Adam Ball - Cloud RevolutionHi, I'm actually on the road for this intro, hence the unusual setting. I'm at CommsVNext in Denver, and it's a bit of a coincidence because I'm recording the intro for my podcast with MVP Adam Ball. Adam is one of the organizers of CommsVNext in Denver, also a fellow MVP and co founder of Cloud Revolution.

Cloud Revolution are focused on Teams Phone, Meeting Rooms, and Contact Center as well, and we get his perspective on what's going on in the market in all those areas. So in Contact Center, how disruptive AI is being, and also for Teams Phone and Teams Rooms, what's he seeing with customers, what are they doing, what do the projects look like, what do the architectures look like.

Really appreciate Adam's time for this pod, and also many thanks to AudioCodes, the sponsor of this podcast, and for listening. Really appreciate their support of everything we're doing at Empowering Cloud. Hope you enjoy the show.

Tom: Hey everybody, welcome back to the pod. I've been looking forward to this one. This has been a long time in coming actually and getting Adam booked in. Adam and I were just talking offline before the pod about when we first connected on Twitter way, way back in the day. But I won't steal any thunder. Adam, do you want to introduce yourself?

Adam: I'm Adam Ball co founder of Cloud Revolution Microsoft Teams MVP as well as a co founder for CommsVNext, which is a Microsoft Teams conference based here in the U. S.

Tom: Awesome. And we've followed a similar journey on opposite side of the pond in terms of technology stack. Maybe you can just give us a little bit of the history where where you came from, how you got into this world. Sure.

Adam: I'll say how I got into this world is probably by Dumb Luck, Blessing, I don't know, a mixture of both. I came from the sysadmin world was working, actually did a lot of Big Iron, actually was a Unix admin, so I know, Tom, you came from the Cisco world and everything, so we have these really weird command line worlds that blend in, in everything.

And I was hired by a consulting firm to lead their virtualization practice and they, and this was this was 2007. And they said, Hey, by the way, we're in this program called Lighthouse. And for those who know, and they said, can you learn this new product? And it was Office Communication Server,

and so I sat down and started learning it and literally 2007 was a pivotal year for me in that I gave up virtualization and started down this journey of unified communications. I hadn't really done much with it prior to that.

Tom: I love that's the story of a lot of the kind of old school people in this space is like we all got hold of OCS and it was all very early and it's funny now to think that, we're I was gonna say a decade, more than a decade on and it's it's completely mainstream now, but it was so early then presence and IM was a revelation at that stage.

Adam: Absolutely. I know that you'll resonate with this, but remember how excited you got when Microsoft dropped a new CHM file on OCS and you literally could spend like 30 minutes reading it page by page and and try to figure out what was new because they didn't have a what's new section at the beginning.

You had to go through the documentation and that's what we spent time doing, right? 

Tom: Oh, a blog post on cumulative updates and what the cumulative update brought you and

Adam: exactly.

Tom: We used to, patch CUs.

Adam: Yeah, exactly. So like we're all the little hidden tricks of, oh, they didn't document this, this is how you have to do it. And I could scare a lot of people with the original SharePoint site for updating phones that we had to do and things like that, that I still remember terribly.

Tom: It was good times. So tell us tell us a little bit more about Cloud Revolution because I'm, we're going to dig into what you do and what your view of the market is, but give us an overview.

Adam: Yeah, absolutely. So Cloud Revolution, we're essentially a systems integrator. What we do is we help organizations move to the cloud, and we are focused on Microsoft Teams, so we say it in this way. We have three pillars. First and foremost is Microsoft Teams phone system. That's where our specialty is.

We've got folks on our staff that are like myself, MVPs, or maybe they went through the old masters program for OCS, Lync, Skype, etc, and so we've just been doing the phone system portion for a really long time, so that's helping organizations move from wherever they're at today, and I'll make a comment on that because we used to always say from legacy to X, right?

And I don't want to use the term legacy anymore, and I think we all need to abandon it. But from wherever they're at today to teams for us, and then so that's the 1st pillar. The 2nd pillar is once you're on phone system, you've already determined that's where my communications are happening.

