Microsoft Devices Ecosystem Platform (MDEP) Explained

Yoav Barzilay, Microsoft Senior Product Manager, explains the Microsoft Devices Ecosystem Platform (MDEP) and how it fits in the Microsoft Teams devices ecosystem.

• Microsoft Devices Ecosystem Platform (MDEP) is a distribution of Android Open Source Platform (AOSP) from Microsoft
• MDEP aims to provide a unified platform OEMs can choose to build on for collaboration devices
• MDEP focuses on security and manageability
• MDEP can be used as an OS for collaboration apps in addition to Microsoft Teams
• The future of MDEP includes expanding into other use cases

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

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Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. Great topic. This week we are talking about MDEP the Microsoft devices ecosystem platform. My guest is Yoav Barzilay. He's a PM on that team. And we get into what MDEP is, where it plays in the Teams ecosystem and what the future plans are for MDEP as well. Many thanks to Yoav all for making the time to come on the pod, and also many thanks to Jabra. This month's podcast sponsor really appreciate their support. On with the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to the pod. I've been looking forward to this one. This is a hot topic in our space at the moment. I've got my friend, Yoav Barzilay. we go back a bit in, previous technologies. now he's, the person to talk to, I think around MDEP So, Yoav, do you want to just, introduce yourself or maybe give us a little bit background about your your backstory because it's quite interesting. Yeah. Well, first, Tom, thank you so much for having me here. always a pleasure to meet with you. And chat about technology. so I have been working at Microsoft for the past eight years. we met, I think, back in the days of OCS and Lync. and then the whole journey towards Skype for Business, and now Teams. recently I moved to the MDEP team, the Microsoft Device Ecosystem platform team, and I PM our collaboration distro, for that purpose. previously before that role, I was, leading some of our surface hub efforts. And I think that's where most of my, community relations have come from. but, yeah, that's where we are here today. I'm super excited to to talk about MDEP today. Awesome. So, MDEP the Microsoft Devices ecosystem platform is a bit of a mouthful. maybe for, for those who are not familiar, maybe you could talk us through what it is, what the thinking behind it is. We'll we'll start there. Microsoft Device Ecosystem platform is the AOSP. So the Android open source platform, version of Microsoft. Microsoft is not new to the Android ecosystem. we've developed a lot for Android. we have over 2500 engineers worldwide working on and for Android. so we're pretty much, very well invested in this area. MDEP has started, working on collaboration devices 18 months ago. we have announced very early on in stage that we're partnering with Jabra and Qualcomm for our first device. and only a few months ago at Enterprise Connect, we announced a strategic partnership with Yealink as well in our expansion, to offer SoCs from media, tech and rock chips so we can expand our platform and give our own OEMs and partners, the ability to provide more devices and have MDEP on their, greater portfolio of devices. so, yeah, we we are working to improve, the collaboration experience and the go to market times for our partners and customers. I think the charter we have, I think I know that the charter we have for our devices, is that we want to provide a, a unified platform for manufacturers to say we don't need to do the heavy lifting of the platform anymore. We can invest now in our unique IP and what differentiates us. And we will let Microsoft do the platform heavy lifting for us, and that's what we're offering them. As a matter of fact. So Android's a really interesting space. Obviously there's, you know, like in the billions of users of Android. And when most people think of Android, they think about maybe the, you know, a phone with Android and, and the Google Store stuff, but there's also Android, the open source project, and then people take that open source project and they do different things with it. Maybe you could explain that better than me, how that world hangs together. I hope I can. So if you look at the variety of, even collaboration devices we have today, you're you're familiar with that? market better than me for sure. So you will have, multiple vendors, multiple OEMs, and each one would have their version of Android, running on their devices. They would all invest and have invested a lot in making their flavor of AOSP, of the open source Android operating system. very good. and we have heard from customers that they do like that flexibility. They do like the ability to customize it. They do like that it's lighter and recessed consumption. And the end customers love that. It's usually cheaper, than buying other operating systems. what we have done is we have invested in the same AOSP code, but added the experience we have at Microsoft, to add security, to add manageability to add accessibility to it. and to we definitely hope that we're bringing added value into the AOSP, platform, into the AOSP ecosystem and definitely into our ecosystem, as we move forward. Yeah, I mean, it's great to see Microsoft investing in that. That number of engineers working on it is really exciting, too. And it's kind of part of this bigger movement around Microsoft about being, you know, cloud first, multi-platform, investing in open source, all that, that movement that's been happening over the years. This feels like a a continuation of that. Is that fair? Yeah. And don't forget that, our latest phone was launched on Android. The my the Surface Duo is the world's first, world's first, dual display device or dual display phone. and we did launch it on Android. obviously Android has been in Microsoft for a while, but this is a new project and a new take on it, bringing it to the OEMs for this. You know, Microsoft Teams, Teams and Android use case is really interesting. What what today and what in the future do you see Microsoft bringing in terms of value to AOSP? I'm guessing you know that the security tools, the other bits and pieces, what's that story? So security, obviously is our first big concern. And we want to make sure that every device