Eshan Mathur: My goal is for somebody to open ProPortal, having never logged into it before, or maybe logged into it once a long time ago. Um, or if you are already an MTR customer, you log in and you click on the BYOD section and all of a sudden your inventory is just populated and we can tell you automatically what is in what room and, and what's going on with those devices, right? And how often are they used by your users and what's wrong with them and all that stuff, right? That should all just happen automatically. And that's within reach.
Tom Arbuthnot: Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. This week, we go deep on Microsoft's BYOD strategy. We've got Eshan who looks after the BYOD at Microsoft. We talk about where BYOD fits, how it aligns with the Microsoft Teams Rooms story and get really deep on some of the interesting features that are coming in BYOD.
Many thanks to Eshan for taking the time to do the pod and also many thanks to Logi who are the sponsor of this podcast. Really appreciate their support. I hope you enjoy the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. Excited to do this one, it's taken a while to get it in. BYOD is a hot topic in the Microsoft space at the moment, and there's a lot going on, a lot being shipped, a lot of new features coming.
I've got Eshan here who's going to talk to us about it. Eshan, do you just want to introduce yourself and your role?
Eshan Mathur: Sure. Um, so my name is Eshan Mathur. Um, I am the senior PM for, uh, certain BYOD end user experiences as well as the BYOD, um, IT admin experience, um, as it comes up through Teams.
Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. And your background, I was looking at it before you joined on the pod.
It's not your typical like years and years and years in Microsoft. You've been in a few different places. Can you just take us through a little bit of that history just for interest?
Eshan Mathur: Yeah. So, um, I was a game developer for over a decade. Um, And started my career out at Disney, making mobile games, um, you know, working on Mickey Mouse games and Where's My Water, if you know that franchise, and really that was all about great user experiences, right?
Like, and that's what you get with video games is great user experiences, um, frictionless user experiences, like lots of focus on engagement, retention, like that kind of thing, right? Because in the games world, nobody's got the patience for anything that doesn't work really well right away, right?
In the enterprise world, we have a little bit more leeway, right? You have to use Teams. You don't have an option if that's what you use at work. You have to use Zoom. You have to use Slack. You have to use whatever enterprise software that your IT has basically told you to use. So that's a very different world, right?
The consumer world, but also the consumer games world is a very different world. Um, and then I took a, uh, Kind of a, uh, well, I guess I should say I started a company, uh, in the games world. It was a start up slash game studio making, um, free to play party games for people to play in their, in their homes together.
Um, that went on for about five or six years. We shut down that company and then I decided, okay, you know what? I've had enough of games. Um, I want to go do something different. And I took a complete left turn into FinTech, and I became a FinTech PM for a while, where I was, uh, designing financial products, robo advisors, and, um, and, uh, you know, credit card payoff mechanisms and all that kind of stuff.
Um, and decided, okay, cool, I did that. That was interesting. Um, and then, uh, decided to try enterprise, uh, stuff as well, which is something totally different. So, um, yeah, it's been. A really weird sort of trajectory, but the, the roots of my career are really in user experience, um, and, and I think that, that is highly related to what we're trying to improve in the BYOD space, since that's what we're talking about today.
But yeah, it's been engineer on a games team to a, uh, you know, games designer and UX designer on a games team to project manager and producer on those games teams to, um, startup founder and CEO to Fintech PM to Microsoft PM. And there's, there's a bunch of things I did as well. I used to be a graphic designer at some point.
I don't know. I've done a lot of weird things.
Tom Arbuthnot: That's cool. But it brings in some interesting perspective that isn't just, just. Enterprise Software as well, which I like.
Eshan Mathur: Yeah.
Tom Arbuthnot: So like let's level set because already BYOD is fun in that BYOD means, you know, bring your own laptop or your own phone in some organizations.
And we mean it in the context of bring typically your corporate laptop, not your personal device to a, to a meeting room. Um, and maybe you can talk to us about that, that scenario to start off with.
Eshan Mathur: Yeah.. Um, so we define BYOD as Any meeting room or scenario where you don't have a meeting enabled compute already there. And I say meeting enabled compute because there are other kinds of computes, right, like sort of what we call low computes that don't run meetings.
Um, but if you have to bring your laptop or your phone or your tablet or whatever it is into a room in order to run the meeting off of the device you just brought in, that is BYOD for us. Um, that definition definitely does vary across the industry, but for us that's what we're talking about when we say.