I might be using it for collaboration, et cetera. So then we go in and help organizations with their meeting room space. And so we ask. What are you doing in your meeting rooms? And many of them may or may have already made certain investments towards Teams. A lot of them haven't. They may be on Tanberg, they may be on Lifesize, etc,

and so we're helping them transform those rooms and asking questions around how is the room used? How many people are in it? How can we help you with that? And then our third and final pillar is really contact center customer experience from that standpoint. That's an interesting one these days because we obviously started with that

extension of Teams or a lot of customers coming and saying, Hey, I've moved my entire organization to Teams, I want my contact center to come into Teams and I want it to be all inclusive. I want everybody on the same platform. Though you also have the customers who are like, yeah, I've got my phone system on Teams.

I really just want to get my contact center into the cloud and I want to be able to take advantage of the the benefits of cloud and not have the commodity components on premises and do the care and feeding. I want to get rid of that, I really just want to take care of the new features and so customer experience,

while we still focus very much on that pairing with Teams, we don't have to necessarily, because with some of the contact centers, you may have Cisco, you may have, a different platform, and you're just really trying to take advantage of the new features in the cloud, and so that one's kind of an interesting one for us in that it's a more, it's the classic consulting answer of it depends.

Tom: Yeah. Yeah. I always have this conversation with customers around contact center because usually it's a Teams first customer with me and it's it like, I love the extended contact centers, obviously we work with a lot of them, but like your contact center doesn't have to be integrated. Like it's a perfectly valid option to have them side by side.

But to your point, like it's a very slow, like that space has moved a lot slower than you see. It's still overwhelmingly traditional and then there's some things coming now with the cloud scale and the AI capabilities that suddenly it's oh, we probably do need to get to cloud for the business resilience for the capabilities.

Adam: Absolutely. And I think there's a couple of things that you just hit on one. Everybody had, we always talk about with COVID, everybody had a business plan for if my office gets closed, disaster recovery et cetera, business continuity, nobody had a plan for what happens if they close all my offices.

Nobody ever had that plan. And so when you get into the cloud there's a lot of that resiliency that gets built in there, but I think going back to your to another comment you made in there is that it's really about scale in when those contact centers can scale in a multi tenant model, the abilities of AI and the abilities of the data that they're able to then leverage for all of their customers becomes pretty massive

and so I think customers are starting to realize that we need that and we need our people focused on the business problems within the contact center versus dealing with cumulative updates, patching, uptime, etc. Let's push that off and really get focused on the business.

Tom: I'm bullish on AI being really disruptive in that space. Like across the board

I can have a debate about AI, but I think like it's one of those areas where the general standard of service is variable to be nice and AI could do a reasonable job in a constrained scenario, and the people part of context is really hard,

the turnover is really high, it's a tough job to keep people motivated. So there's so much potential there for AI to, help those agents, help the insights, but also potentially to serve.

Adam: Yeah, I would agree. I'm very hopeful in it. Having gone through and funny enough, I had to deal with two different banks in the last 24 hours where had to call in and because of a fraudulent credit card getting open kind of thing, the stuff that we all end up, unfortunately, have to deal with in today's data loss mindset, right?

And so you have to stay diligent. Both of them, one was a very major worldwide known agency. Both of them really struggled to have me be able to walk through their menus and everything. They were great voice enabled. You could tell it's semi AI kind of thing. Not, I wouldn't say AI, but it's definitely cognitive services from that perspective.

Tom: The nuance type stuff of good recognition.

Adam: Right, and both struggled and it's and so that's where you have to get really hopeful in it that it progresses quickly and so that you can actually get to it because as soon as you have something that's not normal, that's where it throws everything for a loop. 

Tom: Yeah. Yeah. So let's go, let's loop back to phone because you, I know you work with lots of customers and all different scales as well. What are you seeing at the moment? Is it still really fast moving? Are people going site by site? What are you seeing?

Adam: So we see all of that. I think the interesting part is obviously through COVID, a lot of organizations pivoted very quickly to the cloud, and it's not just Microsoft, it's just in general, they pivoted from, I'm on premises today, I'm in the cloud today. The next day, and we hyper scaled it out. We deployed it really fast, and we just treated it like every CIO has ever asked, which is why can't I just throw it at people and have them experience it?

