Deploying 1,000 Microsoft Teams Rooms globally at AstraZeneca with Stephen McClellan

Stephen McClellan, Associate Solutions Engineering Director, Conferencing at AstraZeneca, and Tom Arbuthnot discuss the technology journey at AstraZeneca, deploying over a thousand Microsoft Teams rooms. 

• The journey from full Cisco to Microsoft Teams
• Impact of COVID-19
• Evaluation and Deployment of Microsoft Teams Rooms
• Challenges and Successes in Implementing Microsoft Teams Rooms
• Exploring the Future: AR/VR Scenarios and Mesh

Thanks to Ribbon, this episode's sponsor, for your continued support of the Empowering.Cloud community.

Transcript

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Tom 0:00

Welcome to the Teams Insider podcast. This week we have Stephen McLennan from AstraZeneca and we're talking about AstraZeneca's journey from what was a pure Cisco conferencing environment to Microsoft Teams and over a thousand Microsoft Teams rooms now in play. It's a really interesting journey and Stephen shares thoughts along the way of vendor assessment, how the industry is changing and what the strategy is there. Really enjoyed this conversation. Thanks to Stephen for taking the time. And many thanks to Ribbon who are the sponsor of this podcast. Really appreciate their support of everything we're doing at Empowering Cloud. So I hope you enjoy the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the pod excited for this one. Not very often. You talk to somebody who's has experience deploying over a thousand Microsoft Teams rooms. There's going to be a lot to talk about on this show. I've got my friend, Stephen. Stephen, do you want to give us an intro and a bit of background?

Stephen 0:48

Yeah, sure. Stephe McClellan work at AstraZeneca. I'm the associate director for solutions engineering, specifically to conferencing. Been working here for about 10 years and been in the industry for over 20.

Tom 1:02

Awesome. I loved our prep call. It felt like we could have talked for hours. There's so much you've experienced in AstraZeneca and what you've been doing. Maybe you can take us a little bit on that journey. Cause I know AstraZeneca used to be a hardcore Cisco house and now you're on the Microsoft journey, which is interesting.

Stephen 1:16

Sure. Yeah. Yeah. We're on the Microsoft journey. Still a hardcore Cisco house, but, weaning off of it. And yeah, when I started contracting with them back in 2013 2014 is when I got picked up and we took on a big task, which was to bring the primary company AstraZeneca and a subsidiary company MedImmune that they had acquired some years back and really bring them in, combine them make them as one for their video and communication strategy. And there was two separate Cisco estates. There's two Microsoft link on-prem states at the time. And then a little bubble of HP Halo Telepresence room spotted around our high profile offices. And we had the task to figure out a way to bring that all together.

Tom 1:57

And for those that don't know the scale, What kind of user count is that and room count is quite big, isn't it?

Stephen 2:02

Yeah, at the time, it would have been about 75, 000 users and room count at the time total combined was only about 580. So it's interesting to hear what growth happened after, so what we, during that time, 2014, we scoured the market and came up with. What was a disruptor at the time, which was a Acano and we implemented Acano of, which brought Lync, which then turned to Skype for Business interop to our video conference room straight away. And and then we replaced the HP halo rooms with Cisco Telepresence TX9000, at the time, and that built, and then we brought in external guests, which was a big gap in the market at the time. Not just video conferences, but external guests via web browser. That then. Set us on a trajectory to make anyone be able to communicate on a video call any place anytime from desktop for mobile from conference rooms and from telepresence rooms and that then, that started to evolve as it took some time to, of course, get implemented. And then the Skype for Business interop grew and evolved and molded to the point where we no longer, we had a service called VMR virtual meeting room. So you had a Skype Meeting, or you had a VMR and the VMR is kind of video conference call that then evolved to, you no longer had to choose to whether you were going to do a Skype Meeting or VMR with the seamless interop between that, that brought to the market. And then, of course, was bought out by Cisco. We then, once we got to the point where we took away that need to choose, is it a VMR, is it a Skype meeting? It says every meeting is a Skype meeting. Whether once again, you're in a telepresence room, even if you're only connecting video conference endpoints, it's still connecting and getting stitched together on the Skype infrastructure. But it really was the self service ability for people to schedule things because video conference rooms were traditionally, very, in our old days, white glove and scheduled and a bit overwhelming and scary to end users, especially in those days. We still had some remote controls kicking around. As we and so the big thing was forced and drive a consistent user interface and not custom. So we really stuck with the Cisco standard user interface and then make it easier. Easy for users to book and join the call. And once we fully enabled self service, we just saw bundles of year over year growth of adoption. And we have that all recorded. We have beautiful charts to show that from our analytics company, Viopta, which we used to ingest all of that data through those years to make informed decisions. And then what we saw that 550 endpoints over year grew around 250 endpoints a year. Once the infrastructure really got established And and that led to video conferencing being a commodity. It was just expected, joining a call from a room, was pop in and dial it yourself. There wasn't no technical support needed. It was easy to use and video and content just once again became a commodity, whether at your desktop or in your meeting room, or you're at home, or you're bringing in externals. Now, fast forward, we had gotten the service self service well established. Once again, that started 2014 and evolved and iterated up until pre covid. We were preparing to go to Microsoft teams from on-prem Skype for Business. We had done all the prep work, we had done a small set of pilot users. Once again, we had no idea what was coming and we had about 5000 of our users on pilot for Microsoft teams. And

