The Evolution of Unified Communications | How DTEN Fits into the Future of Meeting Rooms

**2:16**

David, thank you so much for joining us on our podcast, *Behind the Rack*. It’s a pleasure having you on. I’m really excited to talk to you about UC products. I won’t call it a fad, but it’s getting more and more popular.

Very much so. It’s a lot more prevalent.

**2:40**

Before we kick that off, for the audience who may not be familiar with DTEN, can you give us a brief overview of who you are as a company and what you set out to solve in the collaboration space?

**2:54**

Sure. I’ll start by saying I don’t know that this is a podcast for DTEN, because by definition, DTEN makes all-in-one solutions for Teams Rooms and Zoom Rooms — and we don’t need a rack.

**3:07**

Everything is built in: cameras, microphones, and speakers. It’s all built right into the screen. The screens are all touch-enabled capacitive touch screens. The idea is: hang it on the wall, give it power, give it Ethernet, and you’ve got yourself a Zoom Room or a Teams Room.

**3:30**

Where did we start? We actually started there, although we started by making interactive whiteboards about 10 years ago. Then we connected with Eric Yuan from Zoom, who said, “I’m getting ready to make a new version of software called Zoom Rooms. If you do these 12 things, you will build the first all-in-one Zoom Room appliance.”

**3:48**

That’s what we did. We built the first all-in-one Zoom Room appliance, and that’s how we got here today.

**3:54**

Since then, we became aware that Microsoft was becoming — and has become — the number two player, and now the number one player in the space. So we also build Teams Rooms.

**4:05**

But more than just building a Teams-certified solution, we wanted to have more of an engineering relationship with Microsoft, which is where we are today. We built the first and only all-in-one certified Microsoft Teams Room solution running Windows IoT.

**4:18**

That’s called MTR-W in Microsoft’s world. Not only is it Teams Rooms-ready, but it is also Copilot-ready. When they get all their Copilot features in, we’ll have all the Copilot features running as well.

Very interesting. And this is the successor to the D7X, if I’m not mistaken?

**4:44**

Correct. The original model we created was called the D7. We made a second generation of that, then moved on to the D7X, which was our third generation. That’s where we started with Teams. The first D7s only did Zoom.

**5:03**

Now the D7X AI Board, as it’s called, is the fourth generation in the series, and it does Zoom and Teams appropriately.

**5:18**

Zoom is a little closer to the vest on what it means for AI to be in the conference room at this point. Microsoft Teams is pushing forward and telling people more about what’s coming. But they’ll both have AI solutions.

Is it the panel or screen you have behind you right now?

**5:37**

Yes. That’s a 55-inch AI Board behind me.

Cool. Very nice. That’s a good intro for DTEN.

**5:50**

What about yourself, David? What’s your background? How did you come to work in the UC space?

**5:58**

Like everybody else in this world, it was an accident. Nobody really knows the UC space exists. Nobody even knows the AV space exists. It’s hard to find the space, but as I’m sure most people know, once you find it, you don’t leave it. You can’t get out.

**6:16**

I started on the broadcast side, originally in television broadcast. That moved me into the AV space. I worked for a PE company and for a dealer, and ultimately went to work for Crestron for a long time. A couple of other places after that eventually got me to DTEN.

Interesting. Before you even knew the UC space existed.

**6:41**

Right. Back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, you were doing everything via satellite to deliver content from one place to another, and then phone banks were coming in on the other side. That was essentially your definition of what we now call a podcast.

ISDN lines and technologies like that. I’m curious: what role did you play in the broadcast ecosystem? Were you a camera person, audio guy?

**7:14**

I worked at a couple of TV stations doing all kinds of different things, primarily audio. I did some camera work. I owned a production company for a couple of years. Then the local broadcast dealer hired me to be their broadcast salesperson. That’s how I got into the broadcast/AV cycle.