Nobody asked how to figure out how to use WhatsApp. Like, why do I need to teach them how a phone works? And they did that during COVID by and large. What we're seeing today is you get some of the organizations that, hey, we stuck through it, we, we made it work with our existing on premises system,

we did everything we needed, and we got through it, now we're looking at what's next. We also have organizations And in those organizations, sometimes they move site by site. Sometimes they go big bang. I've got one that's 4, 000 seats or 5, 000 seats right now that's we're going to do, these 2 or 3 smaller, and then we're going to rip the Band Aid off and everybody's going at once kind of thing.

And I will say the people who go faster tend to do better. The 

Tom: Yeah, 

Adam: go slower.

Tom: you can extend the pain of living in two worlds and actually the slow and steady isn't as good as you

think it might be.

Adam: Not only that, it just creates a lot of confusion and it ends up creating a lot of costs to the business that they don't really realize because your group, your project group is distracted by this and they're not able to move on to more important things. At the end of the day, the communications platform from the actual coworkers viewpoint is a commodity system.

I and I hate to say that because it's sounds devaluing to what I do and everything. What we do is very important. If you're just one of the, if you're in HR or finance or whatever, you need that phone to pick up and work, you don't really care about any other aspects to it, and so from that perspective, it's just that whole mindset of it's, from the employee base,

it's probably more of a commodity mindset. So the faster you can go, the better in most cases. And the other thing is that it's really interesting because today and like this, what I'll make my comment here is that why I think we need to get rid of the term legacy. Most legacy is gone. Let's just be honest.

Real legacy is gone. People are now on, for the most part, are on a modern system. I don't know what that means to everybody, but Modern system has modern features, it is a modern UC system in some fashion, whether that's an on  premises, box or in another person's cloud. I'm seeing a lot more cloud to cloud migrations days. 

Tom: Yeah. I've seen some cloud to cloud and we're coming up to that time period where they signed an

Emergency 

Adam: Three year deal. 

Tom: cloud provider, and it's now timed out and they're like, and also some people, for perfectly valid reasons were like, Teams isn't ready to be our telephony yet, but we're years on now, and actually the

features 

Adam: Yeah 

it is.

Tom: And the attitudes have changed, I think more importantly, is like the people that were convinced they needed the particular line key buttons and the particular this and the particular that they're like, actually, 

Adam: We still get that. I will say that. I get I, that's a question I get on a daily basis is can you do shared line appearance? Can you do this? Or do you have sidecars? Or and there's definitely still that legacy mindset of how a telephony system used to work. Most people are onto a modern system.

I don't want to discredit some of the other systems as much as I've got my own, favorites from that perspective, but yeah, we are seeing a lot more cloud to cloud and some of it's more becoming more interesting in all honesty with where Microsoft is at. Like you said, people said, oh, it wasn't really fully capable,

now it is. Some people say it's still not fine. Everybody has their own use cases and, but for the majority of people, it is, let's just be honest. 80 percent of what, or 90%, maybe even more, of what you use on a day to day basis is in every phone system. Can you make a call, put, receive a call, put a call on hold, transfer a call?

Right there, four functions. You get that, you got 80 percent of the market. And but I think it's important to note, like, why are people looking at cloud to cloud migrations, and in most cases, it's cost consolidation. It's, Hey, I don't, I'm paying for this over here, and I'm paying for this.

Why am I paying for both? Let's take a look. And there's that reason and then the second reason that I see is It's trying to remove complexity of tools. So if I'm in Platform A, so in Teams all day long, why would I want to shift in context, switch out to a new application to do meetings or calling, et cetera?

So that integration and that simplifying of tools is another big driver that we see.

Tom: What are you seeing on the connectivity side? Are you seeing more people go like cloud direct, operator connect, direct routing as a service? Are you still deploying? I know you do SBC work. You've got some quite deep people on SBCs as well.

Adam: We do SBCs are pretty rare. I'll be honest even for the past five years SBCs have been extremely rare. We've got, I can count probably on two hands and a foot the number of SBCs we've deployed. We've worked on a lot because a lot of customers will come to us with them, but we don't see them.

