Video Rooms market perspective and latest news from Jabra with VP of Product, Olly Henderson

Olly Henderson, VP of Product at Jabra, discusses the evolution of meeting room technology and what Jabra is focused on based on customer feedback and insights.

• Launch of Panacast 40 VBS: A new Android bar for enhancing small huddle rooms with affordable, high-quality AV solutions.
• Role of Edge AI: Utilising edge AI for optimal performance and less cloud reliance in Jabra's video solutions.
• Future of BYOD: Jabra enables adaptable BYOD experiences, allowing easy upgrades to native conferencing systems.
• Strategic Collaborations: Leveraging MDEP integration and partnerships to enrich Jabra's enterprise solutions.
• Streamlined Deployment: Reducing costs with zero-touch setup and Jabra Plus management platform improvements.

Thanks to Jabra, this episode's sponsor, for their continued support.

Transcript

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Olly Henderson: I think it's quite exciting. Towards the end of the year, we're gonna have cloud to cloud integrations. So, uh, some of the big partners, the integration partners, uh, will be able to just dovetail straight into the Jabra Plus cloud, which helps them to add services, which helps with the adoption of the devices.

So, um. So many places we want to go and we wanna move so quickly, but you've gotta be thorough, uh, to do this right, uh, in its own way.

Tom Arbuthnot: Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. This week we have Olly Henderson, who is VP of Product at Jabra. A second time Olly's been on the pod. Really interesting conversation about the Jabra portfolio, working with the MDEP team and how MDEP has been received by customers. New devices coming into the Jabra portfolio and a little bit of, uh, what was talked about at InfoComm as well.

Thanks to Olly for taking the time to jump on the pod. Really interesting conversation. Appreciate his perspective on everything that's going on. Many thanks to Jabra as well for all their support of everything we're doing at Empowering.Cloud and with the show. Hey, really welcome back to the podcast, uh, exciting one.

We're talking just after InfoComm. Uh, this is actually a pre record, but we're gonna talk, uh, it's gonna be going out after InfoComm, so I wanna catch up with Olly and get. The latest on what's going on with him and the Jabra space, or it's been a while since we've spoken. How are things, 

Olly Henderson: things are very good.

Uh, great to see you again, mate. It's, uh, a rarity. I'm sat in my home office to talk to you. I'm not. 

Tom Arbuthnot: I know I can't do you. Whenever I talk to you, you're on 

the move. 

Olly Henderson: No, I'm happy about that. Although, uh, as just discussed with you, I am hopping on now. Flight this evening to, uh, back over to the UK for some customer stuff.

So 

Tom Arbuthnot: Nice. 

Olly Henderson: Keeps me busy. Keeps me busy. 

Tom Arbuthnot: So, how are things, last time we spoke, I think we were just on the cusp of the, uh, the VVS 40 announcement. Obviously the, the fifties been in play for a while now. I'm really interested to get your thoughts on like where things are for you and also MDEP first device in market.

Now other devices are coming through. Um, how's that been being kind of, uh, first on the MDEP band wagon? 

Olly Henderson: Mm-hmm. So, great question mate. It's been a really exciting time. Um. Panacast 40 VBS is in its, uh, customer, uh, EAP external acceptance, uh, testing program that we've got going. Uh, so that's coming to market this summer as planned.

Everything's looking nice and stable. Uh, customers are, are very excited about it and very excited on the fact that it's a, an MDEP device. Right. Uh, we're seeing good. Um, success and traction with Panacast 50 VBS certainly increased, increasing month on month, and a lot of that is down to, uh, the MDEP architecture that it relies on.

You know, last time we talked about this talk track that some of the world's largest companies have had, where they've been very eager to get onto an Android path, but because of different InfoSec requirements, because everyone's running their own. Uh, platform. Their internal InfoSec teams have just struggled with that a little bit.

