ONE MILLION Meetring Rooms (#MicrosoftTeams)

Microsoft announced it was what we beleive to be the first Meetings provider to reach one million connected meeting rooms. Just for fun, it also dropped that it has 20 million PSTN users! HUGE. The two Daves discuss the accomplishment, what it tells us, and what it doesn't reveal. 
Episode adapted from this video discussion: https://www.youtube.com/live/MhW_ETMfF8c?si=88DOkXsa0jrLV4ak

Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

okay

Dave Michels: 0:21

welcome to Talking Heads the informative, entertaining and brilliant podcast on enterprise communications from the team at talking points. Welcome, today, Michael some talking points and with I don't know if I should call you a guest. I don't know what the right term is contributor goes coconspirator colleague, whatever. But I'm with Dave downto. Welcome, Dave,

Unknown: 0:50

thank you give us a few months, we'll figure out what the right terminology is right now we're just kind of winging, it just

Dave Michels: 0:54

kind of winging it. But welcome to Talking Points, Dave. And what I thought we would talk about here is we're just putting together the, the incentive report, but we're just finishing it up here. And we've had some dialogue and conversation. So I thought we would talk about some of these Microsoft announcements that came out their quarter quarterly results. And it's always, it's always nice when Microsoft gives us little teams. Numbers, because they don't normally share these numbers. They keep them locked in a vault, and little

Unknown: 1:26

nuggets of information every once in a

Dave Michels: 1:28

while you least expected and just drop this dropsies the numbers, and you're not the same numbers right there. Like sometimes this monthly active users something totally sort of different. This was a new one this I never heard this one before. But apparently, you actually this may be the first time they've shared, but they shared that teams has reached a major milestone of 1 million teams meeting rooms connected. Well, let's

Unknown: 1:54

actually pause and congratulate them, even though we're about to spend the next you know, three hours tearing those numbers apart. But But let me pause and say, Look, that's it for the industry where you know, it was hard to do anything in video, and you have to convince people to turn their cameras on and you know, all the things that we live through, you know, that's, that's a it's an incredible number to fathom. Now, you have to give kudos to what they've done. They've become the de facto product in the collaboration space and in the video space.

Dave Michels: 2:22

You know, it's an absolutely fair point. I you know, you know, Sesame Street says, you know, this was brought to you by the letter, the letter T or something. Microsoft Teams was brought to you by COVID COVID changed everyone's expectations and user patterns, and themes was in the right place at the right time. And Mike, and given credit, Wednesday, it wasn't luck, Microsoft doubled down and really built that product out. And, you know, now now online meetings have suddenly become normal. Your point was, you know, I went hate going on video, I don't want to be in video, all that stuff. All those little conversations are gone. It's just kind of a normal thing now. And so they're celebrating with this major milestone of button quotes, major milestone and 1 million users. So one of the users 1 million meeting rooms meaning so I guess my first question is, Dave, you've been in video, what 6070 years?

Unknown: 3:23

Let's say for decades and leave it at that before. Okay.

Dave Michels: 3:27

And you didn't say 44. And I met you when you were a Cisco guy at Dimension Data, doing consulting with Dimension Data video. So my question is, if I would have asked you then, let's say your Dimension Data, Cisco years, if I told you that a vendor will have a million meeting rooms in their future, who would you have guessed? That would have been?

Unknown: 4:02

Wow, that's a good question. You know, at the time, it was like a Polycom world with Cisco making inroads. And then there was a whole telepresence phenomenon, I probably would have picked one of those two companies, Microsoft, you know, for the longest time, the Microsoft, people in the space, were sticking, you know, a C 930 or some other teeny webcam between two flat screens and calling it a meeting room and it was the laughingstock of everybody in AV so you know, I don't think they've ever changed their position. It's just the cameras got better and the software got better so now now they're able to do it and you know, it's it's it's a tremendous milestone, and it's not something anybody would have expected in terms of the way we were looking at the space and 2006 2007 I mean, Cisco for a while there with them. I forget the name of the product where you pick up the phone and the video just pops up onto your screen automatically. There were a lot of people that really liked using that there are a lot of people that hated it, because they know what their video to come Um, I didn't expect it you know, that's where you started.

