ONE MILLION Meetring Rooms (#MicrosoftTeams)

Microsoft announced it was what we beleive to be the first Meetings provider to reach one million connected meeting rooms. Just for fun, it also dropped that it has 20 million PSTN users! HUGE. The two Daves discuss the accomplishment, what it tells us, and what it doesn't reveal. 
Episode adapted from this video discussion: https://www.youtube.com/live/MhW_ETMfF8c?si=88DOkXsa0jrLV4ak

Episode Transcript

Unknown (00:00):
okay

Dave Michels (00:21):
welcome to Talking Heads the informative,
entertaining and brilliantpodcast on enterprise
communications from the team attalking points.
Welcome, today, Michael sometalking points and with I don't
know if I should call you aguest. I don't know what the

(00:42):
right term is contributor goescoconspirator colleague,
whatever. But I'm with Davedownto. Welcome, Dave,

Unknown (00:50):
thank you give us a few months, we'll figure out what
the right terminology is rightnow we're just kind of winging,
it just

Dave Michels (00:54):
kind of winging it. But welcome to Talking
Points, Dave. And what I thoughtwe would talk about here is
we're just putting together the,the incentive report, but we're
just finishing it up here. Andwe've had some dialogue and
conversation. So I thought wewould talk about some of these
Microsoft announcements thatcame out their quarter quarterly
results. And it's always, it'salways nice when Microsoft gives

(01:17):
us little teams. Numbers,because they don't normally
share these numbers. They keepthem locked in a vault, and
little

Unknown (01:26):
nuggets of information every once in a

Dave Michels (01:28):
while you least expected and just drop this
dropsies the numbers, and you'renot the same numbers right
there. Like sometimes thismonthly active users something
totally sort of different. Thiswas a new one this I never heard
this one before. But apparently,you actually this may be the
first time they've shared, butthey shared that teams has
reached a major milestone of 1million teams meeting rooms

(01:53):
connected. Well, let's

Unknown (01:54):
actually pause and congratulate them, even though
we're about to spend the nextyou know, three hours tearing
those numbers apart. But But letme pause and say, Look, that's
it for the industry where youknow, it was hard to do anything
in video, and you have toconvince people to turn their
cameras on and you know, all thethings that we live through, you
know, that's, that's a it's anincredible number to fathom.

(02:15):
Now, you have to give kudos towhat they've done. They've
become the de facto product inthe collaboration space and in
the video space.

Dave Michels (02:22):
You know, it's an absolutely fair point. I you
know, you know, Sesame Streetsays, you know, this was brought
to you by the letter, the letterT or something. Microsoft Teams
was brought to you by COVIDCOVID changed everyone's
expectations and user patterns,and themes was in the right
place at the right time. AndMike, and given credit,

(02:42):
Wednesday, it wasn't luck,Microsoft doubled down and
really built that product out.
And, you know, now now onlinemeetings have suddenly become
normal. Your point was, youknow, I went hate going on
video, I don't want to be invideo, all that stuff. All those
little conversations are gone.
It's just kind of a normal thingnow. And so they're celebrating

(03:02):
with this major milestone ofbutton quotes, major milestone
and 1 million users. So one ofthe users 1 million meeting
rooms meaning so I guess myfirst question is, Dave, you've
been in video, what 6070 years?

Unknown (03:23):
Let's say for decades and leave it at that before.
Okay.

Dave Michels (03:27):
And you didn't say 44. And I met you when you were
a Cisco guy at Dimension Data,doing consulting with Dimension
Data video. So my question is,if I would have asked you then,

(03:48):
let's say your Dimension Data,Cisco years, if I told you that
a vendor will have a millionmeeting rooms in their future,
who would you have guessed? Thatwould have been?

Unknown (04:02):
Wow, that's a good question. You know, at the time,
it was like a Polycom world withCisco making inroads. And then
there was a whole telepresencephenomenon, I probably would
have picked one of those twocompanies, Microsoft, you know,
for the longest time, theMicrosoft, people in the space,
were sticking, you know, a C 930or some other teeny webcam

(04:23):
between two flat screens andcalling it a meeting room and it
was the laughingstock ofeverybody in AV so you know, I
don't think they've ever changedtheir position. It's just the
cameras got better and thesoftware got better so now now
they're able to do it and youknow, it's it's it's a
tremendous milestone, and it'snot something anybody would have
expected in terms of the way wewere looking at the space and

(04:45):
2006 2007 I mean, Cisco for awhile there with them. I forget
the name of the product whereyou pick up the phone and the
video just pops up onto yourscreen automatically. There were
a lot of people that reallyliked using that there are a lot
of people that hated it, becausethey know what their video to
come Um, I didn't expect it youknow, that's where you started.