A BYOD scenario. Um, and so of course we have lots of different kinds of spaces in the industry. Um, we have spaces that go all the way up from, you know, super hi fi executive rooms all the way down to like tiny huddle rooms that have one or two people in them and maybe no tech in it at all. Um, and we have also a bunch of kind of, you know, weird shared spaces that don't fit into your traditional definition of room as well.
Um, and so for us it was just easier to say let's define it based on the devices and the hardware and the capabilities that are in the room rather than like, you know, Oh, this size of room or this kind of room or this, whatever. Right. So that, that's, that's it for us is like, if there's not a meeting enabled compute in there, it's BYOD.
And that really describes the vast majority of meeting rooms in the world. Um, I mean, that, that's most meeting rooms, right? I mean, I think as much as we want, I think everybody in this industry wants meeting enabled computes to be in every meeting room. We're just not there yet, you know? Um, and that leaves a big hole in the market, um, to address where maybe the user experiences aren't as great as they could be.
Um, certainly nowhere near as good as they would be if there was a meeting enabled compute in there. Um, but, you know, that you still have a huge chunk of the market that just flying solo, just me and my laptop going in with, uh, with,
Tom Arbuthnot: yeah, I mean, it's, it's arguably the majority of rooms, depending on which research you look at, like, you can see from the, The BYOD device type makers, it's, you know, millions of units of these things around the world.
So, uh, yeah, it's, uh, or I can't remember what the stat was, but it's something like, you know, 90 percent of rooms aren't video enabled yet. They're, they're, they don't have an MTR equivalent in those rooms.
Eshan Mathur: Right. Yeah. And then there's, You know, subcategories within that, right? There's rooms that have no tech at all.
There's rooms that have just an audio device or just a phone. There's rooms that have the display, but nothing else. You know, then there's rooms that have the full sort of AV suite, but no compute to run them. You kind of get everything.
Tom Arbuthnot: It feels like this is a different thing from Microsoft in the last couple of years.
Because previously it was very much, you know, MTR is the best way and BYOD is a bit of a pain. And you should, you should buy an MTR. The price point has been coming down in MTR steadily. But in the last year, particularly in the last, you know, like six, eight months, it's been like, well, it feels like Microsoft is saying, we appreciate that 100 percent of scenarios aren't going to be MTR and BYOD has a play.
You know, MTRs. First and best. And like, if you want this one click and you want all the, all the bells and whistles, it's still MTR, but, and, and there are customers, certainly, I know some of the customers with literally a thousand plus MTR rooms still have some BYOD rooms as well.
Eshan Mathur: Right, right. Yeah. I mean, listen, MTR is the best meeting experience we provide, right?
If it were up to us, every meeting room would have an MTR in it because that's the best experience. Bar none. And that's true for sure because we've been developing MTR for a lot longer than our BYOD experiences. But that's also true because of technical reasons, right? You have a compute in the room, and it's highly capable, and it can do so much more than you could ever do with a BYOD solution.
Um, so it's, it's not just like some like artificial thing we're saying. It's, it's, it really is the best experience we can offer. And if we could put one in every room, we would, right? And that's the, that's the goal. We want to get to that place. But you're right. There are still lots and lots of customers out there who, um, aren't for, for one reason or the other, aren't able to put a compute like that in every room.
And we recognize that that's true. Um, and we want to serve those customers in all of their spaces that we can, right? We want to serve them on desks. We want to serve them in their small rooms and their big rooms and their important rooms, and they're not important rooms. Everybody should come into the office and have as good of an experience as they can when they're using Teams, regardless of what space they're in, you know? And so, yeah, BYOD rooms exist, we should service them. But it is important to know that like, it's not going to be the best experience that you can get. That is, that is for sure going to be MTR. You know, and that's again, technical reasons for that.
That's the reality.
Tom Arbuthnot: No, it makes sense. And, and BYOD, like the, the, the hardware has come on a long way. Like USB C now gives us one cable that can do display, audio, and power in a lot of cases. Yeah. Yeah. Depending on which, which of the 17 USB C standards it is.
Eshan Mathur: Yeah. Or, you know, a lot of times you'll see a USB C cable, um, for the AV bar and then you'll see like You know, uh, another, like an HDMI cable or something all put into one dock or yet, or something.
So you'll see all kinds of configurations in BYOD rooms.
Tom Arbuthnot: So that's the hardware. What are you thinking about and focusing on in terms of improving the software experience of what's Microsoft bringing to the table for that BYOD scenario?
