I've had some really amazing conversations this week. On, on frontline workers, talking about oil rigs and, and shipping with our maritime certification that we've got. So we've got a certification that enables our solutions to be deployed in those such spaces, to hospitals where I spent 10 minutes talking about disinfectant and the testing we go. 

that we have in our lab. So how we go about testing with disinfectants, we've got a, a device that goes backwards and forwards. Another, arm comes up and goes that way with, with, the scrubbing pad on it, the disinfectant to does it for hours and hours. Take it off and look at it and there's nothing wrong with it. 

If you did that with a, with an iPhone or something, it'd be scratched. you know, you wouldn't be able to use it. You know, if you're using all these disinfectants all the way through to, how do I get away from. This manufacturing plant who's got an on-prem PBX for, you know, could be any manufacturer, but they need to get rid of that so they could bring the on, the desk as workers into Microsoft Teams so they could decommission it and recognize the ROI and Microsoft Teams gives you, if you running two in parallel, you've got support both of those platforms. 

So we help, those decommissions or those platforms and bring it into the Microsoft Teams. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I've definitely seen a lot of that as well. Like the, again, to use this kind of desk based slash knowledge worker scenario, like that's relatively easy on Teams these days. Customers are going faster, they're more confident. 

Everybody's using a soft client for meetings anyway, so it's almost like a might as well cut the phone over, you know, efficiencies, same platform, but. That story does fall down when you're like, oh, there's a bunch of people in the warehouse or the manufacturing or the whatever it is that are still relying on the PBX. 

So now our premise of we were gonna get rid of the PBX to save some cost while the PBX cost still there, we still need to maintain that. And we've got Teams as well. 

Stewart Wright: Yeah, E exactly. And I find there's three common denominators. There are more, but the three common ones are when we talk about frontline workers and move and them. 

To a collaboration platform such as Microsoft Teams is they're either forgotten, completely forgotten, and it's like last minute panic, right? We've gotta do something here. Or they're given devices not fit for purpose. Or the third one, which I've just mentioned is they keep the on-prem solution running, which is, you know, it's increasing those costs, two platforms being supported and so forth. 

So there are three really, really common things I see out in the market. There are other anomalies to that, but they're the key ones. So having that solution that we can connect to all the on-prem stuff today of, of course, but take, take you to your strategic vision of a, a single collaboration platform for all workers. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, that, that's good. And, and for people who don't know the kind of portfolio, you've got Deck that's certified for Teams as in it connects to the SIP connectivity on Teams. and you've obviously got Deck that works with. classic PBXs as well. Is there anything else to kind of, to talk about in the portfolio to give you an understanding of it? 

Stewart Wright: Yeah, of course. So, so, so Deck, you know, is, is a, a very, secure, reliable communication platform itself, with the infrastructure that comes with that. But also we have wifi, products as well, called the versity range, and the 8440 range as well. So the versity is, is smartphone and Android based. 

it, it connects to your, the wifi environment itself. But what's different about standard wifi devices is multiple things. So we've got dual antennas, so, you know, it is like, what? I've got my iPhone. I'm in the house. I walk, I'm on a conversation, I walk down to the garden office and the call drops halfway down the garden. 

I haven't got a big garden, by the way, but the, the signal doesn't go that far. It drops a couple of seconds. And I'm in, I'm in the garden office, and the signal picks up on the versity That would never happen because it's hooked onto the, the access point that you're actually connected to. And as you are roaming around, the second antenna finds an X access point and seamlessly carries that call through. 

So dual antennas, IP 68 rate is very, very rugged. Has all the cleaning capability that I mentioned earlier, a hot swappable battery. so when you're in a call. the battery's dying. You can take that out and change it. And when you are in hospitals, for example, and you are having a conversation with a doctor or you know, you need some help in his, risk of life and death, you, you can't have a battery dying and the device dies. 

you need to be able to continue that conversation. Or if you are on an electronic patient record, you need to be able to keep. Putting information into that and not losing it. But furthermore, with that device we have released recently, a versity dock. so that means when you go back to your desk, you put the, the device into the dock, it comes up onto your screen and you use it as your desk based computer as well. 

So is that powerful? you could do away with laptops. So you have the single device, it can consolidate multiple devices in, into one. and they're very big in, in healthcare, across the world. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Nice. That's running Android to kind of goes Android on the device to Android. Android, correct. That's an Android based 

Stewart Wright: device. 