Hmm. MDEP seems to have taken away that fear somewhat. So that's played right into our hands and, uh, it's very surprising the amount of companies that are looking to chop and change from, uh, an MTRW environment. And they're seeing this as the natural segway into, uh, MTRA. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it's interesting for you 'cause you get to see both sides of the fence with the, uh.

The windows and, and now the Android. And it's, uh, interesting as well, the 40 like, uh, a really, uh, aggressive price point, I think for what you get in the box there. Are you seeing that play through Microsoft have always said, like, if we can get more aggressive price, people are gonna do lots more rooms.

Olly Henderson: Yeah. I, I, I don't think you can ignore the value proposition there. Uh, something that we were quite stringent about was to get it at a, at a very, uh, aggressive price point. I think, um, you know, that. The goal at launch was, uh, at, uh, 14.99 for the bar stand only, uh, SKU in, in, in the us. Uh, unfortunately that's gone up a little bit because of our friend ask you, because there's 

Tom Arbuthnot: been some pretty, pretty massive world events that have, uh, hit everybody.

Yeah. 

Olly Henderson: A few details here and there. Uh, but no, we've still managed to, uh, to keep that nice and, and, and tight. And that'll be coming up 16.99 for the bar only SKU, little over 20.00 with a controller in there. So that's, uh, super positive. Right? Um, and it's compelling. I. That's what customers are saying to us.

That price point, allowing to say, to do rooms of up six people at that sort of dollar amount with the inbuilt android compute platform, uh, let's not forget that a lot of the guys are more than happy to deploy this as BYOD device. Uh, even in rooms where they're not quite sure at this moment in time that they wanna.

Add, uh, a license to it. It gives them that flexibility and I'm, I'm telling you now sure. As night followers day, when they get it into those rooms, then they will, uh, add that license on top. And it's super easy to do. No rewiring, no changing of the room to apology, just dropping the license onto, onto the bar and activating Teams Rooms for Android or, or zoomin, depending on whatever your flavor is.

Tom Arbuthnot: It's great to have that flexibility. And that's another thing that, um, again, Microsoft has said is like, if you've got the option, go with something certified with ready to go and then make your choice based on usage. And with the Microsoft in the BYD mode, you get those usage reports so you can start to say, okay, these are the high usage rooms that warrant that extra experience and extra license.

Olly Henderson: No, exactly right. And, uh, we see that as a large path to success. Uh, lots of customers, especially in the focus on hover rooms using BYOD, but now we can start to offer them very competitively value driven solutions, uh, which allow them to have BYOD mode, which can then become full MTRA or uh, MTRW, dependent on what derivatives that you go for.

So that is something that's certainly working well. I think the, uh, the latest requests that we're getting in from customers are those that are looking to move to. Great. You've got MDEP, great. You've got 40 in the small room. Fantastic. 50 into the medium room. We've got some nice new toys coming out.

You know, we've got our own scheduling panel coming out towards the end of the year, which again, is gonna be on MDEP. And then the conversation naturally goes to, um, larger rooms on Android. How do we get to those rooms of 20 people? And, um, you know, that's where we are. Uh, I can share with, uh, our NDA customers that we're certainly looking at that and have got some great solutions coming.

To market for that over the course of the next 12 months where we can actually really step into the large room space, look after 20 people comfortably on an Android platform. And, um, whilst there are some out, out there doing that nicely, I don't think there's too many doing that very well, especially not on the MDMDEP platform as well.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, that's interesting. So you've kind of gone for the, the, the middle with the, uh, VBS 50, then gone to the, like, smaller option, super cost effective, and, and now you're rounding out the portfolio or heading in that direction to the larger room so you can go full, full Android and all these different scenarios.

Olly Henderson: Well, it's gotta be done. You know, that, that they, they, you've gotta follow, uh, for all sorts of reasons. You've gotta follow the money, right? We're, we're all businesses, so you've gotta go for the volumes and the volume certainly is in that smaller space. Yeah. But that's also the pain point for the customers as well, right?

