Mo Khalifa: It's not the employer drives what equipment the, the employee uses. It's now the other way around. The employee is now saying, Hey, I want to work in this way.
Kimberley Tee: You know, you can have budget restrictions, you can have internal adoption restrictions, but I think unless it's really, really reassured and safe, I think it's going to be so prohibitive.
Tom Arbuthnot: Hi and welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. This week, we have a really great perspective from two big players in the space. We've got Kim Tee from Lenovo, and we've got Mo Khalifa from HP Poly. Really interesting conversation on what they're seeing in the space, the drive to simplicity in rooms, how AI is going to impact the room experience, and what customers are really demanding from rooms and the meeting experience.
Many thanks to Kim and Mo for taking the time. It was a really fun conversation. Also thanks to Landis who are the sponsor of this podcast. Really appreciate their support. If you're looking for a Teams certified contact center or a tenant console, definitely worth the look. Thanks very much. On with the show.
Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. This one has been a while in the planning to get three busy diaries all back to back. So really excited for this one. We're going to get in some perspective from two people well known in the community, so I won't do big intros, but maybe Kimberley can I start with you?
Kimberley Tee: Yes, so Kimberley, I work for Lenovo. I am in the EMEA Smart Collaboration Team as an IFR. My life has for the past 15 years actually been marketing and alliances, but I've decided halfway through this year to take on the challenge of sales. So far, not regretting it.
Tom Arbuthnot: Whole new world. And Mo?
Mo Khalifa: Cool. Thanks, Tom.
And, uh, thanks, Kim. So, uh, my name is Mo. I am the Microsoft Alliance Manager at HP Poly. Um, ex Microsoft as well. So that's where I, uh, kind of, uh, bumped heads with Kimberley and yourself, Tom, and many other titans in the industry. So it's an absolute pleasure to join you guys to have a bit of a conversation.
Uh, I'm also now a new Microsoft MVP as well. So super, super excited about that.
Tom Arbuthnot: That's the nice thing about our space, right? Is everybody knows everybody and everybody talks, right? And it's great to have, you know, two, two massive OEMs in the, in the space, come on the same pod and have a friendly chat.
Let's dive into that. Cause that's the conversation I kind of want to have on the pod is you, you obviously both well plugged into the space and see a lot of what's going on. Let's talk about the last. 12 months and kind of what you're seeing 2024. I'd be really interested to get both your perspectives because it like there is a big growth area, but it is also highly competitive, lots of OEMs in play, lots of different options in play.
What are you guys seeing from a market trend perspective?
Mo Khalifa: Yeah, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's really, really interesting for me because I know we promised each other we weren't gonna talk about COVID and everything else, right? But I'm going to refer to it just one little tiny bit. One of the good things or maybe the bad things that came out of the pandemic was.
The rate of change, right? We saw like 15 years worth of evolution or change in the AV space in, in three years. And it's really forced organizations, forced OEMs, forced Microsoft and all the other platforms out there to really like get with the times is probably the best way to put it, right? Because we live in this, this, this social age, everyone has their phones, everyone does everything online.
It's a, you know, everything subscription based. And it was about time that, you know, over the last few years, people started catching up. But what I'm seeing in the last 12 months is like a complete different thing. One of the biggest challenges we see is actually getting people back into the office, right?
And it's like, well, why would I go in the office when the experience here at home is amazing? Because the OEMs, you know, all the manufacturers have done such a great job of creating amazing webcams, amazing microphones and giving you a great experience at home. I don't really want to travel two and a half hours to get down to work.
to have a subpar experience. So in the last call,
Tom Arbuthnot: it could even actively be worse if the gear isn't right. That's the thing. It's not even like the same and the travels a pain.. It's like I get in and the thing's not working and I can't get a room and the audio is bad.
Mo Khalifa: Exactly. And the coffee is not good or whatever it may be.