And then we have, the 8440, which looks like this, which is now massive better. Feature phone, you know, it's got buttons, but there are massive, massive use cases out there. that will still set at these like hotcakes because you have environments, many manufacturing plants and warehouse and so forth where you've gotta wear gloves. 

And if you're wearing gloves, you can't with a smartphone. Operate the smartphone. So yeah, button, we've, we've seen 

Tom Arbuthnot: this personal preference on Teams as well. Yeah. All the Teams first IP phones were all fully touched and, and customer demand has brought through some Yeah. Physical phone 

Stewart Wright: buttons. Yeah. EE, exactly. 

So I mean, it hasn't got any glass in it as well, so if you have, a food manufacturing plant, no glasses allowed in there. Then the, this is the device they use in those environments hasn't got a camera. there are a lot of environments where you're not allowed cameras into. So you don't want, you don't want people taking pictures of your secrets and taking them away. 

So they'll put yeah, put in the feature phone in there. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. So, Patrick, in the research part of what you looked at was kind of the partner opportunity and then the market opportunity there. What, what did you find? 

Patrick Watson : it is, it is pretty massive. ultimately in terms of the, yeah, so we, we, we were looking, so primarily a lot of Cavell's research focused on, you know, communications and technology provides and looking at the opportunity for them. 

And I think one of the things that we wanted to look at Spetralink was, you know, how, how, how big are some of these markets? So. And if you look at the, the UK for example, healthcare, nearly 2 million, you know, potential frontline workers manufacturing 2.6 million. You look at Germany, nearly seven and a half million users in manufacturing. 

So, I think just listening to what you and Stuart were talking about then. What we've really focused on as an in, as a sort of industry is this real focus on user experience and the causal link between user experience and business performance. And if you are neglecting a, a really significant chunk, of the business, and these, as I said, millions and millions of users, you know, around your. 

And across the world, you just, you, you're not really not realizing that opportunity as a provider. If you, if you, if you can't offer, as Stuart said, something that's suitable on a ma on, on a manufacturing floor, you are writing off potentially 7 million users in Germany. And it sounds a bit sensationalist, but that's, access to that market requires solutions that are, that are suitable for it. 

So yeah, pretty, pretty massive markets. 

Tom Arbuthnot: And Stuart, how does a, like, there'll be a lot of, people in the team space listening into the pod. No doubt. Some of them customers, some of them partners, but like partners that might know the, I would say the traditional part of Teams. If there is a traditional part of Teams, IE the knowledge worker, like probably using Operator Connect, like all that stuff is relatively straightforward these days and well-trodden path. 

How does that kind of partner get into understanding? And some of these specialist frontline worker scenarios and devices. 

Stewart Wright: Yeah, so that's a really good question. So we got a, a great tagline that I love personally, love, and we put it onto presentations and it is called where the carpet stops Spetralink starts. 

So if you think about that, where does carpet stop? It's, you know, hospitals, private healthcare and manufacturing, plant distribution centers, et cetera and so forth. So. All these, or most of these organizations, as Patrick said at start a call, 80% are classed as frontline either I without a desk or don't have a fixed abode that they go to and work. 

That's a huge amount of people. and so if you look at most of the large global organizations, they have deskless workers. so it's, it's really about how do you enable. That element of that and company to get them onto that common collaboration platform. So the, the market really is for, for enterprise mobility. 

When you talk about Decks and wifi is the market that's in transition. So taking a customer and transition from an on-prem to Microsoft Teams. If they've, A simple question you've gotta ask is, do you have deskless, workers, do you have frontline workers? What's your strategy to get them onto that platform? 

And they probably revert back to what I said before. Oh, we haven't thought about that. Are, we're gonna keep that platform running. you know, there, there's, that may be what they're thinking. So it's about really, Being able to have a solution that brings them to that platform itself. And that's what we do. 

And all our conversations on a daily basis are based around that. I say last year almost a hundred percent of conversations that I, I was having was around Microsoft Teams, and customers that were migrating to Teams. Yes, I was having some conversations on other platforms as well, and that will probably grow this year. 

But by far the biggest majority is, is customers that have migrated into Teams. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, we did see as well Microsoft, reduced the phone license for frontline worker Attach as well. So it's now, $5, like, rather than the $10 for a knowledge worker. So if you're already investing in that frontline worker skew for those scenarios, there's a, a cost efficient way to add that kind of extra phone capability as well. 

