AV and UC Converging with John Bailey, Senior Vice President AVI-SPL

John Bailey, Senior Vice President of Technology and Innovation at AVI-SPL, discusses industry changes and the convergence of AV and IT.

• The industry is experiencing a convergence of AV and IT
• The need to focus on reliability and stability in meeting room solutions.
• The current and future role of AI in optimizing the AV and meeting experience

Thanks to AVI-SPL for their support of Empowering.Cloud

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Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. This week I have John Bailey, Senior Vice President, technology and innovation at AVI SPL. I've worked with AVI SPL for a number of years. They’ve been a big supporter of Empowering Cloud, and im fortunate to catch up with John Bailey fairly regularly on what's going on in the industry and on this pod. We get into that. We're just off the back of Infocomm, so we get his thoughts on the show. Also his thoughts on the industry in the market where IT and UC, you have kind of collided with AV and what the future holds. So many thanks to John for the time and many thanks to AVI SPL for their support of empowering Cloud. On with the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to the pod. Been looking forward to this one. I didn't actually get over to Infocomm this year, so I thought amongst other things, I'd get an update from from JB. JB did you want to introduce yourself and, tell us about yourself and your role? Yeah, yeah. Great to see you again, Tom. So, I'm JP John Bailey. I'm senior vice president of technology and innovation with AVI SPL. I've been, with the sort of combined business now for, 25 years as of May. So, I've got some good perspective on the industry, I'll put it that way. And, I'm really responsible for our global, go to market practice and strategy around UCC solutions. and really, for AVIs pl that's all, across rooms, users, voice calling, contact center, digital media security and networks, all the, all the things, right that that really go into, to create unified communication solutions. So and I have extended teams that that manage all of those. So I really just spend a lot of time thinking about where are we today, where, where is this whole thing headed and how do we continue to evolve, I think, as an industry to better serve our customers. Awesome. I really appreciate the conversations you and I have and really appreciate everything you've done for the supporting Empowering Cloud as well. so I finally direct you on the podcast to have the conversations we have off mike on Mike. But let's let's start with Infocomm, because you're just off the back of that. what did you think of the event? Yeah, I thought it was great. I, I haven't seen the attendee numbers, but it felt very, very busy on day one. And, and and likewise on day two. I know we had a lot of engagements there with our team, with customers. So it seemed like the turnout was was pretty good. you know, I'd say for us, the show is I think the show used to be about technology showcase for integrators as much as for customers. And now I think the whole industry is really focused on trying to get customers to the Infocomm event. because, you know, and it and, I'll play off the Avixa name, but really, we all are selling experience these days, and we, you know, we can't do that on spec sheets. and we can kind of do it on video calls, but it's really better to get customers in front of the technology using the technology, saying the power of what's possible, maybe, the art of the possible. in order to, to really drive some of these new solutions out there. So I, I love the event. ISE is another, you know, obviously great event. Yeah. that we do every, I guess on the offset. Yeah. Ironically, you know, it should be, in my opinion, Vegas in January, February and maybe Barcelona in the summer. But, you know, they don't ask me. Yeah, yeah. Maybe we should talk to them, see if they can mix it up a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. And and you were showing, like, I assume I saw the extreme. You showing your whole, VR design kind of tool thing that I did in January. So. Yeah, the VR design service, again, was, is a big draw, on our booth. And, it's it's an amazing service. I mean, in and of itself, the whole idea behind it is to accelerate time to decision making and create more surety around the designs that they're really going to solve. you know, for, for the challenges that our customers have. And, and so what we've seen is that being very successful is actually measurably shortening the pre-sales cycle. You know, the amount of time everybody spends trying to figure out out of all these solutions, which ones are the right ones. We also kind of shorten the pilot cycle, which we still think is important, to get technology into a customer space, try it out, make sure the networks fit for purpose. Make sure that teams can support the solution. and then there are there are, complexities with space design and technology that you really can't see in 2D on paper. If you really need to visualize, some of these things, and VR is the perfect, perfect medium to do that. So really, it's I. Feel like it's a really good use case for VR. It's like you can step into the room and look around and see the different angles and particularly with the, you know, multi-cam setups. Now, understanding why cameras should be placed in different locations as well. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, it's interesting too, because VR is such a buzz. And then for some people or some people want to experience in VR, some people don't, you know, some people we like sanitize the equipment between every single, you know, customer that that does the demo. But some people still, you know, have some reservations about that. But primarily it's a design tool. It's really a tool for the designer to visualize the space. And then oftentimes I find we are actually then creating once we have an approved design, a sort of a customized 3D fly through, that doesn't require VR for, you know, for. Yeah, it's right. And you could design and then take it up to the executive sign off and show them the fly through. And yeah, it's really cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so yeah. So talking to the show, I guess one of the things that strikes me is a few years ago, I wouldn't have been going to things like ISE and Infocomm, and now they're kind of staple events for me. This and AV, UC kind of coming together. It's been massive. And AVI SPL, I feel have been like at the forefront of that with, you know, with Pro services, with rooms. And now with voice as well. What what's your perspective on that kind of the two worlds coming together? It's been a it's been a long time coming. and again, I've been in industry for, for quite a while, right, a number of years. and we've been talking about, especially from the AV perspective, AV IT integration that conversations have been going on for over 15 years. Right. So and I think in a way it it may have kind of snuck up on us, even though we've been talking about it for so long. Because now when we talk about AV rooms, we're talking about, UC rooms and we talk about UC rooms, we're talking about EV rooms. So they really are, the same. the question is, you know, who or how are we going to develop a skill set to address both kind of disciplines? which, you know, in my mind, I appreciate is kind of equally complex and important, to creating the right outcomes. So it's interesting. So I feel like I feel like each side sometimes has their opinion on their own, you know, the, the, the it people are like, oh, surely it's just, you know, it's it's a bar and a few cameras. It's easy. And then the inverse on the it side and I've come to understand actually through a lot of the, Avixa team and you guys, how complicated the AV can get to do is be right. A lot of it's not visible complication. Things like, you know, acoustic design and stuff that there's a lot to I mean. But even if it's not complicated because a lot of the work we do and and that's part of what I think that the AV industry has to accept and evolve to is there's custom work and then there's scale work, and every room doesn't need to be fully customized. And some of them, we just need to be able to get a lot of work done in a shorter period of time. But it still takes some of the same basic approach to quality to installing in corporate enterprise environments. So, you know, I I'm glad. I think the industry too, especially manufacturers are moving away from this. How many minutes does it take to install our soundbar? Right. Because it's, you know, between 15 and 25, depending on who you ask. Yeah. but how important is that, really? I mean, if we make the devices easier to, to start to install and deploy, we should be thinking about scale as much or more so as, as kind of cost savings, in getting things done. And, you know, that makes me, I just was thinking about we were on a panel discussion, about a month and a half ago, and it was all about AI and, one of the customers, attendees in the audience asked the question, well, if, if AI enables me to do 4x the work, what? Doesn't that just mean the the boss is going to realize he only needs one out of every four employees, and I like. Well, I guess that's one way to look at it. But another way to look at it is you can bring your products to market four times faster utilizing the team you've got. You just, you know, and enabling them to do a whole lot more. So it's I guess it's perspective in how you look at it. Yeah. It's interesting. And you do projects. They're all from the kind of, you know, lots and lots of similar roll out to very complex, you know, very high end. What do you see with customers today? Do they think about that as like one one engagement or do they, do they go, you know, it's just kind of high end experience room a different conversation to the a hundred off MTR bars type room? I think so, and I think this is where it's important. The customer still appreciate consistency. They want hopefully a single partner that can do both types of projects. So so we don't have two different integrators involved in the same building at the same time. and you know, I think we, I think we appreciate both. It's ironic though. Tom, you got I'd love to get your feedback on this. It's I right, I mean, we we build out executive boardrooms with, for example, Microsoft Teams room technology.