Dave Michels (05:02):
Turtle. Right? It was it only worked with your
calling internally it did thatit didn't do the Fair's fair, a
million is a lot of meetingrooms is there's no question
about that. No, the big changes,though, as I think about how
about that question I just askedyou is, in those days, we didn't
really know, we didn't know howmany meeting rooms there were, I

(05:23):
mean, because because you soldsomething and you don't know
whether it was was stayed inservice, if it ever got
installed, you just don't knowif a new system replaced it.
Were in the cloud world that welive in today with Microsoft
Teams, they actually know ifthings are being used. So in
theory, they didn't really havemuch detail on their
announcement. But in theory,these are a million active

(05:47):
meeting rooms. And so

Unknown (05:49):
I'll tell you two stories with that very briefly,
when I was working in financialservices, and we're building out
the Cisco TelePresence rooms, wehad some major software issues,
pending on the nascent productthat it was, and we needed to
like roll out something to allthe rooms. And when we did that,
we wanted to check to see ifthey were working. And we asked
Cisco, how do you check if yourrooms are working? So we don't?

(06:11):
So you know, there was thismystery, there were all these
hundreds of rooms, but nobodyreally knew what it was. And
honestly, with today's numbers,even though we're in the cloud,
even though they're very tightlymonitored by Microsoft, you and
I, we kind of are familiar withthis space, we don't know what
this means. Is this a millionlicenses? Is this really neat?
Is my room and my phone and my,my desktop? Are they all being

(06:32):
counted by as three, or as oneor many? It's a big number, and
we can respect it. But you know,this is this is as you know, as
clear a Swiss cheese?

Dave Michels (06:42):
Well, it really is, particularly since the
biggest vendors of Microsoft,meeting rooms are they they the
biggest feature they talkedabout is the ability to work on
different platforms. And so andso if you have a room, let's say
from from Lodgy, and you switchit from teams to zoom. Is that

(07:07):
is that a there's no room foreach and we double counting can
consume have this many rooms?
And Microsoft are listeningrooms? And it's the same rooms?
You know, we double it, youknow, because Because Because
logic can do that. And he can dothat. Cisco doesn't even have to
reboot to do that, you know, ifso. So what is a room? Is it an
always on? You know, I don'treally know. We don't have a lot

(07:27):
of information on this. But it'sa good question. And

Unknown (07:33):
we we live in an industry where analysts for at
least my entire career, havebeen saying less than 10% of the
rooms out there in the worldhave been equipped for video.
I've never believed that number.
My personal experience brings itover to more like 40 or 50%. But
but everybody is still quotingOh, there's such an amazing tam
here. And you know, we have somany rooms that we can address.

(07:54):
So I think it's still a bigmystery. What isn't a mystery is
when people reach out to me onmeetings. Now for the most part,
they're sending me links toteams, for the most part, with,
you know, the second runner uptheir resume. The third is
WebEx. And I don't think you caneven mention the others. I'll
get a Google meeting once Well,you know, that's

Dave Michels (08:15):
not that's not fair. That's not fair. Because
it it's interesting, becausethere are a lot of different
video options. People forgetthat, you know, so there's the
big four, you know, you justmentioned three of them, you got
to mention Google me too. Sothere's the big four, but the
RingCentral, eight by eight dialpad, you know, all these vendors
have really actually pretty goodvideo solutions. We've come so

(08:40):
far, not to mention the seapassplayers and their ability to to
do video enabled services. So soit's a huge again, you know,
this was brought to you by thepandemic, it really is. Video
has become so mainstream and sopowerful. So that's a great
story. What's interesting to methough, along those lines,
though, is is you take somethinglike not all of those vendors I

(09:05):
just mentioned actually haverooms. They have desktop video,
but they don't actually haverooms necessarily. I don't think
Vonage has rooms and I might bewrong. I don't think eight by
eight has rooms. But but so soagain, because we don't really
know how to count those. Let'ssay there's a 20% margin of
error. So Microsoft's majormilestone is 800,000 to 1.2

(09:26):
million. Meaning was we juststill, you know, two, yeah, very
big numbers. Let's see. So theyalso announced us they were they
also announced 20 million PSTNusers up 30% year over year. And
again, that's a that's a that'salso a big number. Everyone

(09:49):
tells me that voice is dead.
While 20 million peopleapparently disagree. And there
you go, there you go. So 20million. PSTN very big number. I
mean teamsters only deal butthey just had their word fitters
was a fifth year birthday six,six year birthday.