Right. So, so, you know, and, and in the two and a half hours, it takes me to get to work. I can get like four or five Teams calls in. Right? So, so am I productive or am I not productive? So there's all of these challenges that literally all the OEMs and Microsoft have started to do. Now, in the last 12 months, I'm not sure if you guys will agree with me, when I look at Microsoft Teams Rooms, I'm seeing less major updates than we saw last year.
So last year we had the likes of front row and all of this cool stuff coming out, but more kind of refining the Teams Rooms experience, the little things that make the difference, whether it's, you know, adding, um, uh, rosters or names into a room or intelligent speaker or whatever it may be, those little updates that actually make that experience of walking into an office and using a meeting room better.
It's. That conversation about tech and megapixels, that's long gone. That was like, you know, eight, nine years ago. No one ever talks about, Hey, we've got a 50 megapixel camera. No, not really. It's the experience that you get out of it. So, you know, this in the last 12 months, what I'm starting to see is more refinement.
Uh, on, on the software experiences and even the hardware experiences as well from, from many OEMs and, you know, creating, I'm going to use the HP terminology, but it's pretty much the same across everywhere, everywhere else. It's that best face forward. So whichever way that you're looking, it's going to be the camera that's looking at your face that will pick up and, and send that across.
That's the biggest change I've seen kind of like over the last 12 months. But there's also a whole bunch of challenges that. come along with that as well, right?
Kimberley Tee: And with that, I think it's, it's the fact that collaborative tools within the platforms, I mean, let's, we're all Teams fans, right? So it's that collaborative tool being essential to the experience for people to actually want to be in those physical rooms.
It's the demand for simplicity being caught up, catching up with it as well. Like, so, the demand, we, as humans, we want everything in our lives as simple as possible, don't we? Everything. Just everything. And it's where, like, they, we, we managed to catch up within the hardware and the software and being able to have a simple user experience and alongside all those collaboration tools that we're seeing now with all the, you know, the just explosion upon explosion upon explosion of AI into our, into our daily lives.
Like, personally and professionally, I think it's less so on, like you said, the big updates, the big configurations, the massive life changes, and now it's more refining and having those. Yeah, the little things that we didn't necessarily didn't know that we wanted, um, around, yeah, collaborative, collaborative tools and simplicity.
Mo Khalifa: But, you know, you know, Kimberley, you, you hit the nail on the head, you know, when you said about simplicity, that is what we're seeing. That is what customers are asking for. I'm not, I'm not gonna, uh, you know, bash too much across here, but you guys remember the Microsoft Surface Hub back in the day, right?
Amazing device. Lots of collaboration. I used to sell it back in the day. I used to love it. It's like 25G a pop to, to, to sell the 84 inch version. Now, when we were selling the dream effectively to the IT administrators, the people that were, uh, procurement, they understood it. They understood the story, they loved it.
They were like, yeah, we are gonna go out and deploy. And they went out and deployed everywhere. The problem was that adoption piece never went down to Mr. Smith that works in accounting, that's gonna use a Microsoft Surface hub. It was a simple device if you knew how to use it, but it became over complicated if you didn't know how to use it.
And it's the same thing when it comes to like meeting rooms today, right? We're used to just either using like, uh, if you're using a Teams certified headset, as an example, using a Teams button, pressing that once and bam, you're inside of a meeting or just pressing that join button. Or now if you're using the new Outlook, you've now got a little video camera icon.
I'm using that way more often now, or the little pop up that pops up saying Kimberly started the meeting. Do you want to join? Yes. And bam, away you go. And that simplicity is now starting to move in. You know, we have to be careful because there's so many more features coming in, right? So the challenges, and I'm not sure if it's the same for you, Kimberly, the challenges I have now working in the OEM space is OEMs will come out with, you know, some really good software elements to control cameras, to control different intelligent director versions, you know, whatever it may be.
And then you've got. Microsoft, which maybe a few months later will then do an update to say, Hey, we're now going to control cameras for you as well. And then for customers, it's like, well, which one do I use? Do I use the OEM provided camera controller? Do I use the Microsoft inbuilt version? Is that good enough?