That's also like the, the vast majority of their rooms, the focus in huddle rooms. So we're addressing that. As well as the medium room. And then we're looking at a two-step approach to start to get into, uh, the larger spaces. How do we get audio further into the room without giving too much away? So that'll be happening.

And then how do we get video further into the room as well? 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, there's some interesting stuff. Uh, yeah, not, not really to talk about publicly gateway. It's interesting where Android is getting more and more capable, uh uh, and working with third parties and partners and doing some clever stuff. We've seen it as well with other OEMs, like where you can start to really, traditionally it was like, oh, you wanted to go bigger, more complex.

That was a default windows. Whereas now it's getting more compelling to have both options on the table. 

Olly Henderson: It is, it is. And you know, look, at the end of the day, we've just gotta be mindful of what, what the customer would like. And there's gonna be lots of MTRW environments that are happy on MTRW. We've got another big event happening this year, haven't we?

Where, uh, windows 10, uh, systems have been deprecated. Uh, yes, they'll be supported for a while longer, but. It's front and center, right? 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. You've 

Olly Henderson: had the big A OSP change over, so these things are starting to gather momentum. I think Microsoft has done a cracking job as well of improving the Android experience.

You know, you can remotely, as I found out to my cost, Tom, you can remotely change the wallpaper on your, um, Android controller and, uh, splash screen in the background, uh, through teams because, uh. One of my engineers lovingly changed it to my least favorite football club or my, uh, arch enemy, Sunland. But yeah, you can do clever things like that, which is starting to show that Android is maturing and it's taking it to a place that, um, is usable.

Uh, you know, you've got, um, PTC camera controls now and uh, teams, rooms for Android. It, it's getting there nicely. Yeah. The in speaker as well, 

Tom Arbuthnot: which again, you were, you were first to do that on the windows, uh, bar. Now being able to do it on any Android device. So even that, the BBS 40, you get the intelligent speaker through virtue of Microsoft doing it on the cloud processing side, which is exciting.

Mm-hmm. 

Olly Henderson: A hundred percent. So I just, I just see it, uh, you know, continuing to gather momentum. Uh, we, we've seen the guys at, um, InfoComm, so, uh, you know, it's always good to spend some time with the EP team. Uh, as you know, with Microsoft, everyone's split into so many teams that you've got Ilias guys and the Endep guys and everyone, but I think they're starting to be a lot more cohesive as well, and work, uh, and starting to knock over some obstacles together to, to move things forward.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, they seem really practical. We just had Chris on the podcast. It hasn't gone out yet, but it goes out before this one. And um, yeah, he was saying about how it really is a, um, a, a relationship journey with the chip set of vendors, obviously with the open source project and with the OEMs and device manufacturers all working together to kind of, um, get the requirements and make sure they're, 'cause they're ultimately there to serve you guys in this context to be the OS which you build on top of.

Olly Henderson: Yeah. Without any shadow of a doubt. And, uh, they're proving to be very good partners as well. Uh, and, um, it's a, it's a two-way street of learning. You know, it's still relatively, uh, fresh on that journey. Mm-hmm. Feels like we've been working on it for years, but, uh, and we kind of have, but you know, it's, uh, in terms of market, uh, residents, it's just starting to reach good maturity now, but loads of interest.

And we're really, we're really happy with the move that we made. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. And talk to me about the panel. Is that a case of, again, filling out the portfolio conversation of customers wanting that option and having it all from from one OEM. 

Olly Henderson: Absolutely. So with Panas 40 VBS, we were able to bring a, uh, new controller, new Android controller, uh, for the room.

So, uh, this time it's got multiple uses. Uh, so the new controller will obviously be coming to market with Panas 40 VBS. It can control the PANAS 50 VBS as well. And, uh, it can also have another functionality of being the scheduler outside the room where we've got multiple different mounting options. Uh, and you can turn that into a teams panel or a Zoom panel, uh, whatever your, uh, flavor of choice is.