Dave Michels: 5:02

Turtle. Right? It was it only worked with your calling internally it did that it didn't do the Fair's fair, a million is a lot of meeting rooms is there's no question about that. No, the big changes, though, as I think about how about that question I just asked you is, in those days, we didn't really know, we didn't know how many meeting rooms there were, I mean, because because you sold something and you don't know whether it was was stayed in service, if it ever got installed, you just don't know if a new system replaced it. Were in the cloud world that we live in today with Microsoft Teams, they actually know if things are being used. So in theory, they didn't really have much detail on their announcement. But in theory, these are a million active meeting rooms. And so

Unknown: 5:49

I'll tell you two stories with that very briefly, when I was working in financial services, and we're building out the Cisco TelePresence rooms, we had some major software issues, pending on the nascent product that it was, and we needed to like roll out something to all the rooms. And when we did that, we wanted to check to see if they were working. And we asked Cisco, how do you check if your rooms are working? So we don't? So you know, there was this mystery, there were all these hundreds of rooms, but nobody really knew what it was. And honestly, with today's numbers, even though we're in the cloud, even though they're very tightly monitored by Microsoft, you and I, we kind of are familiar with this space, we don't know what this means. Is this a million licenses? Is this really neat? Is my room and my phone and my, my desktop? Are they all being counted by as three, or as one or many? It's a big number, and we can respect it. But you know, this is this is as you know, as clear a Swiss cheese?

Dave Michels: 6:42

Well, it really is, particularly since the biggest vendors of Microsoft, meeting rooms are they they the biggest feature they talked about is the ability to work on different platforms. And so and so if you have a room, let's say from from Lodgy, and you switch it from teams to zoom. Is that is that a there's no room for each and we double counting can consume have this many rooms? And Microsoft are listening rooms? And it's the same rooms? You know, we double it, you know, because Because Because logic can do that. And he can do that. Cisco doesn't even have to reboot to do that, you know, if so. So what is a room? Is it an always on? You know, I don't really know. We don't have a lot of information on this. But it's a good question. And

Unknown: 7:33

we we live in an industry where analysts for at least my entire career, have been saying less than 10% of the rooms out there in the world have been equipped for video. I've never believed that number. My personal experience brings it over to more like 40 or 50%. But but everybody is still quoting Oh, there's such an amazing tam here. And you know, we have so many rooms that we can address. So I think it's still a big mystery. What isn't a mystery is when people reach out to me on meetings. Now for the most part, they're sending me links to teams, for the most part, with, you know, the second runner up their resume. The third is WebEx. And I don't think you can even mention the others. I'll get a Google meeting once Well, you know, that's

Dave Michels: 8:15

not that's not fair. That's not fair. Because it it's interesting, because there are a lot of different video options. People forget that, you know, so there's the big four, you know, you just mentioned three of them, you got to mention Google me too. So there's the big four, but the RingCentral, eight by eight dial pad, you know, all these vendors have really actually pretty good video solutions. We've come so far, not to mention the seapass players and their ability to to do video enabled services. So so it's a huge again, you know, this was brought to you by the pandemic, it really is. Video has become so mainstream and so powerful. So that's a great story. What's interesting to me though, along those lines, though, is is you take something like not all of those vendors I just mentioned actually have rooms. They have desktop video, but they don't actually have rooms necessarily. I don't think Vonage has rooms and I might be wrong. I don't think eight by eight has rooms. But but so so again, because we don't really know how to count those. Let's say there's a 20% margin of error. So Microsoft's major milestone is 800,000 to 1.2 million. Meaning was we just still, you know, two, yeah, very big numbers. Let's see. So they also announced us they were they also announced 20 million PSTN users up 30% year over year. And again, that's a that's a that's also a big number. Everyone tells me that voice is dead. While 20 million people apparently disagree. And there you go, there you go. So 20 million. PSTN very big number. I mean teamsters only deal but they just had their word fitters was a fifth year birthday six, six year birthday.