Eshan Mathur: Yeah. So, so this is to me, like, like at the heart of what we're trying to do, right?
Is, okay, the hardware is there, right? We can't go and deploy hardware for admins. They have to do that, um, and they have to choose good hardware. And we have partners that make incredible hardware that we recommend, um, that works well with Teams. There's obviously a certification program for MTR, but a lot of those same certified devices also work really great in BYOD scenarios.
So that's the hardware side, right? And we will encourage people to use great hardware when we can. On the software side, though, what we can do is we can recognize the fact that Teams before the rollout of BYOD features, um, Teams was really designed for. Uh, the scenario that we're in now, right? Like we're at home, we're, you know, just talking remotely.
We're not in a shared space. Um, and when you add that shared space into the mix, the requirements become a little bit different. And what we wanted to do was make sure that Teams was going to react in the right way. And Teams was going to create an experience through an amalgamation of features that really felt like it was the right experience for a meeting room as opposed to just being at home, right?
It's not that dissimilar from the kind of integrations that we have with MTR where you can do things like proximity join and we're making the Teams client able to integrate with MTR better. In the same way, we want to make sure that when you plug in. A BYOD peripheral of any kind, whether it be a display or an AV bar or a speaker puck or something else that when you take that meeting, Teams is going to do things for you that make sense for the fact that you're in a shared space.
There are probably other people with you in person. There are probably people with you remotely as well. Um, how do we make sure that that actually works well? Right? So a couple examples of that, right? You'll hear. Issues all the time where someone will go into a meeting room and they'll complain about, um, you know, they'll file a ticket with their admin or whatever, um, and they'll complain that their audio was bad, even though they plugged in the AV peripheral.
It's a really high quality AV bar. It should have been awesome. What happened? Well. For one reason or the other, because of defaults or maybe driver issues, what device wasn't recognized, the AV bar wasn't actually being used. And it was the PC's mic and speaker being used, which means the person sitting across from you can't be heard through the screen.
Um, that sometimes happens. Um, you also have people saying, Hey, I feel really anxious because when I walk into a room and I plug in the display, I don't know if something may be private on my screen will suddenly be. um shown to the entire room, right? Because sometimes our computers just move straight into mirroring as opposed to moving into extend.
And you know, maybe that's what was the last setting you use, maybe there's some driver that's causing that to happen, Maybe that's just how Windows decides to behave that day. But that's a point of anxiety for people as well, right? Um, and then there's also just like. How do we, how do we help admins be proactive about issues that are going to happen, right?
Like, is it the network? Is it the audio? Is the video? Why are things happening in BYOD rooms the way they're happening? Um, today, very few people know what's actually happening in their BYOD rooms. Um, they don't necessarily, unless a user goes in and reports it by creating a ticket, there's very little capability out there to proactively tackle issues, um, and even when you do get a ticket, you have to send somebody there, you have to figure out what's wrong, diagnose it and everything. So I would say the sort of two pillars of the software solution are, make sure that Teams is giving you good experiences, right and we can talk about the full list of those experiences.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, yeah, let's dive into that in a minute, because that's the
Eshan Mathur: And the second piece is, how do we give admins the capability to proactively understand when issues are happening before a user runs into it and complains, or before your exec goes into a room and says, Hey, this doesn't work.
Um, as well as, can we give you information about You know, what's happening in your BYO rooms from an inventory standpoint or a lifecycle standpoint where you can maybe try and optimize some cost, right? Which rooms should we, uh, deploy with new hardware in the next refresh cycle, right? Like, what is in need of an upgrade?
What has outdated firmware, right? What, uh, Um, you know, what does our space look like? What peripherals are in which rooms? The number of customers that I've met that have no idea what peripherals are in what rooms, I mean, that alone is a big value add. Right, right, right. So just like knowing what is there, um, is also a big value add.
So there's the admin side and the end user side, and we're going to tackle both for sure.
Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome, so let's talk about the user side, so essentially what you're doing is taking the Windows desktop client and or the Mac client, and you mentioned other devices you can bring into the room, so that's interesting, I might tease you some thoughts out there about phones and other devices, but Windows client, and you're saying that when you plug into a BYO, it'll behave in a different way, yep, yep, yep, yep, the desktop client, I guess I should say, shouldn't I, yeah, both, so you plug in, And then at that point, if the device is recognized as a BYOD type device, it's going to behave slightly differently than a typical, you know, user scenario.