Stewart Wright: Yeah. Yeah. And it, and it's a big, there's a bigger share of share of what it, When you talk about from a revenue perspective for for partners, but it's also that single solution for the end customer as well. and just to. Put it, put it on top of that as well. One of our solutions is called AMIE which stands for Advanced Mobile Intelligence for Enterprises. 

That's your management, monitoring and provisioning solution. that can see everything in your Spetralink data or wifi environment. So. You know, 

Tom Arbuthnot: part 

Stewart Wright: of And how's that, 

Tom Arbuthnot: how's that work, Stuart? Is that like a, a, a a server? You run the partner round? Is it in the cloud? It's in the cloud. 

Stewart Wright: It's, it's, it's in the cloud. 

It's based in AWS So you, you get your username login, you know, everything. The, the server will be connected. and then. Once you get your log of details and the server connects as an outbound connection, then you'll be able to see your entire environment. The, the amount of devices you've got at the base stations, the firmware it's running. 

Is a device plugged in? Is it charging? What's the battery health like, the voice quality and more. and if you need to do an upgrade to the firmware, it's just a single click. update entire estate, Three o'clock in the morning and boom, off, off you go. so that's a very, very powerful solution. It's really quite unique in the market and, and the depth and granularity you go to with that, with that solution. 

We're really proud of it. And. 

Tom Arbuthnot: And then how would I, like, say I'm a new part of this space, obviously Deck, you have base stations and you have aerials and you have coverage, things like that. How, how do I, how do I get into that conversation? Do I need a specialist for that? Do I partner up? Do I train? What does that look like? 

Stewart Wright: Yeah, exactly. So we have partners who can do those site surveys. So the site surveys required for these large estates. if it's a smaller building, IE we have, a large retail customer. 650 stores throughout the UK. It's quite simple. It's, it's one, one controller in that, in that building and two or three devices and they just get shipped in a bundle, gets put onto, the wall and it's up and operational. 

But then you've got something far more complex, in these large factory environments where you need. People that have offices in those factory environments need a, an S33, like an, an office based device to people who are in explosive areas need an ATEX device, or other people need the, the, the man down capability. 

So if they start running away from a fire or an explosion, our device will send out, send out an alarm, and it's, you know, an action occurs and you can go and help those people. 

Tom Arbuthnot: That's interesting. And, and you, you just touched on something that's really interesting there, which is there are a few different, supported on zip gateway Decks, options for Teams, but you guys have some quite unique capabilities that kind of go beyond the registration and making and receiving a call. 

have they been, It'd be great to go through those, but also what verticals, I'd love to know the exact, who's using that man down? Who's using, obviously the healthcare, I guess is the disinfectant scenario. 'cause it's quite interesting the different models you developed. 

Stewart Wright: Yeah. EE, exactly. So there's the, the man down capability, that's really in, in hospitals, prison wards, psychiatric units, boals, anywhere where you need to know. 

if, if, if somebody's been attacked or if something's happened. so if somebody starts running away, as I mentioned, an alarm will go away. We've got a pull cord as well. So if you've got a device on, on your belt and somebody grabs that device, the pull cord comes out, an alarm will go off. and, and we're working on the ability to, have the option of a howler. 

The device starts, whoop, whoop, whoop. Like that. Or it doesn't because there may be some scenarios where you don't want people around you to know you, you an alarm, alarms going off, alarms off, off. You know, you might want, I'm in problem. There's a problem happening here. Silent an alarm, someone will come to your, your aid. 

it could also be, somebody walking around a nuclear power plant, a security guard. He, he says, well, I'm going on my patrol. He walks around. If he stops moving over a defined period of time and he can configure this, to be sensible for your business, then an alarm will go out as well. So you can go, what, what was his last location? 

We go and find out what's happened. there's the flashlights on top of one of the devices as well. So this power cut the manufacturing plant, you can find your way out. but they're, they're just so dependable and rugged and secure. From a FO's perspective that all of these high-end organizations rely on it and will roll out Spectralink above all. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. So it's not, it's not just about the connectivity. There's actually some kind of different, a hundred percent people, like people protection type scenarios and, that kind of, you know, extra, extra ruggedness seems to be a common theme across all these scenarios as well. These devices are gonna get used more aggressively than a, a desk phone. 