$500,000. I mean, is not that uncommon with a big TV LED screen and a lot of complication going on and a big table. But it's the same compute in a $5,000, three person huddle room. At the core of the system is is the same. Yeah, it's not interesting. It's all the peripheral and the and then the other bits and pieces. But it's yeah, fundamentally the I guess that's what it's interesting that, isn't it. Because that's what Microsoft are aiming for. Uniformity. But is there a case there where it starts to get you'd like more bells and whistles or are people appreciating that uniformity, even if I'm in the boardroom or I mean, you know, a four person space, same UI, same experience? Yeah. yeah, absolutely. And so many times, you know, our customers want something special for the executives group, for the, for the board, but they're actually much less they're more risk averse in those rooms than they are in the bread and butter rooms. So until it's like I always kind of get a chuckle, it's like, what have you got this cutting edge for our most important room? Yeah, yeah yeah yeah. Hey, like, I know you don't want to be doing cutting. Guys like you want to be. Trying to want something proven, right. Yeah, yeah, it feels like the Microsoft options in those high end rooms are getting more interesting in kind of the last 12, 18 months. So the, the likes of the Q system, the one beyond and all the integrations you can do with MTR now, you can do some quite fancy high end things with with the MTR compute as you say. Yeah, you sure can. But I mean, if I could just maybe bring it back to the basics for a minute here, because here's something universally hear from just about every, just about all of our customers. And that is they need these rooms to be more reliable. They need them to be hardened. they need them to be absolutely mission critical because they are mission critical, and they're meeting critical. and so, you know, you know, the kind of challenges that we, that we kind of had around these cloud connected rooms with multiple software updates and, and there's a lot of stuff kind of going on the market is saying, what I'm hearing is we want more reliable solutions. We would even live with less bells and whistles if we if we knew we were, you know, five nines on, on these rooms every Monday morning when we come in. Right. Because I mean, in the old way of doing things with big iron in a data center and MCUs, you know how we used to pre cloud, do this complicated video stuff. You might have a room or two go down or you might have a blade go down in a component. You might lose eight rooms kind to replace the blade. Now we have customers that come in and say nothing's working Monday morning, you know, why is that? And it it may be, you know, internal reasons. It may be the customer might have done something to their environment, but nonetheless, we got to figure out how to, to get things more reliable. That's that's a key concern that I'm hearing. Yeah. It's interesting isn't it. Because the it was very the old traditional AV well very slow and steady. Right. You know, you would patch the MCUs once every now and again. We wont define a period. But you know, not necessarily super often. They were robust and they stuck there. And by comparison now we're interlocking, you know, more complex compute devices that that patch themselves less so on Android, more so windows but a cloud service that it continuously moving. And to your point Microsoft being a software company a very driven by the latest feature, the latest lay out like they want to keep growing because that's what gets kind of the the sales end of the organization excited. but I do hear the same thing from, you know, I talk to a lot of, more kind of operational people. And you're right, it's the stability over the latest, you know, whiz bang AI feature definitely resonates. Yeah, yeah. What do you see there JB, Are you guys obviously do manage service wrap, You do the pro portal. You have your own stuff. Is is that becoming a big part of the conversation is how you can because you obviously you can't control what Microsoft do, but you can start to monitor and test to an extent. Yeah. I mean we are continuing to to try to push the ball forward, with, you know, those things like delegated access, remote access, with how do we assist the customer in a way that everybody understands who's touching the systems and which part of the systems are being touched? so, it's, it's a concern. And I would say it seems like customers who bought into some of this tech that's got unbundled, managed service with it somehow thought they didn't need any additional services anymore. Now realizing, oh, we still need to be able to pick up the phone and we know some. We need to have somebody that knows more than just the Microsoft stack or the Zune stack or the Cisco stack. We need somebody that kind of understands, you know, everything. and that's the role I think traditional integrators can and should be playing. so we'll continue to, to try to push into that space. But it's a it's a complicated. Yeah. Right. it's a complicated story. That's another thing I'd love your opinion on is it feels like obviously Microsoft is, you know, getting really busy in the room space. It feels like every OEM has a bar or something with a Microsoft badge on it these days. I know your your team, you know, do a lot of lab tests and kit selection. So I guess got a two questions. I mean, is it sustainable for everyone to have a bar? And how do you help customers with vendor selection? What are the key things you can help them think about when they're selecting vendors? Yeah I you know, you're exactly right. And we're we're testing the ones where we feel like there's strong market pull, or there's serious innovation. but it's, it's kind of harking back to, well