And we're just gonna start off, uh, slow and steady, uh, to begin with, with just those two options. Then we'll start to build out, uh, the plan is, you know, there's lots of good scheduling and workplace, uh, facilities management platforms out there. So we'll start to, uh, build that out. As time comes and as customers bring those requests to us.

But I think it's a, you know, Jimmy Bourne's always evangelized very well the importance of the scheduling panel outside the room, and it's a segue into potentially getting technology into those rooms as well. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, it's a nice option with the, with the BYD shared device license as well. You can have the, the panel and have the device in BYOD mode, and then you are still ready if you later want to step up to MTR, you've, you've got the panel to use that use case as well.

Olly Henderson: I think that's exactly right and it gives us some nice, uh, opportunity as well to, uh, start to give some, uh, good innovation on the BYOD side. You know, as we look at future facing BYOD modes that we are gonna do on our devices or I. Maybe even future facing BYOD devices. How do you get that BYOD device interfacing nicely with the scheduling panel outside the room so that if people aren't using the room, it gets released back into the pool?

All of the above. You know, it gives, it gives nice angles to be able to bring some value, uh, to customers and, and how they want digest their video. We're still seeing lots and lots of BYOD uh, in those, especially in those focus on huddles as well. Yeah. 

Tom Arbuthnot: And when, when I buy a a, a bar for Deborah in BYOD mode, is there a pricing or licensing difference or how, how would I move from one to the other if I said I'm doing a thousand BY Ds, and actually I'm gonna pick.

200 next, next six months to jump up to MTR mode? 

Olly Henderson: Yeah. No, there's no price difference. I mean, they, there's uh, different kus that we have that's mainly partner driven from a platform, you know, Microsoft, like Aku and Zoom, like ku. So it gives our operations people just in case they didn't have enough to do some.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We always want more. So you could, one could technically just purchase vanilla SKUs that arrive in the BYOD, then go through the factory reset and turn those into Teams Rooms. Uh, should you want to, but yeah, that, that's part of the strategy, definitely. And part of this, like why the value price point was so important and being able to deliver.

Um, full MDEP functionality, full Android functionality onto a bar that could be in its first instance, deployed as A-B-Y-O-V bar at a price point that wasn't too petrifying to people. Yeah. 

Tom Arbuthnot: And how, how, how is it out there? Like, like it's a really competitive space and again, off the back of Incom there's been.

More announcements and a couple more, a couple more MDEP partners with Kit in Market. You've obviously got a lot of experience in this space. Like what, what's it, what's it feel like out there? 

Olly Henderson: It feels like MDEPs certainly going, um, a lot more traction, a lot more, um. Buy in definitely from customers.

Um, I think the more people that we get on the MD platform, the better we could be told. I think it makes things, uh, a little more scalable. Um, so people can choose their method of deployment or their OEM of deployment. Is there going with, um. And that keeps us honest as well. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. 

Olly Henderson: Right. So, you know, we have to innovate, we have to improve our Android offering.

We have to get things better. And I think, uh, yeah. I welcome with Open Arms. Anyone that's moving onto, uh, the MDEP platform. You know, I think we've got some, I. Some good audio people coming on there, some good peripheral, um, screen sharing people coming on there, you know, so it's an interesting, uh, mix of people, obviously yealink on the, on the video side.

Um, and I noticed they've got a new bar that's also coming to, uh, Endep as well. So, yeah, I, I, I think the more partners that come on board with it. The greater the, uh, acceptance will be and the faster the adoption will be. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Nice. And uh, how much have you seen of the management platform as in, you know, your management platform or others being part of that conversation around devices?

Olly Henderson: Yeah, I mean, management is, is key, right? You've got, um, let's look at a couple of different situations. So in a pure Teams or Zoom, uh, setting, you've obviously got pro management portal with. Better licensing, uh, should you want to call it that. And also with ZDM, you've got, uh, great management through Zoom, but really it's a, it, it's still at the point where how do you get down into that granular control of, um, the devices, right?