Eshan Mathur: Yeah. And there's complexity around the sort of entry point into the experience that we'll talk, we can talk about later. There's some really cool stuff we're doing there that we're trying to like automate that as much as possible. And so if you walk into a room, how does Teams know that you're in a room, right?
We should talk about that as well as sort of a third sort of pillar outside of the experiences we offer is.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah.
Eshan Mathur: What is the infrastructure by which all of this will happen? Because it's rather complicated, or it can be complicated. Um, but the end user experiences are really interesting, right? I mean, first of all, We all have Copilot running in Teams now, hopefully, right?
Um, we, we hope that everybody has Copilot running in Teams because it's an incredibly useful tool. Um, when you ask Copilot a question about your meeting, how does the meeting know, or how does Copilot know who was talking, right? If you ask it, Hey, Tom, what did Tom say about this topic? How does it know that, right?
Well, speaker attribution and recognition is how you would know that. So. Can we automatically turn that on for you when you're in a meeting room, right? If you have transcription enabled for that meeting, or you've indicated that you want that to happen automatically, right? Can we say, great, you're in a meeting room, we're going to turn on speaker attributions, that Copilot is more useful.
Right? Um, another one is voice isolation is something that my team works on, which is a fantastic feature that helps you filter out noise from coming from any other person. That's not you, right? Yeah. Well, you don't want that in your room because you have a bunch of people talking in person into your mic that you don't want to drown out.
So we can also say, well, when you join a room, if we know you're in a room, disable voice isolation and let you know that we did that. And then turn it back on, you know, once you're no longer connected to a room. Yeah. Um, Even some of the problems I talked about earlier, right? If you plug in a USB peripheral that has great AV, let's automatically activate it and make sure that that is actually what you're using when you join the meeting, right?
That alone, I think, would solve a ton of problems for people just in terms of quality of experience. Um, and also just save people time. They don't have to fiddle around and figure out what to select in their device settings. And you know, some of these devices present really strangely, especially when you've got like 17 microphones on something.
So can we automate that for somebody and make that easier? Um, you know, they're, they're sort of like a, a full list of experiences and we want to make that, that, that broader and bigger over time, you know? Um, there's also a feature that's already out there, um, that's been out there since, you know, I think earlier this year, which is the, um, what we call shared display mode.
So when you walk into a meeting room and you plug in an external display, right now, Teams just has the one window, is the one meeting window that we all know. Um, and the meeting controls are there, and the meeting stage is there, and the video gallery is there, and it's all there. What we can do, though, is we can say, well, we know you're plugging in to a display that's in a meeting room, so if we know that, let's split your window into two.
And let's say that the window that stays on your laptop is for you, right? It's got your controls on it. It's got your, um, you know, private information on it. So in the PowerPoint live scenario, it'll have your meeting notes. It'll have things that you don't want other people to see necessarily. And then on the shared display in the room, right?
We can show a clean output of just the stuff that somebody should see if they're an attend an attendee of the meeting, right? So they'll see the PowerPoint that you're sharing. They'll see the video gallery. Um, they'll see any messaging or notifications or chat pop ups that you want them to see, but that's all meant for, you know, public consumption, so to speak, whereas all the other stuff will stay on your machine and we can,
Tom Arbuthnot: yeah, I love that that's like
a real, a real confidence thing of like, okay, that's my, My meeting stage is on the screen.
It should be and my control of my private stuff is here. And yeah, as you, as you start to stack these features, you're like, okay, I, I plug in and the device sets itself up appropriately. The stage sets itself up appropriately. And some of the AI stuff, the Copilot stuff, that's really interesting because, I'm certainly hearing from customers I work with who have gone down the Copilot route, which is a substantial investment.
They're looping back round to the meeting scenarios and going, Oh, okay, well now exactly to your point, like we're, we're, we love Copilot when we're all on the desktop, but we need that same experience now in the meeting room.
Eshan Mathur: Yeah, there's just all kinds of things that are different about meeting room scenarios.
And. The goal is to make sure that Teams handles those in the best way possible so that regardless of what meeting room situation you're in or what meeting situation you're in, we're giving you the best experience possible.
Tom Arbuthnot: So let's talk about that. How does Teams know? Because that's interesting, like, like, like, uh, customers thrown out 10, 000 various, you know, some speakerphones, some bars that have been bought over multiple years.