Is that not good enough? Yeah, I feel that
Tom Arbuthnot: And this is one of the downsides of this model that Microsoft have, right, which we talked at the start about the speed of innovation and the challenges and the competitiveness has driven change and that's awesome for Microsoft and it pushes on price for customers and innovation comes.
But there is that like, where's the OEM innovation and where's the Microsoft innovation? How, how do they interlock? That's a really good point.
Kimberley Tee: We've got to remember, it's not just It's not just us using it, it's not just corporate, it's healthcare, it's education, it's, there's that need, like I keep, like I, like I've said around the simplicity, it's, it's not just the, the Mo's and the Tom's that really know what they're talking about when it comes to cameras and to those experiences, it's, it's everyone using it and if we want, if we as the manufacturers and if Microsoft as well, if they want that rate of adoption, it What Microsoft are investing in their data centers for the AI and to process all the stuff they're doing and we're doing if they really want to see that adoption, they have to make it adoptable.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, and I think we've, as an industry, we've proven time and time again that any product that your answer is, we need an adoption program, we need a team, like it's all well and good saying that, and there's a percentage of enterprises that can afford that, and they do the white glove thing, and it's awesome.
But if your product really needs that, to the service hub point, to other things we've seen, Copilot, interesting now. Like, not everybody's going to do that. There has to be an element of, you say, organic usability.
Kimberley Tee: Any mass digital transformation, like the laptops, you know, both our organizations make them though, you know, like laptops, let alone anything, any, you know, really clever, clever devices like we see in our space.
It comes with mass adoption, like it comes, and not just, not just within the enterprise.
Mo Khalifa: I think just to add to your point Kimberly, you know, uh, you know, when we look at the titans like Microsoft, like Zoom, like Google and all the platform players out there, the one thing that we, they always need to remember is the generation that we are now living amongst, right?
So it's this new, you know, it used to be millennials back when I was there, it's, um, That's like selling Surface Hub. And now we've got Gen X. So everything like in the world now is subscription based. And now, now we're starting to see all these like rooms as a service coming out from our partners and distribution and even OEMs for that matter.
We're now starting to see, you know, the license play, the license model, you know, literally every comment that I see on anything that you post, Tom, is, is this going to be on pro? Is it a pro like? So everything is like subscription based on that. But also, you know, we live in that digital age of social as well.
Everybody knows how to pick up their iPhone and use the video functionality, right? Everyone knows how to do WhatsApp video messaging. Meeting rooms need to be exactly the same. The experience of you being able to walk in and just hit that dial button and have that simple experience where it takes you 10 minutes, if that.
It should be 10 seconds to just be like, Oh, okay. I know what that button does. I know what that button does. It's not going to break anything. So I feel, um, you know, Microsoft Teams Rooms had it very simple for a very, very long time, but we're getting to that plateau point where now we're starting to bring much more stuff on the home screen, like QR barcodes and, you know, ultrasound, um, you know, to be able to do one touch connections and stuff, as long as we don't overfill it too much.
Kimberley Tee: Yeah, I think, you know, it's definitely on my mind in my 9 to 5 and it's definitely going to be on yours too, Mo. Like, it's that striking balance between simplicity and sophistication, I think. And there needs to be that focus on that. There needs to be How in reality is, is, is AI going to be adopted?
Because that's, let's face it, we're, you know, we're, we're equipped to the meeting rooms and now it comes down to actually getting the best of value out of the meeting rooms. And that's the AI message as well.
Tom Arbuthnot: Well, that's where the AI is interesting, isn't it? Is which, and it'd be interesting to get both your thoughts on this, is there's, I think there's kind of, You can kind of bucket AI into two types of scenarios.
There's a scenario where I, as a user, proactively go and do something like I go to Copilot, I type some prompts, I make it do a thing. And I still think that's very forward leaning adoption people that are more technically minded. And then there's the AI that just automagically does things. And I feel like The room space, we've got a lot of opportunity for the auto magic.
Like it just transcribes. It just recognizes you. It picks camera angles and that is one of the areas I'm super excited about is not AI, I as a user have to drive. But AI, as you said at the start Mo, like picks the right camera angle, like sorts out the room echo, like they don't have to tune it. It is just like it, it's working it out
Mo Khalifa: and, and, and, you know, just that's the point I was about to make was like, you know, we.