we ship, is secure and resilient and reliable. we are also looking at improving the way we deploy devices, from zero touch deployment. and to, how do we address 802.1x and zero trust networks, how these devices can easily or better integrate into the network? we are definitely looking at a better manageability story. and an open manageability. We're not going to tie this into Intune only or Microsoft only services. The idea behind, our platform is that it is open. It is manageable by any. It is it is agnostic. you can manage it with any solution you have today. so we want to improve again security, deployment, manageability, definitely monitoring. and AI, we want to introduce AI management. So the device or the, the services around the device will help you, make sure that, you know, if a camera is not working, for example, in the conference room, can we restart the service is just something that we can do. you know, to fix it proactively. I'm sorry. And then notify the admins. and obviously having Copilot running on these devices or having the foundation for, OEMs and apps providers and VAS providers, to infuse their AI services on the device itself. Yeah. There's two things you touched on that I think particularly interesting and good to hear is one, like, people might think it's coming from Microsoft, so it's going to be tightly or exclusively tied into an Intune story or a Microsoft security story. So knowing that you're making a platform that is. It will be tied to a Microsoft security story, that's for sure. our security story is very important for us. We make sure when we, when we work with our partners that we have everything as secure as we can to deliver the level of security that our enterprise customers and our commercial customers are expecting from Microsoft and from every device that they deploy in their network. at the same time, it's very important for us that the device can be used by anyone and everyone. It is important for us to make sure that no matter where you are, you can deploy that device, no matter what management solution or what deployment solution you use that you can use these devices in the secure and productive way that you want. Yeah. That's good. Yeah, that's a good clarification folks. I'm thinking. So it's going to be Microsoft security story. But you don't you it's for whatever use case you wouldn't necessarily have to be using the Microsoft management story. It could be another business management story. You're owning whatever it might be. Yeah. We again the the idea is that the platform is a platform and you can install any app you want on the device. as long as it meets the, minimum security requirements. And that that's another key point. I've heard different conversations there. There's a maybe an assumption that, again, because Microsoft are building it, they're building this for MTR so, we'll only MTRs here. But actually the MDEP team is different to the Teams team. Is that right? Yes. We obviously we we we are all under the same umbrella. of course we have very good, very good relationships, with the Teams team. We love working with them. we drive each other's success in many ways. at the same time, our platform is not made for Teams only. We are working. And all of the OEMs we work with, they work with multiple VAS providers, and they run multiple apps on their devices. We're here to serve exactly that. That's good to hear. and I'm I'm guessing you can fill me in. There's some things if we go to the MTR use cases and things you can do at the OS level that you couldn't do without the Teams team can't do it the app level. So it gives potentially in time a fuller story of, like you say, management, monitoring control because Microsoft will be, you know, responsible for the operating system and in the MTR use case responsible for the apps as well. Yeah. So we're getting a lot of feedback from our customers, from our Teams, customers as well, and into what they want the platform to do. we're trying to integrate as much as we can into it. again, this is a marathon. Not everything will be available in the next 3 or 6 months. but we're definitely collecting the feedback, and we're definitely working along with that feedback to make sure that every pain point that the customers have today is something we can address in the future. That's awesome. I'm thinking further forward and share as much as you can, or you go, let me know if you can't what a use case is you're thinking about. For MDEP at beyond MTR Where do you see, Android devices in your house today? Tom? Where don't where don't you see Android devices I think is a better question right they’re everywhere. Obviously we want to continue and scale into the collaboration space. and there's more to come. So, let's have this conversation in six months time and see what we're going. I'm going to hold you to that. I'm going to time it. That's great. I appreciate you sharing. I like obviously for people who want to understand more, there's documentation on learn now so that there's some good, good detail there. I think is there anything else you want people to know about MDEP or you think they should find out more? first of all, yeah, we have all of our architecture and documentation available for anyone to, educate themselves if they want at aka.ms/MDEP, I wanted to put the full name. They didn't let me. So we'll just go with MDEP app. I think that was. The right move. we are going to share a few more news. at Infocom. So, if you're there and if the if anyone is there, first of all, come say hi. It'll be great to, to meet with some folks. but, yeah, there's there's a lot more to share. we will continue to share news as, as we expand and as we grow and as the platform scales, and then we introduce more features. we will share this in the blog. So aka.ms/MDEPblog, and we will continue to, get our feedback from, from the community and get our feedback from the customers and our partners, to make a better platform for everyone. Awesome. Well, yeah. I appreciate you jumping on the pod. And, yeah, it's an exciting area. I'm really excited to see what comes and, hold you to the the six months we'll get back together and, This one, I'm sure we'll have a lot to share. And as usual, Tom, thanks for having me. It's it's always great to talk with you and share the really exciting things we're doing. I appreciate it. Talking soon. Thanks, everybody. Thank you.