**7:41**

They were just starting with three-gun projectors, and it was, “How cool could this be?” There was a lot of, “Look, we can put a big screen in a conference room and light it up with 50 lumens, and people will think it looks great.” That’s what we had at the time.

**8:00**

Let’s get back to the actual business you’re in. What do you think was the main driver toward where we are right now in UC? How do you think the pandemic played a role in it?

**8:38**

I think the pandemic was an accelerator, but the road to soft codecs was already well paved before the pandemic hit.

**8:53**

When I started, somebody built a piece of hardware that allowed you to make a call. It could grab an ISDN line, or multiple ISDN lines, bond them together, and get video and audio to the other side. It was very complicated, but doable. It was expensive and complicated, but it was doable.

**9:15**

Even with that, if you go back long enough, a Tandberg system only talked to a Tandberg system. A Polycom system only talked to a Polycom system. Eventually, standards were created so everybody could say, “Now we can all talk to each other because we’re speaking the same language.”

**9:31**

Everything was still hardware-built and hardware-dependent, but there was interoperability because they had the same standard.

**9:45**

As phones moved from hardwired phone sets to voice-over-IP phone systems, that opened the door for SIP-type calling. The video group followed along and said, “We can put SIP on top of this and get our connections going.”

**10:05**

Then others came in and said, “We can do video calling with software,” whether it was Skype, Lync, Teams, Webex, Zoom, GoToMeeting, BlueJeans, RingCentral, or others.

**10:17**

The concept of software from your laptop being the codec and making the call — instead of dedicated hardware built to do that — was already underway before the pandemic really hit. The pandemic just accelerated it.

**10:35**

There were plenty of people using Webex. I talked to many people whose Cisco servers fell apart during the pandemic, and they had to do Zoom calls to talk to each other to get it fixed.

**11:00**

Back then, many people were still building on local servers. The simultaneous motion was that most of these new software providers were using cloud-based solutions. Anybody who was in the cloud could expand immediately.

**11:11**

Zoom was the biggest example. They could take on as many millions of people as wanted to fire up a Zoom call. But if your organization had dedicated Cisco servers running Webex internally, and it had only been running conference rooms — let’s say 100 — and then you had to add 10,000 users, it would melt down.

**11:30**

There was a lot of meltdown. That created the acceleration that got us to the adoption of cloud-based, software-based codecs today.

**11:44**

I remember that. Everybody was on the call, and everyone was saying, “Okay, you’ve got to shut off all your cameras,” because everything was shutting down.

**11:57**

Before the pandemic, most people didn’t turn their cameras on. Now everybody turns their cameras on. There were a lot of cultural changes that went along with it.

**12:04**

I remember using Zoom before the pandemic. I knew them before they were cool. Even then, executives wanted cameras on to make sure people weren’t doing something else while listening or having the meeting.

**12:38**

Now it’s more prevalent. Sometimes people turn cameras off when someone is presenting because they don’t want to disturb anybody, but in general, everybody has their camera on. That’s the new norm.

Correct.

**12:55**

The next big motion just coming into play for everybody is starting to add whiteboarding and annotation features into those same calls and meetings, because that’s where productivity is really going to pick up.

**13:08**

If you look at how Zoom works today, or how Teams works today, it’s different than even three years ago, when you could do a whiteboard session, save it as a PDF, and nobody knew where it went.

**13:26**

Now, in the Zoom environment, it goes right into your Zoom chat, so everybody who was in the meeting has a copy. You can keep working on it after the fact. You can pre-build whiteboard sessions and bring them in.

**13:38**

Teams does the same thing within channels and groups. The documents are there, organized, and findable. Technically, they’re in SharePoint, but anybody in that meeting can see them, alter them, write on them again, and so on.

**13:56**

That’s where productivity really starts coming into play. Even today, most rooms — especially smaller rooms, where the real work gets done — still have a whiteboard. There’s still an easel or notepad. People still want to write out ideas, think about them, put them up somewhere, park them, and come back to them.