Customers or people in general, right? We don't want to think about what we have to press next and what to do next. And I think that's where the likes of Copilot, um, and, and, and AI really come in where you don't have to think about it, right? You just go, you start your meeting and then AI will realize where's the best voice coming from.
Do I need to use ceiling mics? Do I need to use table mics? Where's the best, Face, who's talking? What do I need to transcribe? You know, the features that Microsoft are bringing to like Outlook and Teams and across the whole Microsoft 365 stack, you know, one of the most exciting ones that I had was the follow button, right?
So if you can't join a meeting, you hit follow. And, you know, it's not working too well for me. I don't know if it's a tenant thing on my end just yet, because we're still going through the trials and whatnot. But when you hit follow, what's supposed to happen is Copilot comes in, takes down your notes and then sends them to you.
And, and that same thing is coming to Teams Rooms as well, right? It's on the roadmap. That's one of the items that I'm most excited about is if I can't join a meeting, we have Copilot go ahead and that's my personal assistance. You know,
Tom Arbuthnot: And again, not, not, not make me go find the meetings tab find the notes like at the end of the week be like well you wanted to follow these through here's the summary like that they feel like that's where it's going to go which is really exciting.
Kimberley Tee: I feel like for it to be adopted in the way it needs to be for the success that we want to see, um, It needs to kind of adopt itself to you, if that makes sense. It needs to do the adoption for you. It needs to say,
Tom Arbuthnot: yeah,
Kimberley Tee: in your visual peripheral, on your screen, in your meeting rooms, it needs to be like, it just like, I really feel like that's what Mo just said.
It's kind of adopting it. He's, it's bringing it to, it's being brought to him. It's kind of the adoption and the AI's kind of,
Tom Arbuthnot: yeah, well, yeah. And there's value that's worth, uh, like again, adoption. I'm always nervous about these, like, this needs a massive adoption, but it's like, well, hang on, how much value is there?
Right? Because like, like if it's awesome, if it's saving me time, if it's saving me money, I will go and proactively use it. You don't need to convince people to the nth degree. Um, I think that the hard thing on the AI in the meeting room front, actually, I think that I've seen working with customers is that technology starting to come through.
It's very hard to. Perceive the value on paper or in a briefing like you kind of have to live it and and the bar that has all the AI smarts looks exactly the same as the bar that has one mic and tinny speakers like on on on the website they look like the same thing so I think that's one of the challenges for our space is helping customers understand.
Where the investment is and why these things are different and, and like where the value is.
Mo Khalifa: But I think, I think that also puts us in, um, such a good position because one of the statistics that came out of Microsoft, don't quote me on it, I'm pretty close to it, it's the high 80 percent of Copilot usage actually starts off in the meeting space.
Yeah, so meetings, Teams meeting, meeting room
Tom Arbuthnot: meeting recap is like the biggest thing by far because the biggest use case, right? It's, it's automatic and it's instant value and everybody has that problem. Like, I'm in too many meetings, I need the summary. It's been really a big hit
Mo Khalifa: and it's, it's amazing. Like the first time I used it, I felt like I hit the big time, right?
I've got my own personal assistant and it's like, wow, you know, I've got a little, little person I can just say take down my notes. Um, but it's actually really useful. And I guess where Microsoft have that. That upper edge is the simple fact with the M365 stack, right? You can tap into Word, Excel, PowerPoint and, you know, everything else to go along with it.
So I'm truly, truly excited to see what Microsoft is bringing, especially in that meeting space as well. So we've heard of Spaces, that's coming along soon. I had a sneak preview when I was over in, uh, in Seattle over the summer. Um, and I can't say too much on this podcast, but really, really exciting stuff that's coming along that's really gonna enhance not just the meeting room, but everything that's surrounding the meeting room when we look at modern office. Um, so, so going back to your point, Kimberly, when we were talking about simplicity, this will bring simplicity. Yes. It's a bit of a headache for IT administrators to initially set up and adopt and get it going, but once they've got that part up and running, then. You know, for years and years to come, it becomes so much more easier for their, for their users.