this again, the if we're talking about the past and the present. Right. the that used to be a thing at Infocomm called the Projector Shootout, where they got every video projector from every manufacturer, and they put them all side by side on screens, and then we'd be like 100 of them, right? And they eventually stopped doing that for a number of reasons. But one was they all just look the same. Okay. we hit that minimum level of quality now, so it's hard for for us. I can't say that we're testing every single device that comes out. but we do test a lot of them in a dedicated engineering field. We stand up, demo, you know, facilities around those things. And in a lot of cases, we're helping manufacturers, in the beta phase of their product development test and provide feedback. So, you know, it's it's probably one of the more, fun things, I guess that we do is, get to tool around with the stuff, but we're not, you know, it's it's it's interesting too, because a lot of the things that we're testing now are difficult to, to empirically test or difficult to create an objective testing regimen around how fast does the AI swing a camera to a target, you know, I mean, so we end up recording a lot of the testing that we do because it's hard to write down how fast is zooming in or out. We can try to measure that. It's hard to do a lot of it's pretty subjective, and probably the best way is offer our opinion around some of those features and then just just document them so at least we can show people this is what it you know, this is what it looks like. Yeah. I think it's really interesting. We get asked a lot. We do our research where we compare kits, but it's very, factual comparisons, you know, like feeds and speed specs, ports sizes, which is useful to a point, but you absolutely then need to be able to say, you know, 4K means nothing, basically like you need to see the, the image, the processing. and yeah, some of it is entirely subjective. Like you might like the way a bar fast cuts between people and you, or you might hate that because you personally don't like it fast cutting between frames as an example. Yeah. Yeah. And I, you know, I mean, security aspects I mean, we want to understand that as much as we can, try to determine if they're obvious vulnerabilities. yeah. Usually with our security practice, we're just kind of playing the mediator, to try to understand what a customer's security posture is. And then advise them on potential challenges with any given product, more so than to kind of recommend them a a full list of security posture and protocol. and then interoperability, I think is important. you know, how are you going to manage and monitor those systems? Can we can we be successful in doing that? And is the API robust enough, to allow us to, to do that for some of these devices? and then finally, I, you know, a third I think is important is what's the rest of the product ecosystem like? We were talking about how important peripherals are. these days. So, you know, for any given manufacturer, what does that roadmap look like? And are they going to continue to augment the solution with, you know, better different peripherals, center of table cameras, a great example, of, a feature that a customer can light up with their existing video bar if they have the right video bar, and if that brand has also released, you know, released to center table camera. So all those kinds of factors, I think we're we're really looking at to understand and help our customers, decide. Yeah, I think that's super important. And there's such high value there because you as you said, I think at the start of our conversation, maybe before we were recording, like, you can't choose these things off a PDF like they it's just it's, you know, sort of meaningless. You could you could set a minimum spec, but you need to understand it. And it's very hard. You know, the very biggest customers do have labs and they get kit and they try it out. But as soon as you go down a tier from that, that they're not going to test out multiple scenarios, multiple systems, whereas you guys can do that once and share that knowledge, which I think is really powerful. Yeah, yeah. Think that's great in that lab has taken on so much. They now do for internal for our engineers. They'll, they'll do a live lab. and again so to kind of show these devices, show the testing, but let our engineers experience what those, those devices are like because we've got, I don't know, over 400 engineers and a lot of technology. It's hard to get everybody in front of everything. Yeah. so that's turned into a, really nice solution there. That the way that the lab supports our company internally. Awesome. So, yeah. as. We wrap this up, Jamie, what about kind of looking to the, a near-term or maybe further term future? What? What's got you excited in the space? You've been in the space for a while. You said, like you've seen things come and go. What's exciting for you at the moment? Yeah. Well, well, let's say let's come back to AI will do that one second. but first, I think including things that I saw at Infocomm this year and ISE in Whisper Suites and NDA. And so these are things that are probably a year out. Yeah. continuing to see more innovation around video. And I think, that's where we, we tend to be lacking. If you think about all the capability that audio has these days, we could translate, we could transcribe, we can attribute who said