**14:23**

The tools are there to do that today and keep us moving forward electronically. Most users just haven’t realized those pieces are there. In the next three to five years, we’ll see a big uptick in people saying, “I need a touchscreen. I need annotation. I need whiteboarding,” because everyone knows they need it. Now they’ll start realizing it’s available in the tools they already use.

**14:49**

In terms of trends, we’re talking about what people are starting to discover and use more and more. Out in the marketplace, what are you seeing? There’s a lot of talk about the pandemic, remote work, hybrid work, and some industries going back to office mandates. What’s the reality of what’s happening in the market?

**15:14**

It’s interesting, and it’s traditional: the East Coast and West Coast do things first, and then it moves toward the middle of the country. In the U.S. and Canada, it’s the same way.

**15:27**

Two years ago, the biggest adoption was in New York and the San Francisco Bay Area. Everybody got told to go back to work, and everybody said, “No. I’m not going back to work. The office is horrible. I’ll come in one day, maybe two.”

**15:48**

So large corporations spent tons of money on video walls, rebuilt lobbies, all-hands meeting spaces, new cafeterias, jungle gyms — everything you could think of to get people to come back to the office.

**16:12**

Those were big buildouts, with lots of technology for AV integrators: big signage and those kinds of things.

**16:17**

Then people returned to the office because the office was beautiful and all set up. Now those same people are saying, “I can’t come in five days a week because I can’t do video calls. The conference rooms are no good. There’s a webcam you hung there just before or after the pandemic because nobody knew what to do, and the setup at my house is better. I need to be home two days a week because that’s when I do all my calls.”

**16:48**

Now we’re starting to see, “Let’s turn all this over. Let’s redo all the phone booths so people can take calls. Let’s redo the small and medium conference rooms so the technology is up to speed and better than what everybody has at home, so they’ll come into the office five days a week.”

**17:06**

At the same time, as we move toward the center of the country — in your world, from Montreal and Toronto to Ottawa — those markets are getting ready to put video walls everywhere, like Chicago. They’re a little behind on how it moves.

**17:30**

In Vancouver, they’re starting to build small rooms, medium rooms, and conference rooms back up because they already have those key spaces done.

**17:42**

To your point, those key spaces — whether they were done before, during, or right after the pandemic — ironically, most of them required a rack and had a lot of issues. You needed someone on site to troubleshoot. Suddenly the PTZ camera isn’t following the speaker, and the HDMI input is being switched to a random input.

**18:09**

That need for simplicity is where DTEN comes in. People want meetings done quickly and efficiently. You can’t have a 15-minute or 30-minute meeting if you spend 10 minutes troubleshooting because something isn’t working and Hugo has to go behind the rack.

**18:33**

The trends you’re describing are what we’re starting to see in Canada and in Montreal as well.

**18:45**

From a user point of view, we use the pandemic as a benchmark, but before the pandemic, most rooms had some kind of controller on the table. You had to push a button and get something to happen.

**19:03**

Now, with touchscreens, you walk into the room and there’s the name of your meeting with a button that says Start. You don’t even have to look for a controller or figure out how to use it.

**19:08**

For the non-technical user, finding a controller is complicated. That alone is confusing. A button on the screen that says Start — that’s it. You can start and go.

**19:22**

My age is my age, so I fall into the older category, not the younger category. But if you look at how people executed meetings before, when we were talking about ISDN lines, everyone would get in the room and ask, “Are we ready?” Then we hit the button and started the call because there were ISDN line charges. It cost per minute to have a video call.

**19:54**

The other thing that happened was everybody came into the room, had a little chitchat, maybe a pre-meeting, and then started the real meeting.

**20:00**

In today’s world, because everybody has a soft codec and people are joining remotely from their laptop or wherever, people jump into meetings early so they can have a side conversation before the meeting actually starts.

**20:21**

Now, the first person who walks into the room immediately starts the meeting because their friends could already be on the other side chatting. It’s a subtle difference in motion, but it totally changes how you look at a room and how a room functions.