Unknown (10:09):
Round that like, trace it back to just before the
pandemic. Yeah,

Dave Michels (10:13):
so that's not to have that many years. This is
pretty impressive.

Unknown (10:17):
It's I think, you know, you have to, you have to qualify
that before you make your pointthat there never was a hey, we
have a new product teams come onboard, that there was, you know,
a Skype for Business that turnedinto teams. And there was, you
know, the one before that, andthe one before that, and so, so
all these users came along withOh, okay with shedding the last
one. That's

Dave Michels (10:36):
a good point. I'm glad you raised that. And so
until Yeah, if you go back toLCS, it's a 15 year journey or
so. And you could even go backto Skype consumer side. And I
guess you couldn't go back tothat. But but if you've got

Unknown (10:49):
OCS LCS

Dave Michels (10:52):
Yeah, but the thing about the 20 million PSTN
users, but I want to know, andwhen we talked about some
questions with the, with thevideo number, I want to know how
these users are connected,because you can become a PSTN
user on teams, a lot ofdifferent ways. And so there's
the direct, obviously, whereteams just host the service. And

(11:14):
you get that from Microsoft,which recently went from three
nines to five nines, whichreally bothers me that they
skipped four nines. And really,that's just, that just bothers
me. But, but but, but you get itright from directly from
Microsoft. Or you can get itfrom one of their dialtone
partners. So and then there,you've got the direct routing

(11:36):
ecosystem, which has been aroundfor, I'm gonna say, I'm four
years, three years. And thenyou've got the new operator
connect ecosystem, which hasbeen around, basically, it's
new. So you've got the operator,so you've got that option. And
then and then as the last yearor so, you've got teams, teams,
phone, mobile users, which Iassume also counts. But they say

(11:59):
they actually said it was PSTNusers. They didn't say devices.
So I guess if I had a smartphoneor a soft phone, Oh, we didn't,
I didn't. Okay, so I have a softphone. And I have a mobile
phone. And it's the same phonenumber. That should be one user.
Right? So. So be curious howmany devices they have on teams,
because you would count, yousay, well, we don't have any

(12:19):
devices, but a soft phone countsas a device. And so So you got
at least 20 million devices outthere. Be curious to know how
many more there are, and howthese are all connected? I
that's what I Inquiring mindswant to know, I want to know
that.

Unknown (12:34):
I think you know, you have to shrug off the numbers, I
think it's fair to look at theyear over year growth, how its
presented, if they're gracing uswith presenting it the same way
every year. But you know, theunless they reveal everything,
this is the number of licenses,this is the number of SPC
connections, this is the numberof PC connections, the number of
headsets, the number ofsmartphone and mobile unless

(12:57):
they reveal everything and letyou work the numbers yourself.
You know, you got to shrug andsay, you know, okay, guys,
congratulations. But, and Iappreciate the year over year
numbers. But I don't thinkanybody really knows what we

Dave Michels (13:12):
just said that is because they actually did a year
over year. So this unlike themeeting rooms, this one actually
is 30%. growth year over year.
So So theoretically, that's aconsistent approach the way that
and so it didn't have anyoperator connect numbers. But
but but you know, that's okay.
We technology expands on growth.
So so so if we look at if wejust focus on 30% growth, that's

(13:32):
also pretty impressive. I thinkzooms had numbers like that Zoom
phone, they don't have numbers,like 20 million, but they have
numbers like 30% growth. And soso I'm not sure if anybody else
does that lease on telephony. Soit's be curious where all these
users are coming from. And thenthere's also he raises earlier,

(13:54):
there's also the question of,are they real users? Are they
licenses? And we don't, we don'treally know the answer to that,
because a lot of times, vendorsand it's not just Microsoft
will, will sell licenses, evenknowing they're not going to be
used, but it's just a way tomake a good deal and close a
deal. So, so. So is it really 20million, but 30% growth, you

(14:18):
know, again, we'll celebratethat. So those are the two
numbers that came out ofMicrosoft. And I think more
thoughts on those as we wrapthis up.

Unknown (14:29):
No, I have to agree with you. You know, I'm always a
critic of theirs. But you know,this is definitely something
that's deserving of applause. Ithink there are more Microsoft
stories that we need to coverthings that are not as obvious
going on, and I think we shoulddefinitely cover them real soon.

Dave Michels (14:41):
Well, I think Well, now that they've done that
they've got a million meetingrooms, I think they're gonna
have to be a regular part ofI've been waiting for this. I've
been waiting for this milestoneso so we will definitely be
covering Microsoft a lot morenow.