what. we can provide shortcuts to when did Tom speak versus when the JB speak and what did they say. Pretty amazing stuff. And in my opinion, just my humble opinion. I mean, videos still pretty basic. I mean, we're able to swing cameras and auto track faces, and in some cases we can pick out who's actually in the room. But what I call that window pane of glass at the end of the table, that hasn't changed in 30 plus years, right? Since the advent of PowerPoint. That got us trying to figure out how do we show a computer screen in a conference room to begin with? Right. So I really some of the things that I've seen of, are encouraging that we're going to maybe start to rethink this whole screen at the end of the table idea and come up with more creative ways to again, create more engaging environments, both for who's in the meeting and for the remote participants. And it equally affects both, in my opinion, because you're either the the postage stamp at the end of the table that nobody can make out right or nobody can see your your particular square because there are too many squares on the screen is all kinds of stuff going on. So I think we'll, we'll see a whole lot there and then I mean, but the biggest one and I think about, and at risk of sounding like everybody else talking. About this, I know as soon you say I, I, I'm going to say, well, which, which, which piece because that's the interesting thing, isn't it? Like. How does that affect us? I believe it's AI's ability to support the meeting participants. It's not that it's not the intelligent edge devices. Those are great. They incorporate AI, but the ability to I heard this term recently, the AI meeting manager. Right. So and that's kind of what our experiences, at least my experiences today, the AI tries to recap the meeting at the end, suggests the action items give us insights into what happened, but it doesn't really help us along the way. of the meeting. So I think maybe the next version of of AI and meeting room is the AI meeting. Participant two actually brings value to the meeting and says, well, since we're talking about the fifth floor redesign of the building in London, what would you like to look at the floor plan now? You know, I think that's where we'll get to. And I have some appreciation of how hard that's going to be. I think mostly from a data governance standpoint, that a lot of people don't realize how important the data management is to AI solutions, especially within your own environment. And there are things like, we don't want to ask certain questions. Yeah, yeah. No, for fear of getting an answer that's out there somewhere on the servers. But it probably isn't something that we want to open up to, you know, the general employee community. So, that's what I think the meeting room of the future is probably more on the AI I.T side than the AV innovation side. Don't. What do you think? Yeah, no. It's interesting, I think, the, the AI pieces interesting in multiple way. So I think I'm interested in how it can actually help optimize the AV experience. I know in consumer land, you know, I've got Sonos speakers and stuff like, I, I'm, I'm unsure why that hasn't come to the, like, bar technology yet. It feels like that would be a good way to, you know, set set audio that they put in such challenging scenarios. I'd love to see a bar that scanned the room and said, you've placed this bar for a small room in a hall. It's just not going to work like that. Like help, help people not shoot themselves in the foot. so I think that would be really interesting that the piece you mentioned, the AI in the meeting, I definitely think that's very interesting. Someone or someone, some some AI even taking minutes coaching you along like like maybe coaching presenters as well to help understand, you know, this person hasn't engaged. Give a pause for people to engage with you kind of, kind of like a speaker coach, come, come a meeting. coordinator, I think is really interesting. Yeah, I'd say a lot of meetings that, could use that a stronger moderator, maybe, to keep things on the level, but. Yeah. Have, you know, have you seen or or experimented with any of these personal AI devices? and UC these, like the AI pin? Yeah. No, I haven't had hands on, but I've been watching them say things like the rabbit handheld and the pin. it's interesting. I think it it's very hard to displace the, the hold that the phone has. So I feel like they'll always be accessories to a phone. but I mean, I have the, the Apple Watch. I feel like that that format is going to be the wearable because we're already trained to wear a watch so they can make those watches more, more intelligent then potentially. That's really interesting. But yeah, I'm bullish for something like that in the future, but I think it will be phone based rather than a brand new device potentially. Good. Awesome. Well JB, thanks for taking the time out. I appreciate you jumping on the pod and a massive thanks again to, you know, big support both in front and behind the camera on the Empowering Cloud stuff. I always appreciate the time time you give us to catch me up on what's going on your side of the fence as well. Absolutely. Look, it's a pleasure. I really appreciate you, having me on. And, maybe I'll get, to join again sometime in the future. but, and, happy to, support, Empowering Cloud, who's a great organization, that you all built there. So thank you for that. Great. Thanks a lot.