**20:39**

I don’t have to worry about whether there’s a controller on the table. I walk in, start the meeting, sit down, and everyone is happy.

Simplicity.

And there’s nothing easier than touching the screen. Most two-year-olds know how to do it.

**20:57**

Based on your experience, where do you think we are with UC? Is the industry quite mature, or is there still room to improve, bring new features, and expand — including on the user side?

**21:18**

The AI components being developed are going to be massive improvements in productivity, production, and efficiency. We’re going to see it continuously, again and again, and it’s going to be astronomical how much more efficient meetings become.

**21:44**

That’s one of the things DTEN is working very hard on. When you throw the word AI around, the question is: is AI something handled in the cloud, so the hardware manufacturer in the room doesn’t have to deal with it? Or do the components in the room need a higher level of engine and support to process things locally and execute better?

**22:15**

I think the answer is both.

**22:22**

Take my AI Board back here. It has a center camera, but it also has two additional AI sensors. I can actually 3D map the room.

**22:32**

Why do I need to 3D map the room? For a bunch of reasons. One is that if I 3D map the room, I can see everybody in the room and see whose lips are moving.

**22:46**

On the fly, I can rebuild the beamforming microphones so they’re pointing toward the people who are speaking. You don’t need to have a physical microphone in front of each person, but it sounds like each person has one.

**23:03**

Those are the kinds of AI components you can run once you have enough processor locally — what my team likes to call “on the edge.” We have edge processing to handle what’s going on in the room, and then centralized AI as well.

**23:16**

As Microsoft points out, they almost want AI to be an entity in the room. We could be sitting here talking, and a voice says, “Hey, there are 15 minutes left in this meeting and you still have three agenda items. Should we move on?”

Pretty cool. Creepy, but pretty cool.

Everybody’s getting bossed around by AI.

**23:41**

But when we start talking about corporate efficiency, that is definitely corporate efficiency.

**23:52**

Let’s say we’re part of a Teams chat or channel. Somebody asks, “When are your AI Boards going to be shipping?” I say, “I don’t know. Sally’s not on the call today. She has the exact date.” I should be able to say, “Hey Copilot, when are these AI Boards shipping?”

**24:10**

Copilot should be able to come back and say, “According to the document in the Teams channel you’re part of, Sally said they would be shipping on May 22.”

**24:24**

When you start looking at those motions, Copilot is designed to be your personal assistant, but now we need an assistant in the room to help everyone at once. That’s more of a far end, but we’re just scratching the surface of how efficient and productive we’re going to be.

**24:48**

I really like the edge processing you were talking about. Instead of using audio threshold to steer or turn on a mic for someone, it looks at you. When your lips start moving, the microphone array beamforms toward your direction.

**25:12**

If you get up and start walking around, I know the direction you’re walking. I know where the walls are, so I know whether you’re going to turn left or right when you get to the end of the table. I can keep that beamform right on you the whole way.

That’s amazing.

Unless you’re miming the entire thing and trying to trick the AI.

**25:40**

The other thing we can do — and we’ve done a lot of this with the AI Board — is when I start looking for people and cutting them out to put them in their own boxes, I know there’s a glass wall going into the hallway. I don’t need to cut those people out or include them.

**25:53**

I can look for real people. If there are pictures on the wall, I don’t cut out the people in the pictures and put them in the meeting. Once I know the room, everything becomes much more proactive than reactive.

**26:14**

Especially with speaker tracking, we’ve always been reactive. Somebody has to move, and the camera has to chase them. Now we kind of know everything that’s going to happen.

**26:20**

Because of all these unique benefits and features, are you noticing that when a deployment is commissioned, or a corporation decides to change one, two, or three rooms and has eight or ten rooms total, standardization becomes important?

**26:42**

Personally, there are a couple of rooms in our building that were built at different times and have different systems. I always book the same room — the latest room, the room with the best features, or the one that’s easiest to use.