So you may, I, I think from a lot of the organizations that I speak to, people kind of live day to day in there. Pro management portal and they see their alerts and they see there might be a problem. And then when they actually want to change device level settings, they hop off onto the OEM management platform place.

Yeah. And Jabra Plus is, is growing really nicely. You know, it's, um, been a long journey. We've had management platforms for years with the headsets and obviously with Panacast 50 originally, but we, we realized we needed to create a whole new management platform with Jabra Plus. Uh, they've got Panacast 50, Panacast 50 VBS Panacast, 40 BBS will be on it.

We're starting, it's starting to look and feel a lot grown up. You can have regions of the world, you can split it into different geographies. You've got different access, right. We've got SSO, all of these things take time to, to bring to maturity and, and bring on, but we're really, um, building an enterprise level platform now.

I think it's quite exciting. Towards the end of the year, we're gonna have cloud to cloud integrations. So, uh, some of the big partners, the integration partners, uh, we'll be able to just dovetail straight into the Jabra Plus cloud, which helps them to add services, which helps with the adoption of the. So many places we want to go and we wanna move so quickly, but you've gotta be thorough, uh, to do this right, uh, in its own way.

But yeah, we, we just hear time and time again. Management is, is key. You know, and I mentioned to you earlier, I'm heading back to the UK for a, a big customer meeting with RFI and I know there's gonna be a good, a good hour of that around management platforms of the devices. What does. What does the, um, platform device management do versus the manufacturer device management particularly 

Tom Arbuthnot: interesting in the BYOD scenario or the mix scenario?

I've got some BYOD and I've got some, uh, native, as you say, like in the BYOD mode. I think that's the biggest difference of this gen of BYOD. It's not the BYOD of old actually having. Remote access to, to patch and upgrade and manage and set things and maybe other capabilities in the future. It gives a whole different level of power to BYOD versus a, you know, a webcam on a cable kind of thing.

Olly Henderson: Mate, I think it's a great call out and it's just, I. It's almost become table stakes. You know, I think gone that we've seen some incredibly successful BYOD devices in the market over the last 10 years that weren't really manageable. You couldn't really see what was going on in the rooms. You couldn't see where they were deployed.

Uh, organizations just aren't gonna stand for that anymore. Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm hearing that 

Tom Arbuthnot: for the first time in the last couple of years from enterprises, and it's not even the collab team, it's the InfoSec team. They're like, we can't have. Devices knocking around that, that that may or may not be patched, that who knows, who even knows what they, you know, what they are anymore.

Um, so actually it's the, it's been the InfoSec team pushing for managed device even in the BYOD setting. 

Olly Henderson: Absolutely. And I think that, uh, the InfoSec team and the facilities teams, you know, life is expensive. We all feel it from, from our own pockets when we get paid all the way through to giant corporate selling billions of dollars.

The world costs a lot of money now and space costs a lot of money. And they need to know what's going on in their spaces, what devices are in the spaces, how many people are using those rooms. This is, this is table stakes at this point. And you know, this is definitely, uh, as we think of devices and how they come together, these are the bare minimums we've gotta put in place, uh, moving forward.

Tom Arbuthnot: And, and what are you seeing from customers in terms of, uh, as much as you can share with the VBS 40? 'cause you do like a, a really thorough in-house process then I know. You see to kind of customers and it's, it's often I've heard from kind of Josh and, and Mike, it's not always customers that are like, gimme customers.

Actually, you want to give it to some of those customers that really. Push the devices. What does that process look like before you are happy to, to launch? 

Olly Henderson: So, early adopter programs are fun. Uh, feedback's, feedback's a gift, but it's not necessarily a gift that you want all the time, you know? Um, and you want it, you, you definitely want some.