Tom 5:20

I love your scale, Stephe. You're like small pilot, just 5, 000,

Stephen 5:24

yeah, now we're up to 90, 000 employees. And then when you hear the size from going from 5, 000 to 77, 000 at the time in 1 week to Microsoft Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams when COVID did kick off.

Tom 5:37

That's that's that's an amazing journey and a testament, to what everybody was, rapidly going to cloud, but that really is rapid one week to put another 65, 000 on,

Stephen 5:46

Yeah. And I did have the curiosity would our Skype infrastructure. We had quite a robust Skype infrastructure. On-prem deployment, would it handle everyone from home, but we never got a chance to test it. And we just went straight to Teams and took that variable away and now put that over into Microsoft's ball court, which they had their own struggles.

Tom 6:05

Yeah. Yeah. They had everybody that they had the biggest. I remember them scrambling around to spin up, new servers, new regions, new Azure was getting topped out and it really was a massive growth time, but across the whole industry, it was a very pressured time, but fortunately we came through it.

Stephen 6:19

Yeah. Yeah. And leading up to covid we have been doing some work with Cisco in the background to ensure we would have the interop that we had with Microsoft meetings because once again, Cisco acquired back and it was now CMS and we had interop between our Microsoft Teams meetings and our Cisco rooms. And we wanted to ensure that seamless and this would continue through to Microsoft Teams. And we had confirmed that they were going to be developing CVI, but it wasn't ready. When, when we were ready, so we ended up deploying Pexip because they were ready 1st as a, as an interim solution. And luckily we had done it right before. And everything went on lockdown. So we had video conference interop there and ready to go and ready to scale. Covid kicked off. We went 100 percent remote and everybody sat back and watched it all work for the most part. So it was exciting times, so once we got through covid, we we moved everything to the cloud in terms of our calling. We then started to think okay, video conferencing is truly a commodity. 2020, 2021, we started thinking. What is next in video conferencing? We had dealt with years of Cisco CMS and Microsoft Skype for Business interop challenges and speed bumps that we hit, and we were continuing to see those once we did eventually migrate from Pexip CVI to Cisco CVI. I think that was late 2020. I think it was around September and we saw the same interop challenges and woes. They weren't unfixable. It just took a lot of effort as a, screaming customer to both big players

Tom 7:48

the big vendors together. Yeah.

Stephen 7:50

to work nicely to play nicely. And we had great relationships and built, and we're making strides. But we then thought, what is the future of conferencing? And we reevaluated and Microsoft Teams Rooms are just, starting to become relevant as far as I was aware. And yeah, we went off on a, about a 8 or 9 month exercise to explore and deploy

Tom 8:11

Yeah. Talk us through that evaluation because you took it really seriously and I respect how much effort you guys put into evaluating your options.