There's some webcams in there. Like, how, how do we solve the problem?
Eshan Mathur: So this is a really, really
cool and interesting part of the, of the, the feature area. Um, and it is cool, interesting for, for a couple of different reasons. One, I think it's very novel approach. Um, but two, it's kind of also the Achilles heel of the BYOD space as well, right?
It is an approach that tries to say, we are going to do our best to understand when you're in a room. And do our best meaning, um, there are scenarios where we won't get it right, right? And, and that's a big contrast between BYOD and MTR, is that MTR, There is a compute there. It knows you're in a room because it itself is a room, right?
It's got peripherals plugged in. It knows when those peripherals are online or offline. It can update those peripherals. It can tell you the health of those peripherals. You can look through the peripherals if you want to and hear through those peripherals if you want to because there's a brain there.
None of that exists in the BYOD scenario until you plug in a laptop. So all of our BYOD solution is anchored around this idea of let's grab information about the device. through the user's laptop, funnel it off to a central service, in this case, Pro Management Portal, and let's do our best to understand You know, was it a room device?
Um, where is it? Uh, what are its properties? Are there any uniquely identifying properties about it, like serial numbers that we can use to kind of like anchor it in our data? Um, and then based on that, you know, what can we do? So the way the solution works, it really, it relies on the devices that a user plugs in being uniquely identifiable, right?
And this is kind of why it's important to use really good hardware is because if you go buy something cheap off of Amazon, I can almost guarantee that the serial number is going to be complete garbage because OEMs generally just don't care. Like low quality OEMs a lot of times just don't care what the serial number is.
They don't bother with that in the manufacturing process. Um, whereas you look at some of our great partners like Jabra, Logi Yealink, Poly. These guys really take a lot of effort to make sure that the serial numbers are unique and they are, they work with us directly to make sure that they work well with BYOD.
Um,
and so that's important.
Tom Arbuthnot: I understand you're starting to build up a bank now of understanding with the certified devices, which device IDs align to which
devices.
Eshan Mathur: Right. So if you have that serial number, and that means that that device is uniquely identifiable, right? Every time a user plugs that device in, We get, we can get, retrieve that data, um, through Windows, up through Teams, up into our central service.
Right? And we can make those devices manageable by the admin. Okay, cool. Now you've got a bunch of devices discovered, theoretically, right? But now you have two problems. One is, how do you know that it's a shared device? Meaning, how do you know it's a device that's in the office or in someone's office as opposed to something at home?
And the second problem is, how do you know where that is? It's just a free floating serial number with a model name and a PIDVID attached, right? How do you know where it is?
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah,
yeah, yeah. I now know I've got, I now know I've got a thousand of these, but I don't know where in the world they are.
Eshan Mathur: Right,
right.
So, there's, there's two aspects to this, right? Let's tackle the first one, which is how do you know that it's a shared device, right? Shared meaning used by multiple people. in the office, like not a personal device. And, and really the key to that is the fact that it's shared. So we implemented what we call a personal, I call a personal device filter, right?
Where we have to see that that device, that serial number has been plugged in and reported by multiple unique users, because if you've got a device at home, you're the only one that's ever going to use it. And so maybe, you know, you've, in the worst case, you've got a spouse that also works, um, you know, with Teams in the same, at the same company, and maybe you'll see two, right?
But you're certainly never going to see five or ten, right? And so we've set that threshold such that you really need to see many different people reporting that device uniquely before we even show it up to anybody, um, for management in the portal. So an admin will never see your personal devices. And of course, if they're not used anymore, you know, TTL kicks in and it'll get kicked out of the database.
So, that's problem number one, um, and maybe we can get even better about that in the future, but that's what we've started with and it seems to actually work fairly well. Problem number two is really complicated, right? So, how do you know where this device is? Well, when we launched the feature, we were, um, incredibly optimistic about the amount of manual work that somebody was willing to do just to answer that question.
And we said, okay, great. Well, here's a PowerShell script. It'll grab your serial numbers and it'll spit it out into a spreadsheet. And you can just import that spreadsheet straight into Pro Portal and Bob's your uncle, right? Um, But of course, what that requires is that some local IT has got to go around to every BYOD room, plug it in, run the script, export it, import it, blah, blah, blah, okay.
It's, it's a really, it's a lot of work, right? And we haven't had a ton of
Tom Arbuthnot: The rooms
are devices, by the way, that we just defined. We don't really know where they are or what they have.