**27:00**

Are you noticing standardization becoming a priority beyond simplicity? DTEN has the maximum amount of features while being one of the simplest systems to use, which is an incredible selling point. But is standardization also becoming an absolute priority for corporations and companies?

**27:17**

Absolutely. And it’s not exactly the way you think.

**27:24**

We always had this approach where things needed to be standardized because, for example, “I have one guy and he only knows how to program Crestron, so all my rooms are going to be Crestron.” You ended up with 10 Crestron rooms.

**27:46**

Now we’re talking about 100 rooms. Every small room and every medium room needs technology to remotely communicate and collaborate. If I have 100 rooms without a standard, the burden on my support stack is tremendous.

**28:05**

There has to be a standard. Every corporation buys everybody the same laptop. I look at it the same way. The entire building might be DTEN, except those big rooms, which will be Crestron or something else. Just like everyone gets a Lenovo, except the marketing department — they get Macs.

Exactly. Marketing.

**28:37**

There has to be a standard, but we know there’s flexibility within those standards. Within the same space, we need to have the same thing so we can resolve issues faster and users get the same experience in every room. That way, they’re not going to different places to use different technology.

**28:57**

I have a personal experience with DTEN. We currently have the SFM road show going across Canada, and we have a DTEN product there. We had shipped it with the rest of the product. I didn’t have a chance to open it up and play with it beforehand.

**29:10**

When we got to our first location, I was the one setting up the table with the DTEN product on it. I had no idea how to set it up or what I was getting myself into.

You didn’t read the manual, did you?

I did not read the manual. Sorry, David.

**29:30**

That’s basically a joke here. Nobody reads the manual on DTEN.

No one reads the manual. But you’ll like where this is going.

Hang on, I’ll take you even further: there are no manuals in DTEN units.

**29:50**

Exactly. There was no manual in the box. There was a piece of paper with a QR code, and that’s it. All I had to do was plug it in. I just needed an outlet next to the table. It was a 27-inch monitor screen.

**30:03**

I set it up within five minutes. I didn’t need an external computer. I didn’t need to know what I was doing beforehand. I did not read the manual. There was no manual. Thank you, David, for not putting a manual in the box. It was just easy to set up.

**30:21**

Are we noticing these products being put in unconventional locations, where maybe we would never have thought of putting an all-in-one screen or touchscreen?

**30:35**

I asked another manufacturer about this at one point. Even at home, some of us have better setups than we sometimes do in corporate settings. I’m a nerd. I’ve got three screens, a 4K webcam, and a microphone. I love my setup at home.

**30:55**

But I’m always thinking it would be crazy to have my own little boardroom one day, or a display dedicated just to video calls. Are you starting to see that, where people say, “All I need is a plug. I can set up a remote video conferencing room,” or whatever it may be?

**31:13**

We have a number of executives and celebrities who have purchased DTEN 55-inch screens or 75s for their houses or home offices so they can do video calls.

**31:28**

There was a big influx during the pandemic, and it didn’t have anything to do with the pandemic itself. One CFO — I don’t even remember what company he was from — went on Jim Cramer’s show on CNBC. He happened to have a DTEN, and he started annotating on the board and circling things for people because he was on a Zoom call.

**32:07**

We got this influx of people saying, “I need one of those. I’ve got to get one of those,” because his friends called him and asked, “How did you do that?” That’s what spun it into this crazy thing.

**32:21**

At the beginning of the pandemic, we had a company order five boards for their C-suite. A lot of C-level people put 55-inch boards in their offices so they could do local conferencing.

**32:41**

When the pandemic hit, they asked if we could ship them to the executives’ houses. We did that. One executive had a question about using the whiteboard. Zoom was a little busy at the time, so he called us to see if we could help. We helped solve his whiteboarding question.

**33:00**

He was so impressed that he wrote a letter to our president about the support team. The president wrote back and asked, “Would you be willing to do a case study?” He said yes.