We're not selling a ton of them, although we can, and we

Tom: So it's really cloud

first 

Adam: It's really cloud first. What's been more interesting to me is the direct routing as a service was a huge, that was huge for us for a number of years and a lot of direct routing as a service organizations would do the old school PRI model where it's you were buying concurrent 

calls paths, like it's how many concurrent calls do you need to support? 20, 40, 80, 100, whatever it was. Obviously, with calling plans and operator connect that shifts to a per user per month model and so a lot of organizations are using that. Take care. Okay, with that, mainly because they get the predictability of, hey, I know if I add people, it costs me this,

and if I subtract people, it, I save. Why? That kind of mindset. It has been interesting to me because I think a lot of that direct routing as a service model, Microsoft would benefit a lot of folks just from a cost standpoint. 

Tom: Especially when you scale up like to

the big orgs and you look at their real world concurrency like

Adam: Exactly. One thing that's been interesting is we're seeing more and more customers

and I think this is a direct precursor to what Microsoft started offering with shared calling their shared calling plans is that, and I actually saw this back in the early days of Skype for Business Online, I had a customer who did this where they started just eliminating phones they started doing the data and they're like, use your phone for less.

You place less than 60 minutes of PSTN calls in a month. Your phone number's gone. You don't get a phone anymore. And people think it's crazy, but I see it more and more now of, yeah, we'll put common area phones, we'll put, call touchdown points where you can go place phone calls, et cetera, from them.

But in most cases, you're sending meeting requests, and so one to one calls are either coming in over Teams, right? Like you and I might have a Teams call. You're not calling from the UK to Colorado like ever from that perspective, and so we're seeing more and more of that, which has been

interesting and a definite challenge for, I think, for a lot of the carriers out there that are in that per user per month model, because as they go and they, if you have 5, 000 users and you're like, I only need 500 seats, um, that deal went from being really attractive to, oh that's not so great anymore. 

Tom: Yeah, that was not the model. Yeah, exactly. I see the same thing. I've worked with a customer that was 12, 000 seats and they got down to 4, 000 phones and previously nearly everybody had a phone. They were just like, it's just not used that much.

Adam: Yeah, I had a customer come to me and say, we have a thousand people and we need, we're using less than 30, 000 minutes a month, with shared calling, what, what is that like 10 calling plans, something like that for the U. S. at 3000 minutes a month. It's so instead of 1000, you needed 10.

Tom: Yeah. 

Adam: A, it's a huge factor. It's 100x. 

Tom: Yeah, I think that's why Microsoft brought shared calling along because a lot of these E5 customers have the phone license, would like to make the occasional call, but are not ready to pay per user for that privilege, basically. Which is in Microsoft's blessing to do because it's not their problem, right?

They've already sold the license.

Adam: Right, exactly. I just it does make me chuckle for all the old school folks. Everything old is new again. We're back to extensions without calling them extensions, but we're back to it.

Tom: Yeah, no, it is funny.

Adam: Yeah.

Tom: So we've done contacts, we've done phone, talk to me about rooms and what you're seeing in that space.

Adam: Yeah, so rooms are interesting in the fact that I love what Microsoft and I think a lot of folks have done, have, have challenged on this which is we're continuing to make meeting rooms simple and easier to use which I think is the big factor. So I don't, at the end of the day, all innovation here is good,

and so I love it. I just remember back in the day where you walked in and it was like you're, like when your parents came over to watch TV at your house or something and you're like here are the four remotes and you got to use all four.

Tom: I host, I hosted a session for Pexip yesterday. I literally opened the conversation with, do you remember when we had to dial, sip URIs with a remote? And it was like, dud dud.

Adam: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so walking in, single touch join on a nice touch screen, I think it's game changing for people, and I think I do think there's a lot of frivolous technology in the rooms these days. I think there's a lot of stuff that sounds nice on paper, but in the end, it was really unused.

And going back to the 80 plus, Percent kind of four functions, this is all you need. And so the things that I see that most people want are single touch join, I want to be able to join into that room in the room without having to start a meeting. I don't I, I still get asked for, the wireless click share

type setups of I walked into the room, I don't want to hook up an HDMI cable, I don't want to start a meeting and share into the meeting, I just want to present my screen on the big screen. How do I do it? Beyond that, most functionality is all really about how do we eliminate HDMI background noise how do we eliminate distractions, et cetera,

from that standpoint, how do we properly focus on people? And I think all of the major vendors are doing an amazing job of that today. And so what's always impressive is most rooms, I'll say, and I say that like 80, 90 percent of rooms can be handled by quote unquote kits. So whether that's a bar, whether that's a, whatever it 

Tom: Yeah, much more, it's getting much more commoditized. That used to be a specialism, but it's getting, and I think that the bars in particular will only get better with the, if you look at some of the consumer technology about changing how the audio profile based on the dynamics of the room, I think we'll see that come into enterprise.