Eshan Mathur: Yeah, right? So, I mean, that's what the PowerShell script will tell you, right? Because it'll tell you that these specific devices are here and it'll give you the ability to then go and, Pump that information into the portal.
Um, but that's a lot of work. Um, but that work at the time was key to making the solution work because unless we know that this device you've plugged in as a user is in a room, we can't do anything, right? We don't know for sure that you're in a room. Therefore we can't activate any room experiences. We might accidentally shut off your voice isolation by mistake.
That would be terrible. So. Um, this concept of associating devices with rooms is key to the whole product area, and up until, well, up until Ignite, really, um, the only solution to that was to go around manually and do it somehow, which, frankly, not many people have the bandwidth to do because IT users are extremely busy.
So, what we're doing now, and this got announced at Ignite, um, we're working on something that I call Auto Association, right? And, and really this is where I think a lot of the magic of our BYOD solution will come into play, and I'll tell you why. Auto Association, uh, tries to use various signals that the Teams client is giving us, things like which meeting rooms you have booked and all that stuff, and tries to figure out when you plug in a device, and we see like a bunch of other people plugging in that device as well, right?
What can we figure out about that? Can we tell you what meeting room that's in? Because you booked that meeting room and so did those other people and they all reported that same serial number, right? So we start being able to figure out, without any input from the admin at all, where these devices are.
Tom Arbuthnot: It feels like that exchange calendar is a reasonable cheat sheet, isn't it? It's like, like at the time of plugging in, you were in this meeting with this location set, providing people book meetings, which isn't perfect.
Eshan Mathur: And of course, it's incredibly complicated. I'm simplifying it. There's lots of edge cases.
There's lots of weird things that could happen with it as well. There's lots of booking things, but the point is that we are going to solve that problem so that admins do not have to do that manual work, right? My goal is for somebody to open ProPortal, having never logged into it before, or maybe logged into it once a long time ago.
Or if you are already an MTR customer, you log in and you click on the BYOD section and all of a sudden your inventory is just populated and we can tell you automagically what is in what room and, and what's going on with those devices, right? And how often are they used by your users and what's wrong with them and all that stuff, right?
That should all just happen automatically. And that's within reach. So if auto association works, right, and I'm hoping it does, and we're working really hard on it. Um, that means, okay, we've solved the problem of where a device is. And if we solve that problem, What we can do then for your users is anytime they plug in that device, right?
Now we know not only are you on a shared device, but also you're in a room. We know that cause we know exactly what room you're in. Right. So now copilot can can be like, well, in this meeting Tom was in room 41 slash 25 5 and said this thing, and Eshan was in room 35 slash 3 32 and said this other thing and we can know that.
So we can, all the end user experiences that I talked about earlier, all those benefits to to users in meeting rooms. We can automatically activate those for a user without the IT doing anything. Um, and we can distinguish, discriminate between room scenarios and non room scenarios and present you with different experiences and those things with zero effort.
That's the, that's the end goal.
Tom Arbuthnot: Nice, nice. Good to, yeah, good to hear kind of where, where you're driving to on that. And it, it feels like the other thing on the back end you mentioned about the admins is then you can start getting into kind of, Usage to understand because today you're flying blind by those rooms, but you can start to understand by virtue of that device being used, how often is that room used for meetings?
Eshan Mathur: Yeah, yeah. And with limitations, right? I mean, again, I'll come back to this over and over again, but like, really, if you want to know, if you really want to know what's going on in a room, please go buy an MTR, right? Because like we can only like the BYOD solution can only tell you so much, right? We can only tell you when somebody plugs in.
If somebody doesn't go in that room for three days, you're three days of flying blind. Right? Um, And really, like, there's no way for us to do any kind of real time monitoring, right? There's not really any good way for us to do any kind of, like, device configuration or updating, unless we figure out a way to do that with the OEMs, and that'll get really complicated.
Maybe in the future, but certainly not now, right? So there's a bunch of things that, from an admin capability, MTR can do that, BYOD will either can't do now or will never be able to do just because of the virtue of the technology being different. Right? Like if you want to do diagnosis and you want to like look through a device, well, are you going to send a user there and be like, Hey, can you go plug in your laptop so I can look through the camera?
No. Put an MTR in there and then you'll be able to like use that compute to look through it and understand what's going on in the room. Um, firmware updates, right? Like really difficult for us to do that. Maybe we can tell you what the firmware version is, but updating it like through a user's windows update.