**33:14**

As he was doing the case study, my marketing team said, “We have try-and-buy programs where we loan a board to someone for 30 days so they can try it out.” The guy said, “You have to give one of these to Mark Cuban. Here’s his address,” and just gave us Mark Cuban’s address.

**33:40**

This person happens to own a little company called Dave & Buster’s, in which Cuban is a major investor. Ultimately, we gave one to Cuban. He put it in his house.

**33:54**

Deeper into the pandemic, we suddenly got a random phone call saying, “We need 36 55-inch boards on carts because we’re going to put them inside the NBA bubble.”

**34:11**

I have pictures of LeBron James on a DTEN board doing interviews with news media outside the bubble. We all know it was probably Cuban who said, “Why don’t you just put DTEN boards there?” It wasn’t like there was a big sales thing going on.

**34:29**

The point of the story is that once you start using DTEN, you want it everywhere. You find other use cases. As the user, you ask, “Why isn’t this as easy as my office?”

**34:55**

There are lots of unique use cases. One thing we pride ourselves on is that once you’ve configured it — once you put your Zoom or Teams license in — when you plug a board in, it takes roughly 48 seconds to boot up, and it boots into that environment.

**35:15**

You’ll never see any preemptive screens. You don’t have to get in there and push a button. It goes right into the environment you use to make a call. That means you can put it on a cart, roll it from room to room, and plug it in.

**35:27**

You can take it on a road show and go from city to city, and it will still fire up and run the same way.

**35:33**

Would you say you’re getting more requests from people who are already looking into UC and getting that technology, or are you still educating people about what they don’t know they don’t know?

**35:53**

I think it’s a little bit of both.

Would you say it’s about 50/50 from your experience?

**36:06**

Yes. There are plenty of people who don’t really know about DTEN or even all-in-one solutions. They’ve been hodgepodging things together, and it hasn’t been a good experience. They’re looking for something better, but they don’t know where to look or find it.

**36:25**

Then there are other people, more on the Zoom side than the Teams side, but both, who want to take advantage of other Zoom tools like Contact Center, for example. You can use a 27-inch screen as a virtual receptionist or visitor check-in station.

**36:43**

You can do Contact Center work. You can have a pool of people in the background, and someone can walk up to the screen, hit a button, and call somebody in the pool for an immediate response.

**37:07**

I’ve got a group in New York putting a 27-inch screen on every floor in their office. The screen is IT support. You walk up, and it says, “I need help with my phone, my cell phone, my computer, my software.”

**37:22**

Based on the button you push, it does a Zoom call to that expert in the background. So the users on the floor feel like they’re getting to the right person immediately, instead of asking where Larry is. And when Larry comes over, he says, “I have to go talk to somebody,” and walks away.

Yeah. “Did you create a ticket?” I think we hear that one pretty often.

Turn it off and turn it back on. Create the ticket.

**37:56**

There are lots of different use cases outside the conference room. The opportunities are there. Wayfinding, workplace reservations, hot desking — all of those things are also now part of those solutions.

**38:18**

For integrators and resellers who are new to the UC space, what are some door-opening conversations or questions they should start with to propose DTEN products or make end users aware that UC solutions can help them with meetings and communication between offices and customers?

**38:52**

I like to tell everybody to start with the low-hanging fruit. When you go into somebody’s office and you’re talking about video production, building out the big conference room, or whatever it is, look at the small rooms you’re seated in or walking by.

**39:18**

The magic trick is this: if you see one of those old Polycom starfish phones on the table, they need a technology upgrade — quickly.

**39:30**

Stop right there and say, “By the way, I know we’re talking about this big project, but these rooms have to be upgraded. You need to do better for your customers in these spaces. They need video support. Let’s talk about that next.”

**39:43**

As an integrator, now you get the big job, and once you’re doing the big job, you can go in and hang 50 boards in little conference rooms. That’s cash money.