Stephen 8:19

luckily, we had a project team because if it were tossed over my lap, I would have scrambled a little bit more, but we had a full on project team. So I think that's important to note is to have the at a company. Our scale is to have a properly resourced and really luckily at the time we were being proactive and planning and we weren't being reactive and trying to slap things in and we were denying people trying to slap things in so project team, we brought all their heads together and we had gone through the years of well polished the best industry leading Cisco hardware and great rock solid software in general for their endpoints in the room systems to now being a windows based PC form factor PC and a bunch of peripherals and our instinct at the time was okay. What's the next big player for all the peripherals is Poly. And but we, it wasn't just Poly, Logi. We're quite new on the market and disruptive with the Rally Bar and some of their other products. And so we brought it all into a lab in our UK office. And we did a paper exercise to vet what kind of what specs made sense. And when we got down to feature details, we had come up with the the conclusion in terms of feature parity. We thought it was most important to use the Windows based Microsoft Teams Room. So we had that vetted out pretty early. And, and then we got a bunch of equipment in the lab, which then we whittled it down to further a kind of a short list of, to actually get end user feedback on. So it turned into a few Poly based and ours and a few Logi based MTRs that we spotted 14 systems around the world and Dubai and Asia markets here in America's markets. And, of course, the European market to get feedback from a range of areas. and that went on, and then come up on the end of 2021. we had our CEO was going to meet with 1 of his other peer CEOs of a recent acquisition we had just done and that company we had acquired. Was all Zoom and all Zoom rooms for their meetings and meeting room tech. And meanwhile, we were living with the woes and challenges of teams in the cloud and on, and our Cisco endpoints interop into them. And he came back from a meeting with him and seeing the experience that they have on a day to day basis. And he says. I can't go back to them and convince him to rip out his Zoom rooms and put in our solution that we have here. So what are we doing? and luckily down in the base, the 1st floor of the building. He was in on the campus. I work at. He was there and we had 1 of these trial rooms, a proof of concept rooms or pilot rooms and we ended up I was called over to go meet him and present. We had luckily we had so much analysis. We were trying to come to a conclusion ourselves. What is the future of our meeting rooms? And. I didn't have a good answer. Luckily, we met and we presented all the pros and cons and the risks and some of the problems it solves in the market. And then the fact that even though it was quite immature, we would have to have a lot of influencing to do to bring Microsoft into alignment with the legacy of what Cisco has done over the past 20 years and what we have with the quality that we expect and the essentially the decision was taken that day that we would accept that challenge and we would go that direction to remove that variable that to be players in the market.

Tom 11:27

Yeah. There's that there's never a perfect decision, but you decided to take on the one vendor, at least we have one vendor we're talking to that's both the service and the endpoint. I say one vendor, you've got the OEMs as well, but one vendor from a software point,

Stephen 11:40

yeah, and so that, yeah, so that was, let's say, 2020 into 2222 is when we last quarter is when we actually started production installs. Now that is an important factor from the time we agreed. Okay, it's going to be Microsoft Teams Rooms. Let's go. This is an exciting challenge. Number one thing I had to do was educate myself. I had already been getting educated. I had to get my expert team that we had been living and breathing, living, eating, breathing, sleeping Cisco and traditional video conferencing for years needed to get smarter on Microsoft in the Microsoft world.

Tom 12:15

And it is a different world. It's the it's windows. It's all the cloud elements. It's the software on top. It's the patching, the maintenance, even the hardware is different.

Stephen 12:23

and what I have found to your point around the different ecosystems, all of the foundation and the ways of working that we had in the rigor that we had applied to the Cisco world, my lead guys that, you know, when I, when we got them into the Logi Sync and the Poly Lens and even Microsoft Teams Admin Center, a tagging and in the Pro Portal now, I've seen them and I'm so proud of them for applying the same rigor that we had developed with Cisco, and it's just all ported right over. Now, it's a lot more tools to manage, but so far so good. So we had to get my technical experts trained up along with myself and then we had to get our operations team trained up, and we worked with Microsoft and we're luckily we're pretty big company and we have a bit of swing and we're able to get free negotiated training packaged in with what all the other money we're spending with them, and they're excited to see a trajectory of deploying more Teams Rooms and more Teams licenses of course. Overall now I look back and that was, once again, 2022 was where we did a lot of the education and set in the standards. We, went through even more complex. We learned a lot from the 14 rooms we deployed. Our company diversified that we partnered with to be our AV integrator, they brought some experience from and some negotiations with these third parties of screens, settling on NEC screens for the warranty that that we get with them. And they brought in some expertise around QSC, which was a bit of, I'd say a bit of a disruptor in the market that I'd, they weren't on my radar before two years ago.