I mean, that would be crazy, right? But probably not going to happen anytime soon. Um, yeah. So yes, we can give you something, right? We can tell you things like users are using it this much. Here's what the utilization looks like. Maybe here's what the peak utilization looks like on a chart, you know, so you can understand how your spaces are being used.
I mean, maybe that's more something that facilities cares about more than ITs, but, um, we can hopefully tell you when a user had an issue or preempt, you know, preempt a ticket, right? If we, if we can get enough information there. Um, but yeah, it's gonna, it's gonna have some limitations, but we're gonna tell you everything we can.
So that you at least get some idea of what's going on in your BYOD rooms as opposed to today, where I'm pretty sure most people are just completely flying blind. Yeah, yeah. What we're hoping, of course, is that you start to understand, okay, it's really valuable to know this stuff about my rooms.
It's really valuable to have good user experiences in these meeting rooms. And my users appreciate that. Hey, they want more. Go to MTR, right? Grab an MTR. And, and what we're thinking also is like, really, if you have already done the work of putting in some of these, like, really good AV bars, um, in, in these rooms, it's not that much of a stretch to then bump it up to adding a console, um, and making it an MTR, right?
So there's also that sort of pathway that we're really interested in is like, how do we help people see, um, The, the, the pathway that they can take to bring better user experiences to their, to their users through MTR, right, via BYOD, right? Can we, let's say you don't have the budget for MTR this year, um, but you have the budget to put in a BYOD bar, well, okay, put in a certified bar so that we can, you know, help you get to MTR next year when you have the budget for it.
Right. Like that would
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. Or,
or, or, or as you said earlier, you could like, you know, you, you're kitting out 50 rooms, you don't know where the MTR compute investment should be. But in a, in six months time, you'll see the usage and be like, okay, it's these 10. Yeah. Like, well, exactly. And as you said there, there's a few OEMs that have compute only kits that you can just plug that in and Yeah.
A hundred percent recommend going Yeah. Certified on the BYOD stuff. 'cause you just, you're just gonna get better experience full stop as well.
Eshan Mathur: 100%.
Yeah. And, and that's really, you know, it's, it's kind of the spectrum that I think about, right. On one side of the spectrum is absolutely nothing, right?
There's no management capability or like enhanced end user experiences in that room. It's just whatever you put in there. Then there are some sort of OEM specific things that happen, right? But they're OEM specific. So unless you're like just completely riding the wave of that one OEM, you're limited to using like fragmented software and different solutions and everything.
Right. But those are pretty good. Um, then there's our BYOD solution, which is OEM independent, um, and attempts to give you a good user experience. On Teams overall. And then there's MTR, which is really like, this is, this is not only the best we can offer, but also the experience we recommend because everything before that is either best effort or nothing at all, you know?
And so we were like, okay, let's fill that gap because there is a gap, right? Yeah. But again, we still feel that everybody should be on MTR because. That's how you're going to get the best experience. There's just no way around it. That's the technology, you know,
Tom Arbuthnot: that's good to
know. And there's some licensing gates here as well.
So like, presumably part of this is adding adding value enough to justify licensing those scenarios.
Eshan Mathur: Yeah, and all that's kind of being worked out. And, you know, we'll see. I think, spare that other folks, my job is to be quiet.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, yeah, we don't want to go deep on the licensing in this podcast.
Eshan Mathur: I'm gonna let that lie with somebody else, but yeah, obviously.
Tom Arbuthnot: I'm not
going to quiz you, Eshan..
Eshan Mathur: I know the
answers, but I guess the answers might change, right? Who knows? Everything about BYOD is kind of new, nascent, in flux. We're still trying to figure out what is the best model for all of this. We're trying to figure out the technology, we're trying to figure out the best user experiences, we're trying to figure out what admins care about the most and what we should include in our reporting, we're trying to figure out what they're, you know, willing to pay for and what they're not willing to pay for.
So all of those questions really still need to be answered, um, and, and we're excited and we're moving quickly and we're trying to answer those questions as soon as possible, so.
Tom Arbuthnot: I appreciate the transparency. Yeah, I think it's really interesting. And I say, there's definitely customers that are fully on the MTR bandwagon, but have either an existing or legacy mix of BYOD devices.
It's nice that they can unlock some value from ProPortal.
Eshan Mathur: Yeah, yeah, totally.
Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Um, anything you want to sort of, uh, hint at or talk about in the future? I know you're, you're mid, kind of, you had Ignite announcement, so we've got the latest stuff. As we move into 25, what are the areas of focus?
Eshan Mathur: I think you'll see more user experiences roll out.
So, you know, what we're calling BYOD, I don't know. We actually don't have a name for it yet, but it's BYOD mode, right? Essentially, it's Teams will turn into the meeting room experience that we all want. Um, you'll see more things roll out for that that will make that experience even better. Um, you'll see more things come out on the admin side that help you preempt an issue, um, or a quality experience issue in, in your meeting rooms.
Um, and I think the big thing for me is I want everybody to know that Auto Association is coming. That we're working really hard on it. Um, we announced it for a reason. Um, but I think that'll be a huge game changer for people to try out BYOD because you don't have to do that manual thing that, that sort of manual effort I was talking about.
And what I want for people to do today is. If you are an MTR customer, fantastic. You're, you're already provisioned in ProPortal. You don't need to do anything. Data is already flowing for BYOD. If you are not an MTR customer yet, right? Um, go and, and, and get into ProPortal. I think you just need one license at some point, somewhere in your tenant in order to do that, either a TeamShare device license or a Pro license.
Um, you can provision ProPortal so that like all that, that service kind of spins it up, doesn't it? Yeah, it spins up exactly. Um, you know, that endpoint gets created and Teams can start sending information to it. Um, do that, right? Provision ProPortal today, so that when Auto Association rolls out, you don't have to do anything, right?
That information will start flowing, that data will start flowing, we'll start to make some informed decisions about where devices are, and then hopefully, you know, a couple weeks after we launch it, or a month or two after we launch it, once that data has been gathered and, and dealt with, you can just log on and have an amazing, incredible inventory experience where you can see all this stuff that you have in your org, and all of your users will start getting pushed into that amazing user experience as well. Um, so that would be the second thing, right? It's like go check out the user experience, right? Go check out shared display mode, go check out speaker attribution, go check out voice isolation on and off, right? Like sort of understand what these features are so that when your users start to get those experiences, um, you know that you approve of that experience and you like it and you can configure it or change different parts about it.
Tom Arbuthnot: That's awesome. So if you listen to this pod today and you want to kind of force this scenario, you've still got the PowerShell script. You can absolutely configure all this today, but if you're one of those customers that doesn't quite know what's going on in the estate, you just need that ProPortal spun up and then the data will just start being collected.
And when you have this, um, auto association that will just start working.
Eshan Mathur: That's the hope. Maybe I'm selling it
too much,
but I'm like very optimistic about this feature.
Tom Arbuthnot: Uh, I mean, but it's the thing that to, to, to scale, there has to be something like that, doesn't it? It's clear, particularly for the big, the big customers with the loads of sites.
Like that's, uh, yeah, I appreciate what a challenge that is, especially the, all the, I'm sure you see it, but all the various ways people, you know, schedule rooms and book rooms and name rooms and all that fun stuff.
Eshan Mathur: Yeah,
for sure. And, and listen, the. The better way is still to do it manually because then you have full control over the process, right?
The auto association is going to do its best and we're going to have high thresholds and everything to make sure that it's as accurate as possible. But it could still make mistakes, right? Um, the best is like you're setting up a new room. You have a vendor installing that stuff, have that vendor grab the serial numbers of the, Of the devices and give you an export of it, and you can then import that straight into pro portal and Bob's your uncle, right?
Like you, before those rooms are even available to your users. You've got them fully associated and, and all that stuff. So that, that's the ideal, right? That would be the best thing. Yeah. If you're doing your deployments and that,
Tom Arbuthnot: and that's just gonna snap those devices to have the users go into that BYOD mode without the five log, uh, five different user only because the Pro Portals knows it's a BYOD device.
Eshan Mathur: Yep.
Tom Arbuthnot: Perfect. Awesome. Well, thanks for taking the time out to clarify all that. It's really good to hear it from your perspective and, uh, yeah, maybe we'll give it, give it, give it a few months, get, let you ship that, uh, those new features and maybe we'll loop around on a pod and, uh, get your experience of, uh, yeah, the auto, uh, auto association.
It'd be really interesting.
Eshan Mathur: 100%. That'd be awesome.
Tom Arbuthnot: Cool. Thanks so much. Appreciate it.
Eshan Mathur: Thank you, Tom.