Adam: I think the one area that I see the bar fail in is when you go into a certain size room, like you broach from like a small medium room into a medium large room, there's, and I don't have a specific here's my hard line on it, but the hardest part is when you get into those bigger spaces, yeah, you can get really good sound fulfilling from a bar,

they're, let's just be honest, the audio files are, doing a great job over at these companies with the mics and the speakers and everything like that. But at some point, you can only overcome a large room with more volume. And so as you get closer to that bar, you're getting blasted by the audio so that the people in the back can hear,

and so I think that the areas that I see is in that large room space where there's still some gaps in that. There's a lot of companies that are doing a really good job like Logi where you can have ceiling mics, et cetera, from theirs and still have a kit system as an example. But you are in that cusp of do I need a semi custom room?

And I say semi custom in the fact that it's not really custom. It's, I just need like a Shure micro ceiling tile microphone or 

Tom: Yeah. Slightly extended kit. Yeah. 

Adam: Exactly. It's Just turn it up to 11 a little bit more. We don't see a lot of divisible rooms anymore although there's some great stuff out there happening in the marketplace.

Folks like QSC have done some cool stuff with that and everything Crestron's doing some cool stuff in, in, in how you do all the room control stuff, but that's really a small segment and most companies are even reevaluating. I don't want to make that investment into these rooms.

We'll split a really large room into a couple smaller rooms so that they can be more utilized and we can avoid that expense.

Tom: Yeah. Yeah. I see the same thing on the bars. There's a point where it's not practical anymore. The things like the Shure ceiling tiles are game changing for the right participants in terms of quality. But now you're into more of a project because now you've got multiple things to mount, you've got to mess with the ceiling, and it's interesting, it's

starting to be that the project costs like the hang and bang and the logistics is outweighing the kit in some cases now, so it's actually a, do I just wheel in an all in one or do I mount a room basically?

Adam: Absolutely. We literally just had that happen where I felt really bad, but it is what it is where the services cost more than the equipment almost in a two to one ratio for 

Tom: You've got to remind the customer that they're saving on the equipment, not costing on the pro serve. 

Adam: Well

the hard part is, I mean just whenever it comes 

to services, you got to pay people. I don't care whatever industry you're in, you've got to pay people, and if somebody has to travel in to a location, they're going to be there for half a day. Doesn't matter if it takes them 20 minutes to hang a bar on the wall, they're still, you're still going to get charged for half a day.

There's just no way around it because, and in a lot of cases, it might even be a full day because you've taken that extra time. engineer that technician out of the field for the day, like they can't go to another project and so there's opportunity costs that companies are having to deal with that yeah, if you only have one room to do it's not nearly as cost effective as if, oh, I'm going to do three, four, five rooms all at one time.

Tom: Yeah. It's interesting how talking to the, some of the other partners as well about project optimization now is much more about optimizing the ProServe and the logistics than actually, let's try and do a bunch of rooms in an area at once because, or, if you've got the office to do it, we'll do 10 at once in a building because that will optimize the ProServe effort.

Adam: Yeah, you get the economies of scale, and it's no different on the meeting room space as it is in the, on the phone system side. The faster you can go by getting more people at once, the better it is ultimately.

Tom: Awesome. Let's close out on that perfect end note of the faster you go, the better it is. Adam, I know everybody at Cloud Revolution, great team, highly recommend you guys. How do people reach out if they want to find out more or work with you guys?

Adam: Absolutely. So you can obviously just go hit us up on cloudrevolution. com, so gladly go there. You can always reach out to me. I'm always happy to answer questions, whatever. So it's just really simple. Adam at and go from there. But then you can also follow us on LinkedIn for Cloud Revolution LLC.

Tom: Awesome. Thanks, Adam.

Adam: Appreciate it. Thanks, Tom.