**40:01**

Going to a customer to install one DTEN board might not be the most profitable thing. But if you’re already doing another big job and you’ve got 50 or 60 rooms rolling behind it, let’s go. Even five rooms — take it and go with it.

**40:13**

They’ll have to do a proof of concept and one or two rooms. But once they get going and people start using them, people from other floors start coming because it’s easier to use. That’s where the user demand really starts.

**40:33**

I also don’t see a lot of IT teams using annotation and whiteboarding the way their users do — like the engineering group or marketing group does. Sometimes it’s hard for the IT purchasing manager to really understand what their people do in the rooms or what they need.

**41:00**

That’s what I was about to say, David. We often talk about how the AV world and the IT world need to do a group hug and communicate more so everyone is on the same page.

**41:14**

With DTEN, a lot of obstacles are removed. The infrastructure needed is much simpler. We’re joking about the rack, but you don’t need any of that. You need a mount on a wall, power, and Ethernet. That’s pretty much it.

**41:30**

That conversation becomes easier, and you break down more barriers because of the product’s simplicity. Different departments within the same building use different features differently.

**41:54**

That’s where an all-encompassing product with multiple benefits shines. You’re not finding niche solutions for specific departments. You’re deploying a solution that has multiple benefits available for different departments.

**42:25**

We as AV professionals need to realize that when we move into the UC space, we can’t control everything. We have to rely on others.

**42:43**

If I build a hardware-connected room, I do it all. Other than the phone company giving me an ISDN line, I kind of do it all.

**42:48**

In the UC space, if I want the whiteboard working or not working in the room, I need a Teams admin to turn that on in the background. That’s not going to be me, the AV guy. Nobody is letting me into their Office 365 portal to adjust everything.

**43:09**

We have to say, “We’ve talked to the customers. Here are the feature sets they want. Here are the basics you should turn on for these rooms so users can have what they’re looking for.”

**43:22**

For the person deploying Office 365, they have a lot of other things on their mind. What happens in a conference room probably isn’t their highest priority.

**43:35**

As an AV person, you can be an advocate for the people using the room, but it won’t be you building it all out.

That’s very well said.

**43:53**

David, with so much going on in the UC space, for anybody who doesn’t know DTEN as a brand yet, what is the 10- or 15-second elevator pitch?

**44:14**

I’d gear it more toward someone who is already shopping in the UC space, not someone who doesn’t know what they don’t know. What’s that sales pitch or recommendation?

**44:35**

Like I said at the beginning, we build all-in-one solutions for Zoom Rooms and Teams Rooms. The key idea is to make everybody as efficient and productive as possible inside or outside their meeting room.

**44:47**

Everything is built in: camera, microphone, speakers, and touch. It’s a fast touch-enabled screen, so you can get true whiteboarding. It makes you more efficient when you can walk into a room, start a meeting on time, and take the next productive steps.

**45:06**

The technology fades into the background. That’s ultimately our goal.

**45:14**

It’s disappointing that everybody in the world does not know who DTEN is, but part of our goal is that most users shouldn’t need to know who DTEN is because it should just work.

**45:27**

Other than seeing our logo on the screen, there shouldn’t be much recognition. I never want to hear, “Oh yeah, we always use DTEN,” because that usually means something negative happened.

He’s right. Transparent technology is the best technology.

Exactly.

**45:59**

Because I’m the geek — actually, we’re all geeks, but I’m the geekiest — can you talk a little bit about your microphone array?

**46:05**

I had the chance to try it, dismantle it, and look at it. I know there are a bunch of microphones over the screen. I believe you did a YouTube video where you were walking around the room. That was you?

Yes.

Very nice video. We should put the link in the podcast.

**46:36**

Can you talk about the microphone technology? It’s stunning. In the YouTube video, you were walking around the room, and you were maybe 25 or 30 feet away from the screen.

**47:02**

I’m an audio guy, and I like hearing about microphones. We’ve had a couple of podcasts just talking about microphones.

