Microsoft’s Ilya Bukshteyn: ‘The future is multi-camera’

If you work with technology, you’ve probably heard of Moore’s Law. But perhaps we should start talking about Ilya’s law.

Rather than describing the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubling every two years, this law deals with the regular doubling of the number of active Microsoft Teams Rooms.

This was the claim, made half in jest and half seriously, by Brad Hintze, executive vice president of global marketing at Crestron, as he introduced Ilya Bukshteyn, vice president of Microsoft Teams Calling and Devices, at the Crestron Modern Work Summit yesterday.

In a recent earnings call, Microsoft said Teams now had 300 million monthly active users. And in the same call, Microsoft said the number of Teams Rooms,had reached the half million mark by the end of the last calendar year.

“My expectation, my OKR if you will for my boss, is that we will keep doubling the number of Teams Rooms,” Bukshteyn told the summit.  “I don’t know what milestone we will announce next but clearly in the future there will be a million rooms.”

While Microsoft might not be able to keep the number of Teams Rooms doubling indefinitely, Bukshteyn said there was a huge need to take business meeting spaces and create connections between people meeting there face to face and people meeting with them remotely.

These comments were made as Crestron’s Hintze interviewed Bukshteyn on stage just before moving on to the topic of what CEOs had said about Teams Rooms when invited to a recent gathering at Microsoft’s HQ in Redmond.

Bukshteyn said CEOs were very interested in scale. Microsoft’s largest Teams Rooms customers include the Department for Education for Puerto Rico which has paid for 15,000 rooms and Novo Nordisk, from the Nordic countries, with 7,000 rooms.

“We have had more multi-thousand room deployment customers in the last six months than in my previous five years put together,” said Bukshteyn.

Customers need Microsoft to help them scale faster and one of many ways Microsoft is committed to helping them achieve this is through another of Bukshteyn’s OKRs: ensuring customers can go from unboxing to a room that is active within four hours.

CEOs are also interested in the upgrade cycle for a room, seeing that the pace of innovation is so fast, and in what you need to do to keep rooms up to date in the context of the AI capabilities in cameras that have enabled Copilot.

Another topic on CEO minds is culture and how chat in meetings affects it. “We’ve done a lot to bring chat forward,” said Bukshteyn, “because we see chat becoming a meeting within a meeting.”

Microsoft has, for example, made sure that everyone can see chat on the ultrawide screen required for Microsoft Teams Rooms Front Row, and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies were asking whether it was rude to be on chat during a meeting or actually more polite and inclusive.

“One CEO had a great point, I thought, that chat can be used to not dominate a meeting. His point was that if he speaks up in a meeting it becomes about him,” Bukshteyn said.

Cost was also top of mind, with the question of how to balance the need to video enable every space with the realities of capital budgets.

This was the opportunity Crestron’s Hintze saw to bring up the recent announcement of an AirMedia Connect Adaptor and Microsoft Teams bundle for BYOD spaces.

Bukshteyn said customers he speaks to commonly have as many BYOD rooms as Teams Rooms. In the past, this was mainly because they weren’t sure which meeting platform they would need to use but developments in interoperability between Teams with Zoom and Webex (and hopefully Google soon) had diminished the frequency with which he came across this concern.

There was another issue with customers who didn’t know whether a room was being used. In some cases, IT couldn’t even be sure a room still worked, and one customer had even reported that it appeared webcams and audio equipment installed in a room had grown legs and listed themselves on eBay.

“The thing that I really liked about what we did together with AirMedia is that there is a relatively inexpensive thing that is network connected,” Bukshteyn said.

This helped move a room from “dark to IT” to “transparent” with anonymised data helping IT to make better decisions, perhaps even upgrading a heavily used room to a full Teams Room.

“Another thing I really love about our AirMedia announcement is that when people walk into that room, it will look like a Teams Room,” Bukshteyn said, noting that it would use a Teams calendar.

Of course, it won’t have one-click join and it still uses an integrated USB-C cable but at least it is not an HDMI connection, with Bukshteyn quoting research that says any room with a cable tends to break a laptop once a year, with HDMI being the worst culprit. The USB-C connection also has the advantage of giving users the familiarity of the plug-and-play experience they are used to from sharing presentations previously, Hintze noted.

At the other end of the cost spectrum comes the boardroom, which is back in vogue after the pandemic.

“I’ve had more enquiries or questions about boardrooms, exec rooms, or complex rooms – whatever you want to call them – in the last six months than in all the years before that combined,” said Bukshteyn.

This was a radical change from before the pandemic when “huddle was the word and everything was about huddle rooms”.

Customers were looking for the best technology and were not willing to be patient with anything that required clicking and plugging in. “Technology has to be invisible like magic and it has to be the best possible experience because that’s what they want for the boardroom,” Bukshteyn said.

In practice this means multi-camera systems. When demoing a Microsoft boardroom using Crestron intelligent camera technology to CEOs, Bukshteyn had shown how a multi-camera system could frame each speaker at the table, automatically follow the presenter, and frame a person who gets up and draws at a whiteboard.

“I had multiple CEOs walk up and say ‘I want this’,” Bukshteyn said.

The technology makes such a difference that Bushteyn believes the future is multi-camera for most if not all spaces, with the technology spreading from the boardroom.

A new Microsoft Teams Rooms release due out in July will bring two big changes. Firstly, Microsoft will remove the background from people in galleries of remote participants, to remove the distraction of everyone having different backgrounds. “Initally this will be a sort of grey black. After that we will enable it to be custom,” Bukshteyn said.

Also coming in July is spatial audio, with the location of sounds reflecting the position of speakers on screen.

The ability to identify who is speaking is also essential for Copilot, another topic of great interest to CEOs, if it is to summarise meetings and generate action points, and Microsoft is introducing video and audio AI that will achieve this, overcoming some notable technical challenges along the way.

Bukshteyn also described his own experience of a day in a room with pre-release technology. This had an ultra-wide screen, achieved with projection so as not to break the bank, using the Front Row layout, with everyone on the same background. Everyone in the room had their face framed and was identified as soon as they walked into the room, and you could have a real-time transcript, showing who said what. People could enter the room for particular topics without having to introduce themselves, with Copilot generating meeting notes and action items.

“It just worked,” says Bukshteyn. “No one had to take notes. No one had to say, ‘Can we go around the room and introduce ourselves.’ No one had to say can you move the chair from in front of the camera. One of our leaders on the day said I don’t want to go back to my other room. Why is this not everywhere?”

Finally, Crestron’s Hintze asked Bukshteyn for advice on the conversations that people guiding end users should have with them and Bukshteyn mentioned the set of room archetypes that Microsoft has developed and put into guidance for different room types.

“Those archetypes are our answer to the question “What does Microsoft do internally and they’re often a really good starting point,” Bukshteyn said.

The archetypes can even be ordered from distributors exactly as specified for customers who don’t have a need to customise them.

His other advice is not to limit thinking to what has gone before.

“When I look at this industry we’ve been stuck at video enabling about 10% of rooms for about a decade,” said Bukshteyn. “We think that’s going to change. We think that has to change.”

There are roughly 90 million meeting spaces, Bukshteyn said, of which maybe 10 million to 15 million are video enabled, and to get all of them video enabled, we have to think differently as an industry.

Bukshstein said that we have raise the bar for the room experience so that people can feel the value of the investment and do this across multiple room types.

“We have to serve high-value, highly complex customers and high-scale, simple rooms,” he said. “We have to be able to deliver the Maybachs and the Civics.”