Stewart Wright: Yeah. If you've seen the, The news recently today about, every, I think it was every two hours, someone in the NHS Emergency Wards is getting attacked. so it's a, it's a really bad stat, but that's where we come in. So if they have our devices and something's happening, could press the alarm button on that device. 

A bunch of devices could go off in that area and say, go, go and see Joe at a and e now, staff attack, what do you know, can configure the icon and the words to what you want it to be. And people will go and find out what's, what's going on. We had some use cases with another retail store on our, on our wifi devices. 

They were saying, we get lots of people coming, come into gangs and steal all the stuff from the shop and then run away. We wanna avoid that. So that same customer five years ago was more interested in connecting to, A PBX and being able to make calls. And those calls could be managed by that PBX five years later. 

That's a given. Voices a given on that. Yes, it needs to be safe and secure and reliable. But now staff attacks has come in as a different use case, different angle. So you need to have a solution that, that gives your staff that, that peace of mind. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. Patrick, back to the, the, the research, like where, which verticals do you think partners should be looking at or, if they're already in that vertical, where should they be extending the conversation? 

Patrick Watson : Well, well, I think the, the, the, the, I think we've highlighted a lot of the, the, the key ones with the, in terms of total addressable market. So your healthcare, your manufacturing, retail, I think are the, are, are, are the primary areas, but, and, and sort of secure facilities that, that Stuart's mentioned a couple of times. 

I think the really interesting thing, Tom is, and a lot of partners out there will be finding this and a lot of enterprises who, who, who are listening and, and watching to this will find that they've in, they've done a part migration. To Teams. They've done the easy users, they've done the office location. 

Yeah. And they've done all the desk base users in one place. But actually, as you said, Tom, they, they actually, actually, we haven't done goods in, goods in, are on Teams, but none of them sit on their laptops and maybe they go down to it occasionally. So I think it's not just a case of. If you are a service provider and you are, you are not in manufacturing, that would be an interesting vertical to look at. 

But actually probably some of your existing customers, there's a, there's a, there's a preexisting opportunity there where they haven't migrated their full estate or they haven't fully enabled those users with collaboration. So I, I don't think it's just specific verticals. I think it's. There's a, there's a, there's a piece of the market that, that's still available, that, that isn't being fully tapped, and as you said, Tom, Microsoft are focusing on it. 

So it's, it should be reflected in that, in that focus from, from service provider perspective. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. Microsoft are very keen on, frontline first line type scenarios because they see that as a, an opportunity to add extra value. As you say, it's often neglected area. 

Patrick Watson : Ab. Absolutely. And I think that what a lot of, providers have seen is, is a slight slow down in adoption is what you might call the, the low hanging fruit is migrated. 

So everyone's like, what, where do we look for, for the remaining opportunity? And actually the frontline first line worker is, is the remaining opportunity. So you have to have, solutions, like Deck solutions within your portfolio if, if you wanna fully leverage that. So I think, I think that's the, that's the key missing piece of the puzzle. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Well thanks guys for taking us through that Stewart. You wanna jump in? Yeah, no, I was 

Stewart Wright: just sort, I was just gonna say, think ahead of the, or if you are, if an end customer, think ahead about your desks workers and plan that in and look for a solution that is going to enable you to go to that copper collaboration platform. 

As I mentioned lots of times. But also we'll work over the next five to seven years and not break it down to replace devices every three weeks, six months or, or whatever. So just, just think ahead and plan it in and, and don't fall into the trap of giving a device that's not fit for purpose. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Well thanks very much for Insight. 

It's a really interesting market area that, I definitely think we're gonna see more of Teams' phone over the, the coming FY for Microsoft as well in in front lines. And, the research we talked about, Patrick, I believe that's now available if you've got a link for that in the descriptions there. 

Patrick Watson : Yeah, there'll be, I believe you'll make a, a link available, Tom, through, through user, user channels. 

But also you'll be able to find that if you add to, obviously go to Spectralink directly and there'll be, there'll be that content there. And also it'll be on the, on the Cavell website. So that's a, as I said, that's all a white paper we've written with, with all of those numbers that we've talked about. 

That's available for free for, for anyone interested to download us as they, as they need. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Oh, no doubt. Catch you both at, at the next show scene. Perfect. Pleasure. Nice job. Cheers, Patrick. All the best.