It's all very nice when someone's like, oh, this is great. The video quality was great. It was super easy to set up out the box. And it's like, okay, fantastic. It's not actually that useful though, is 

Tom Arbuthnot: it? 'cause he's like, well, yeah, we think it's great. You think it's great? Like, tell me what, tell, tell me what you wanna say.

Yeah. 

Olly Henderson: Um, you, you much kind of prefer the feedback from that, that. Thorny old AV guy that's been in a business for years and was like, I couldn't do this. This was a struggle. This was difficult. Yeah. I think your TX audio's phenomenal. I think your RX is okay. You need to do some work on it. I noticed some, you know, noise in the picture and certainly, uh, towards the end of the day when the ambient light conditions from outside lighting got lower.

That's the golden feedback. That's the, um, almost as, uh. Quantitative as we could give to our engineers to go back and say, this is what they said, you might not like it, but let's have another look at this piece as well. So, um, those programs, uh, our ours is running for eight weeks on this one, as in an external one.

Internally it's been months. Uh, but yeah, we, we try to put a good time box. Obviously Microsoft do their TAP program as well. Uh, so, you know, it allows us to get lots of data points where we can aggregate. How the device is looking. And, uh, we've already, I, I was doing our pi uh, prioritization planning this morning with r and d.

Engineering and we, we already know what the first value packs or firmware upgrades are gonna be for the device where we can improve it even more. So, uh, yeah, they positive programs, a 

Tom Arbuthnot: track record to uphold there with the, like if you look at the, the devices you brought a lot. To them over the lifecycle.

So, uh, 

Olly Henderson: yeah. Did you feel a bit 

Tom Arbuthnot: of pressure there to keep bringing your new capability through? No pressure mate. 

Olly Henderson: Pressure makes diamonds and all of that? No. Obviously there's, um, there's a lot of pressure to bring, I. Look, Panas 50 VBS is an outstanding device. It definitely didn't come to market at a level we would've liked and that that store on the software side, and that's part of our growth.

It was our first Android bar. An incredible amount of work went to to it, and there was some low hanging fruit that we missed. Now if you think of how we're now making Android devices, we. Which is our Android video device architecture, right? The hard work that we put in in P 50 over the last two years instantly migrates onto P 40 VBS.

You know, we've got the Qualcomm chip set manufacturer. This is where life becomes. Easier. I'm sure a thousand engineers at Java would kick me for saying that. Yeah. Um, easy, uh, not easy, just easy, easy. Um, but that's the benefit and the beauty of how we're thinking about things. So this is why we align so closely with Qualcomm.

This is why we invest in good quality processes that are very future facing for provisions. So that.

Functionality from P 50 onto pbs. We can make something for P 40 vbs, which goes backwards onto P 50 vbs. It becomes a lot more fun as the uh, portfolio grows. We're also looking to do quite a lot of work on our, on our embedded software side. You know, we've got, uh, Jabra os, um, which is our own operating system layer that resides on top of the m debt platform.

That's our secret source. That's our differentiation. That's what we do. And, um, you know. We'll be looking to round that out as a, as, as a more complete software offering, if that makes sense. So yeah, we often talk about value packs. Does anyone have a clue what a value pack is compared to mean? With all due due respect?

Tom Arbuthnot: I do spend a lot of my time when I'm talking about your stuff being like, value pack slash firmware update. Like, like just. There we are. I think, I think the marketing intent is good, right? 'cause you do bring actual new features. Uh, but yeah, I do find myself saying firmer update. 

Olly Henderson: And I think that's where we're trying to get to, mate.

You know, we, we hear those pain points we see, I see the confusion when I'm with customers that are in for calling, like, oh, value pack, whatever, and they're just blank. Um, so yeah, these are the small lessons learning. This is where we're growing on the journey and it's really exciting. Uh, it'd be great to get to a point where in Jabra version.