Tom 13:49

Yeah. That's interesting because they're being they're bringing more innovation out just recently, aren't they? So they're definitely disrupting a bit.

Stephen 13:55

Yeah, we've been tapping my foot waiting for some of this innovation. So I'm really excited for it. Because it's, so we really NEC for the screens. We ended up settling on Lenovo as a standard across the board for now, as our Windows MTR base and touch panel. We thought was 1 of the better touch panel experiences and 1 of the more robust computes and then, Poly for a huddle rooms, Poly video bars for a huddle rooms and Rally bars for our most common types of meeting rooms and then QSC for our complex integrated rooms. So we went through, got those standards stamped back in 2022 and started deploying and of course, we definitely went through major learning curves of the first, 100 plus rooms getting deployed then and started iterating, updating, iterating, update with starting from 2023. and, we went with the principles of, one of the biggest gaps was administration management remote monitoring the depth of quality of remote management monitoring you get from Cisco has been so evolved over 20

Tom 14:55

was going to say it's a really in the traditional space. That's a really robust story, right? And that whole white glove and I can see whatever's going on from wherever. And I've got all this shorty and I agree. Our comparative story was very light. It's getting better, but still light compared to where Cisco is.

Stephen 15:12

One of my little problems was early in the days when we were telling Microsoft our challenges our account team got, got us into the ears of the right people. We got a chance to present from the outside into their, at their board to tell them to take them through the story of where we're coming from and where we're trying to go with their product and where we're having challenges. And a big one was their technical support, and I won't dig into detail on it here, but I've seen that drastically go in the right direction and improve. It's still not where it needs to be yet in terms of what we got with Cisco and Poly support and Extron support over the previous years. That same level of quality wasn't there with Microsoft, but they definitely made strides in the right direction to improve that. And then the remote administration management. I'm so proud to see Microsoft just got lit up in our tenant this week for testing the remote management of an MTR. You can actually see what's on screen and it starts to take control. And that was things I was harping on them back at the end of 2022. Yeah, at the end of 2022 about so exciting.

Tom 16:15

Yeah. And you mentioned on the kind of prep call, one of the things that you're excited about is a lot of the innovation seems to be happening in this software world. So the center of room cameras, the different framing, the IntelliFrame, there's a lot happening.

Stephen 16:27

Yeah, I went to the Teams Rooms world event, not skeptical, but not expecting to get excited. Okay, it's another trade show type of event. And I went there. What became clear to me was the road map and seeing all the pieces individually come together with presentations. I don't know Microsoft's angle, but. I was just all the road map and where it's going became clear to me. And I was like, why is this not published anywhere? I think it may be because it just gives your it gives your plan to your competitors. So maybe that's why they don't publish it anywhere. But anyway, once it became clear to me, I took it away. And then all the dots started connecting copilot, of course, is a factor in AI. But then the center of room, the different angle cameras, so the center table and then different angles of cameras around the room and the ability to pull heads out of recognize people by their faces and then recognize people by their voices with Intelligent Speaker all of how all of that. And, as you mentioned, kind of software base, what you can do with that moving forward started to get me really excited and started to get me thinking like. Whatever company implements this at large, a company like ours implements it at large scale, I think they get a competitive advantage. Time will still tell if, a company like mine makes a full plunge in and licenses every employee, but I think it would be a fun risk worth taking. Someone senior happened to watch this video.

Tom 17:51

uh, And your estate now is actually bigger than ever because you've just tipped over a thousand Microsoft Teams Rooms, but you've still got. A lot of Cisco in play. You've still got interop there. Is that right?

Stephen 18:01

Yeah, something I'm. proud of the company's not they didn't make reaction, big reactionary decisions during the COVID lockdowns, we didn't close, not anything notable. We didn't close any notable offices. So our, me, our footprint when things kicked off was about 1, 650 Cisco rooms and all proper room systems at that point, no desktop endpoints or anything. And we went with the approach of life cycle replacement for our Cisco rooms we couldn't get the funding for big bang of all those rooms to be a big, a lot of

Tom 18:31

Yeah, it would be a lot. Yeah.