It's a bit like the first time that you migrated over to 365 in the cloud. You know, how much of a headache was that? We still go through that today with SMB, SMC customers that are on prem as an example. But yeah, I can't wait. I think, I think AI and, you know, combined with the likes of spaces, et cetera, brings that, that simplicity across in, in, in kind of the modern office space.
Tom Arbuthnot: I didn't want to cut your flow, but it's Places, Cisco's is Spaces.
Mo Khalifa: Yes. I'll tell you
why. I'll tell you why. I was on a call.
Kimberley Tee: Places was a thing and then they dropped it for a bit, didn't they? Because they had other priorities. And then, and then I was like, did it come back as
Spaces?
Tom Arbuthnot: It was too good a thought train to interrupt.
Mo Khalifa: Let me redeem myself. So I was on a call,
Tom Arbuthnot: I can edit
one, and then I was like, I can't edit two.
Mo Khalifa: I was on a call just before, just before, um, this podcast. And, and, and one of the things on like, um, HP's website is like spaces. poly. com, which is like a room builder and stuff. And I was really heavily talking about that.
So that's got like stuck in my head, but Spaces, Places, the same thing.
Kimberley Tee: Did you hear that Mo's bosses? He can't just.
Mo Khalifa: Same thing, right?
Kimberley Tee: He can't get it off his mind but I think, just to add to your excitement, I genuinely feel like we're at a point in the rate of development and what it's becoming, not just that we know about, that's becoming generally available.
I genuinely feel like the landscape of the video conferencing market industry, our industry, I genuinely think is at a point now where it It's also reflecting the needs of the user. It's not just, you know, like four years ago when we, when we had, um, we had a, it was, it was an interesting time, wasn't it?
But that was about like reacting and that was about quick, everybody cameras quick, set up the rooms. We don't know what they're going to need when they get back and stuff, but now it's genuinely about addressing the needs of these users, that individual. Personal assistant and that individual experience is what I really feel like, even like, I feel like, I still feel like an individual as I go into the meeting room, having that collaborative experience.
Mo Khalifa: Yeah, I think a
lot of OEMs are really trying to play in that space as well, right? You know, when we look at 3D, we look at holograms, you know, I think Logitech announced something a couple of years ago in one of the ICs. Yeah, Google have done one with Project Starline as an example, which is really about driving the effect of you being in the same room.
Some.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it's re-imagining a lot, isn't it? The experience, a
ghost and, uh, like yeah, you could have
like, that's the one 3DS
Mo Khalifa: Ds. Yeah. Yeah. But, but, but really, what, what is it that we're trying to tap into? It's human behavior, right? You know, humans, naturally we wanna see communication, we wanna see faces, we wanna be able to see, you know, expressions, et cetera.
That's the one missing thing that we have when it comes down to video is how do we take it to that next level, right? We live in such an exciting time. I mean, I was blown away just by listening to SpaceX catch their rocket with, you know, what they call the chopsticks, right? Uh, we live in a crazy, crazy time, um, when it comes to innovation and, you know, It won't be long till we start, start seeing like the Star Trek stuff that we're so used to watching about little holograms and whatnot.
It's happening.
Kimberley Tee: Yeah, we're already there like if you think about like Alexa who's next to me and all those kind of things, and how much I talk to Siri all day long. Probably because I'm a little bit lonely, but we are already there. And I've just thinking, but it's becoming really, it's becoming really real now, isn't it? And it's becoming, like when I came into av, like when I was still in marketing, I wouldn't, I just, you would never have got me excited about a piece of, you know, a camera or.
or anything like that, but genuinely find myself excited about
this
stuff these days.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it's easy to get excited when you see it impacting users, can't you? Like, this was kind of like, it harks back for me to when we were first like, now I'm aging myself, it's like putting OCS into enterprise and they were like, Oh my God, I could send an instant message.