Unknown: 10:09

Round that like, trace it back to just before the pandemic. Yeah,

Dave Michels: 10:13

so that's not to have that many years. This is pretty impressive.

Unknown: 10:17

It's I think, you know, you have to, you have to qualify that before you make your point that there never was a hey, we have a new product teams come on board, that there was, you know, a Skype for Business that turned into teams. And there was, you know, the one before that, and the one before that, and so, so all these users came along with Oh, okay with shedding the last one. That's

Dave Michels: 10:36

a good point. I'm glad you raised that. And so until Yeah, if you go back to LCS, it's a 15 year journey or so. And you could even go back to Skype consumer side. And I guess you couldn't go back to that. But but if you've got

Unknown: 10:49

OCS LCS

Dave Michels: 10:52

Yeah, but the thing about the 20 million PSTN users, but I want to know, and when we talked about some questions with the, with the video number, I want to know how these users are connected, because you can become a PSTN user on teams, a lot of different ways. And so there's the direct, obviously, where teams just host the service. And you get that from Microsoft, which recently went from three nines to five nines, which really bothers me that they skipped four nines. And really, that's just, that just bothers me. But, but but, but you get it right from directly from Microsoft. Or you can get it from one of their dialtone partners. So and then there, you've got the direct routing ecosystem, which has been around for, I'm gonna say, I'm four years, three years. And then you've got the new operator connect ecosystem, which has been around, basically, it's new. So you've got the operator, so you've got that option. And then and then as the last year or so, you've got teams, teams, phone, mobile users, which I assume also counts. But they say they actually said it was PSTN users. They didn't say devices. So I guess if I had a smartphone or a soft phone, Oh, we didn't, I didn't. Okay, so I have a soft phone. And I have a mobile phone. And it's the same phone number. That should be one user. Right? So. So be curious how many devices they have on teams, because you would count, you say, well, we don't have any devices, but a soft phone counts as a device. And so So you got at least 20 million devices out there. Be curious to know how many more there are, and how these are all connected? I that's what I Inquiring minds want to know, I want to know that.

Unknown: 12:34

I think you know, you have to shrug off the numbers, I think it's fair to look at the year over year growth, how its presented, if they're gracing us with presenting it the same way every year. But you know, the unless they reveal everything, this is the number of licenses, this is the number of SPC connections, this is the number of PC connections, the number of headsets, the number of smartphone and mobile unless they reveal everything and let you work the numbers yourself. You know, you got to shrug and say, you know, okay, guys, congratulations. But, and I appreciate the year over year numbers. But I don't think anybody really knows what we

Dave Michels: 13:12

just said that is because they actually did a year over year. So this unlike the meeting rooms, this one actually is 30%. growth year over year. So So theoretically, that's a consistent approach the way that and so it didn't have any operator connect numbers. But but but you know, that's okay. We technology expands on growth. So so so if we look at if we just focus on 30% growth, that's also pretty impressive. I think zooms had numbers like that Zoom phone, they don't have numbers, like 20 million, but they have numbers like 30% growth. And so so I'm not sure if anybody else does that lease on telephony. So it's be curious where all these users are coming from. And then there's also he raises earlier, there's also the question of, are they real users? Are they licenses? And we don't, we don't really know the answer to that, because a lot of times, vendors and it's not just Microsoft will, will sell licenses, even knowing they're not going to be used, but it's just a way to make a good deal and close a deal. So, so. So is it really 20 million, but 30% growth, you know, again, we'll celebrate that. So those are the two numbers that came out of Microsoft. And I think more thoughts on those as we wrap this up.

Unknown: 14:29

No, I have to agree with you. You know, I'm always a critic of theirs. But you know, this is definitely something that's deserving of applause. I think there are more Microsoft stories that we need to cover things that are not as obvious going on, and I think we should definitely cover them real soon.

Dave Michels: 14:41

Well, I think Well, now that they've done that they've got a million meeting rooms, I think they're gonna have to be a regular part of I've been waiting for this. I've been waiting for this milestone so so we will definitely be covering Microsoft a lot more now.