Stephen 18:32

as endpoints were up for life cycle, we're, and that was going to be in large numbers. And of course, any new demand, any new builds, any construction refit outs and things. And what we've seen up to this point and let's say a year and a few months later from starting the deployment, we are just right up to about that 1000 room number of MTRs. But oddly enough, I haven't seen the Cisco systems go away. I think we will see those finally start to reduce. I think I'll see him start to reduce this year. Yeah, this would be a real pivotal year where we're actually going to see Cisco endpoints going down and MTRs are already up there in big numbers. And I think we're going to settle in the end, probably somewhere around 25, 2600 rooms. Once the full transition is done and then to be determined how the estate grows and molds from there.

Tom 19:15

That's awesome. Have you been looking at the kind of the mesh AR VR scenarios?

Stephen 19:21

Yeah, that was one of the the things I pitched when I pitched from the outside in. Outside into Microsoft. That's one thing I was excited for is how does the meeting room tech, obviously with the different camera angles, how does that then bring you into a mixed reality world? There's a lot of excitement, of course, around the Apple Vision Pro. And some of my responsibilities have grown in the past a few months to where now I have to look at the devices aspect too, in general. And we have some use cases in AstraZeneca where they're using AR and VR headsets, and we're looking at building a robust, and I'm having some major influence and starting to build a robust service around it versus, reactionarily, throwing a few out to these groups here and there. And, and to make sure data secured and stored properly and log in things are done correctly takes a lot of rigor at a company our size. And so we're working on

Tom 20:09

It's hard to hold that excitement back sometimes as well for the right reasons. It's like we can't just have it go everywhere in every technology.

Stephen 20:16

and in this space, especially with a company this large. Pockets of groups of the org, just go out and buy them and they say IT, we need them to work and we're like whoa, now, so, where's the budget? Where's the service? Who's going to own it? All the, all these things are starting to come to a head now. Now I don't know what, HoloLens never got his traction as far as we've seen. We've got it. We kick the tires on it. But I really would like to see I don't know, maybe, of course, with MTR supporting touchscreens, being software based, I would love to see that evolve into a point where maybe on an MTR on a call, you're actually, within a virtual space that you can go up and touch and zoom around on a digital whiteboard within the space and then other people are at home on a headset and, things like that.

Tom 20:56

Yeah, it's exciting. It feels like there's a lot going on in that space. And Microsoft have made some early bets there and actually, built apps for the Vision Pro, which I wasn't expecting. That's they're clearly, considering all these different services and device types.

Stephen 21:07

Yeah,

Tom 21:09

AwesomStephe eve, thanks for taking the time to talk us through that journey. It's an amazing journey and a real a real testament to how well you guys have done to get up to those numbers and keep those standards and any takeaways you would say for your peers, what you've learned on this journey, that, that kind of, to the, up to the MTR rooms.

Stephen 21:25

biggest one for me, I went into this with a very open mind. I see some guys in the industry trying to hang on. To legacy and what was comfortable to them open mind and assess objectively, and test it, it's not everyone, there are some scenarios. We had some swing to be able to get. Free equipment to be able to test and evaluate there was times that we actually ponied up our own money and bought the equipment because we saw there was probably legs in it. And that, if we couldn't get demo gear that that we would probably have find a use for it if it stuck around and, I actually get hands on with the things and vet it out and evaluate it to make your decisions. And, uh, I got, there's a bit of a skill there to try to project where things are going to become a problem later and try to mitigate for those at the beginning. So we have, for the, just a little quick anecdote on our standards, we had standardized on Ethernet displays so that they could put them on the lan and check their status and things. And we also put Ethernet, network capable PDUs, PowerStrips, so we could power kick anything in the room. And we had, we'd never had those with any of the Cisco endpoints before, just because we were moving to such a 3rd party mesh of hardware that we said, let's have, let's put some security mechanisms in place. And though, I would say, I honestly haven't seen that payoff yet. I think in the long run, we will see a payoff having that remote management and monitoring abilities.

Tom 22:45

Nice. Thanks for taking the time to share. Maybe we'll we'll revisit when you tip over another milestone I really appreciate your insights and yeah, we'll talk again soon.

Stephen 22:53

Sounds great. It's my pleasure. Thank you.