Four point, whatever. These are, the new features come out and, and it becomes, it rolls off the tongue. It's a more elegant story. Yeah. Some people, yeah. It's interesting to hear 

Tom Arbuthnot: differentiation on top of MDEP as well. 'cause that was a good conversation I had with Chris on the MDEP team was that there's a, there's a kind of a, a, a, a talk in the industry of world.

Does MDEP commoditize the functionality across all the devices? But actually you've got. Option as an OEM, then to add your own secret sauce and do your clever stuff with audio, your clever stuff with video, whatever it may be, 

Olly Henderson: a hundred percent. And, you know, uh, look, m deck's the base layer. And then, uh, everyone, you know, Yelin will have their own stuff on top of it.

We will have our own stuff, uh, and whoever else comes to the party will have theirs. Um, and I think that allows for that innovation. It allows for us to. Continue to, uh, take some strides forward on, uh, just listening to customers and, and what, what do they actually want? But I, to that point, and this is a whole other episode, we could do what, what do customers want?

I feel that this jazz about multiple streams and everyone having Hollywood squares and this, that and the other is, is kind of fading a little bit and people just expect excellence. Great audio, great video. If it's got intuitive things such as people's names in a room it has to work. But then there's learning about GDPR and ea, not everyone's enable.

Yeah. It's harder in 

Tom Arbuthnot: Europe that that whole conversation about, uh, voice enrollment, face enrollment recognition Yeah. 

Olly Henderson: Is tougher over here. And there's 1,001 great ideas that we'll just never get off the ground because it's, it's getting a bit close to personal data and really asking people to, to sign up.

So. That's a, that's a great talk track and something we could spend hours on, uh, 101 great ideas that probably could just never make it because you are really getting into the realms of personal data. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, yeah. But I think you're right on the, um, the excellence and the fundamentals and the audio and the video quality and like, actually I definitely, if I had to generalize talking to the AV side of the house, it's quality and stability first before.

Any other clever feature every day of the week, I think it get a bit more excited about features 'cause we're kind of, of that world and it's, it's striking a balance. 'cause you do want to get some of that cleverness in there, but never at the expense of stability or quality. 

Olly Henderson: No. And um, you know, we've been very guilty, um, uh, in our early days of having some outstanding features and innovation that were just very hard to turn on.

Scale or deploy at scale. It's easy when you are an engineer looking at a great concept and you're like, oh, you have to do this, this, and this to turn this on. But times up by a thousand. Yeah. Times up by several time zones. How do you, how do you turn that feature on? How do you gain value from it? And it's amazing.

You've gotta be careful because we've had certain features that haven't come to market where we've shown them to customers and they've loved the feature, but then when you've taken them through the onboarding steps, they're like. It's just not gonna fly. It's not worth it. And then a feature can suddenly become a detractor.

So there's a, there's a fine balancing act with a lot of these things. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Interesting. 

Olly Henderson: Mm. But awesome. You know, 

Tom Arbuthnot: I think, I think I appreciate you, uh, being so transparent with us and going under the covers. It's really interesting to hear the, the, the kind of how the decisions are made and what the priorities are.

Olly Henderson: Yeah, no, I, it, it's not, not everything is as straightforward as it seems, but that's kind of the, the good positive challenge of what we do. We class ourselves as, as strong innovators and, uh, we will continue to make great strides forward. But yeah, maybe, maybe there's reasons why things that seem patently obvious don't sometimes happen.

Interesting. Interesting. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Well, Olly, thanks for taking the time, uh, excited about the, uh, the, the, the 14 not being far out and the new, uh, panel. Yeah. We're really excited to bring 

Olly Henderson: it to you guys. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I know there's some exciting stuff we're gonna talk about in the future as well, so, we'll, we'll hold on that for the next one, but, uh, appreciate you taking time, mate.

Olly Henderson: Wonderful. Appreciate it Tom. Thanks so much. Look forward to seeing you soon. Cheers.