Oh, I can work from home. I can do a video call from home. Like it was like mind bending. And now that's, that's complete. We all get it. It's complete commodity. And it'll be the same thing with like video and AI at some point. We'll just be like, of course, I walk into a room and the room knows who I am. And it starts the meeting and it pulls the right people in and it makes the notes and it sends the notes.
Of course.
Mo Khalifa: So I am going to talk
about
one Challenge that I see out there, especially, I mean, talking about the rate of innovation, talking about, you know, the likes of AI and stuff that make our life so much more easier. I love it. It's great. It's great for the end user. I think the biggest challenge that we have today is actually getting IT administrators, cyber security as an example to actually Implement them and understand what Microsoft as an example is what, you know, what they've done with devices.
You know, I've said it on my own kind of videos. I've said it on your videos as well, Tom, a million times that Microsoft Teams Rooms devices shouldn't be treated like PCs or mobile phones on Android, right? They should be treated as appliance devices. And to this day, we have, what, four or five years on the journey with Teams Rooms when I first started early on.
We're still having to fight this battle with the likes of cybersecurity, with the likes of IT administrators to get them to adopt and understand that actually these devices are not going to, you know, kill your network because they don't have Google Play services, as an example, or don't run the same policies that you would apply to a laptop.
And I think that is the choke point. I think that's the part that stops the rate of innovation being, uh, being deployed to the masses. Because we see Copilot a lot and even big enterprise organizations like mine, as an example, we haven't widely deployed, deployed it yet. It's internal, small user group for the better part of a year.
Um, but we're seeing Microsoft coming out with more and more stuff. And as soon as it goes public in like our tenant, as an example, we're already out of date because Microsoft's got, you know, more features hitting. So I think that's
Tom Arbuthnot: Well it's like the, um, the voice and face recongitions, so that's interesting because that was off by default at launch and admins had to go in and turn it on and we all know the tyranny of the default, right, 90% of admins won't turn it on. And then Microsoft are flipping that, which i think is a really good move, it will cause, it will ruffle some feathers but in January they're putting it on by default and the admin has to turn it off.
Mo Khalifa: And so my question is, if it's already off by default, and when they launch it, is it going to flip it on?
Tom Arbuthnot: It's going to flip it off. You've got a policy now, so you can proactively turn it off before it goes on. And obviously, as a good admin, you're watching the message center and reading the roadmap and aware of these changes, because every admin definitely is, right?
Um, uh, but, but the point is, the, the, the, I mean, there's 400 million Office 365, Microsoft 365 users, right? Most of those users, by definition, don't have admins carefully monitoring every feature and every piece. So I think, I think Microsoft are making the right move and it puts pressure, as you said, Mo, back on the enterprise to be like, do we have a good reason to pull these features back?
And sometimes we do, legal, commercial, whatever, but You're stifling innovation if you're, if your default is off lockdown.
Kimberley Tee: But definitely, like we were saying, that personal experience, that, that personal rate of adoption, that kind of thing. Like I, we have, um, Copilot on, in the managers here at Lenovo, but it's not within my pay band yet, you know, and so.
We can't use it as a workflow between me and my manager. And
Mo Khalifa: imagine what it's doing to customers though, right? And Tom, you used a great example with the voice in print, the voice recognition, the facial recognition. It's been out the better part of what, a year, year and a half ish, I think. Um, but not a lot have them switched on because they're so worried about security or whatever it may be.
Kimberley Tee: A big customer of mine has it completely turned off because of security.
Tom Arbuthnot: There's two things that are nuts about that. One is the base Copilot is available in Microsoft 365. But with no additional charge now used to be costed $5 now it's included and you get the commercial data protection on that so you don't have to spend the 30 to start getting the basic command line Chat GPT type experience and if you're not rolling that out I absolutely guarantee your staff are for sure going to the consumer version of Copilot or Gemini or GPT like there's no way they're not because they're trying, they're not doing it maliciously.
They're just trying to get their job done as efficiently as they can. So if you don't,
Kimberley Tee: yeah, every single LinkedIn profile I've seen has been AI generated.
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. So, so, so like they're, they're, they're going to do it. Either way, you want to find them a safe path to do it in a corporately controlled, data controlled way and it's, yeah, you make a really good point.
Kimberley Tee: I think that's definitely all over our marketing and all over our, all over the conversations. It's definitely, if you've got to make them feel safe or it's just not going to, I think that's one of the biggest things you can have. You know, you can have budget restrictions, you can have internal adoption restrictions, but I think unless it, unless it's really, really reassured and safe, I think it's going to be so prohibitive.
Mo Khalifa: Yeah, and I think that if you were to ask Tom, I'm going to put words in your mouth as a question that you were going to ask us, right? What would be the challenge that we see or the thing that we need to work on moving into 2025 would be that.
It would be us working with the correct stakeholders that, you know, approve these types of things within an infrastructure. Because I think. Microsoft and, and the other platform players out there and the OEMs and everyone, they've brought in amazing innovation, right? In the last couple of years, we see some crazy stuff.
A lot was announced during Gitex as well, which happened this week and, you know, and stuff that's coming out in the very near future. But it's no use if it's not being widely adopted. And it's not the adoption, it's not the fact that people don't want to use it, they do. And it's like you said, they'll use the competition otherwise, um, and, and we need to change that mindset.
It's not the employer drives what equipment the, the employee uses. It's now the other way around. The employee is now saying, Hey, I want to work in this way. You know, in the last few years, it was about the style of work, where I want to work. Now it's more about the experience and the equipment that I want to use.
You know, uh, we've seen some really good customers that instead of, um, assigning devices to their employees, they'll say, here's your budget based on your job role, you've got 1, 000 budget, or that's not a lot, you know, 1, 500, 2, 000, whatever it may be, and you pick out of this approved list. But again, that's like personal preference.
I would like to have the ability to be able to pick and choose what type of headset I buy, what type of camera I buy. But, you know, I think that, like I said, going back to what I was saying originally, the challenge is making sure that we talk to the right folk at cybersecurity.
We talk to the right folk in facilities or infrastructure or whoever it may be to get them to understand that it's not this big, scary organization trying to eat up all your data. Microsoft spent a lot of time and investment actually producing documentation in terms of where data is stored, where the data centers are, you know, what they're doing with privacy and security, as well as all the OEMs out there, HP, Lenovo, everybody out there will have their own elements there.
I think a little trust is needed, a bit of, uh, POC, uh, proof of concepts are, are, are, are needed in a safe environment, but that's the only thing that's really going to stop the pace of innovation, because Microsoft can send out as much as they want, but if no one's adopting, it becomes a challenge.
Kimberley Tee: Yeah, and we, and we know how quickly Microsoft can pivot, right, as well, you know, not to Not to throw them under the bus, we are very much in bed together, I don't know if I've got a Microsoft, but the trust there as well, you know, it's not just the manufacturers, it's not just the channel, it's the users as well, we know how quickly the industry can change, we know how quickly Microsoft can move it, we know how quickly, like, changes, needs can change, and so it's the trust Around that to make that investment as well.
Because let's face it, it's nice to have devices. It's not, it's the commoditization coming, but it's not the laptops and the mobile phones quite yet, is it?
Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. And I feel like that's, uh, definitely, it's an interesting, probably another show we should do about the, like commoditization. 'cause it feels like it, it, it's definitely.
Coming and it's interesting. We've got so many OEMs in play and so many, so many options. Um, but I think where you started about the adoption thing is like the pulling it through to the user experience is going to be the most important, I'm certainly seeing that in the customers I work with that is way higher.
in the kind of scoring matrix now than, as you say, megapixels and, and ports and things. Awesome. Well, we could probably talk for another hour. I know we can cause we do, um, but we won't on the pod. So, uh, thanks both of you for getting in the mix and, uh, great to get perspective from, uh, yeah, from what you're seeing in the market.
Thanks everybody for listening. And, uh, yeah, Kim, I will get you on again sometime soon.