**47:08**

We use a 15-microphone array. It’s a complete beamforming microphone. As part of the beamform, you technically analyze all the sound that comes in, then you look for and find the enhanced sound.

**47:30**

We specifically look for human voice frequencies. That’s where we start and say, “That’s really a person. Let’s hone in on that.” Then we amplify that portion and tone down the other pieces.

**47:49**

The second part — and we spend a lot of time on this — is that different people are in different places in the room. One person may be sitting three feet from the board, and another may be 10 feet from the board.

**48:08**

Leaving the AI Board out of it because it knows, the current generation D7X does not know where you are in the room. The beamform doesn’t know where you are, but it picks everybody up.

**48:20**

Then it balances everybody so the volume is the same no matter where they are. Some people pace in a room. Some walk up to the interactive whiteboard to write on it and get very close to the microphones. Then someone asks a question, they turn around, and now they’re facing the other way.

**48:48**

We’re prepared for all that. Internally, we adjust everything in terms of gain and support structure so everybody is even across the board.

**49:04**

I was really impressed with the side cameras as well. That was a cool feature. It’s one of those little things, like thinking about someone turning around and having their back to the microphones.

**49:15**

The side cameras are another thing I was impressed with, which you don’t normally think about. When you’re in front of the whiteboard, how do people on the far end see you?

**49:27**

If you’re walking up to the screen and writing, and you’re blocking the front camera, is that where the wide field of view from the side cameras comes in and captures you writing?

**49:44**

Yes. You can see the side cameras up here on the corners. There are two cameras on each side. One camera is a short throw, so it does one to five meters. The second camera is longer throw, doing five meters or greater.

**49:58**

They’re designed for both Zoom and Teams. The software has different names for them, but the concept is the same: when you have a bunch of people around a table, as a remote participant, I want to see everybody’s face and facial expressions, even if they’re not speaking.

**50:17**

The software tells us we have to find people, look for heads and shoulders, cut them out, and put them in their own box so remote people can see them. That’s step one.

**50:34**

We created Vue Pro cameras so those cameras optically have a smaller footprint. I get much higher resolution when I start cutting people out. The center camera is in the wide shot to see the whole room. At 20 or 30 feet, there aren’t a lot of pixels left when I try to cut somebody out.

**51:00**

The center camera has either a 120-degree or 95-degree field of view. When I put on the Vue Pro cameras, they can get up to a 160-degree field of view. If somebody walks up to the whiteboard, that short-throw camera can still get their face even if they’re facing away from everyone.

**51:22**

They’re dual purpose. They enhance the resolution of the whole plane, and if you’re closer to the board, they can get your face while you’re drawing on it.

Pretty cool.

Very cool.

**51:36**

When we were only building 10 video conference rooms in a building, the smart people said, “It is what it is.” Now that we have hundreds, the smart people have gotten involved and said, “More than half the conversation is nonverbal.”

**51:49**

Speaker tracking cameras make no sense if I need to see everybody’s response. That’s why Zoom and Teams both have the ability — and force us — to cut people out and put them in their own box so you can see them the whole time.

**52:07**

Your sales manager can be standing up there giving the best sales pitch of his life, but the CEO might be sitting in the corner reacting negatively. If you’re a remote participant and can’t see that, you’re out of the conversation.

**52:30**

I had a question outside the UC space. You were talking about the 27-inch screen. Have you explored signage, especially on the virtual assistant or virtual receptionist side?

**52:48**

On the Zoom platform, digital signage is built in. You can use somebody else’s digital signage feed, or you can build your own digital signage within Zoom.

**53:00**

The Microsoft platform doesn’t do that today. They rely on third-party software for those things, including virtual receptionist, wayfinding, and so on. Probably the number one player in that space is Appspace.

**53:15**

Our D7X 27 runs Appspace as well. We’re also talking to several others — JLL and other signage and wayfinding providers.

Can they use your bigger panels too, maybe in portrait mode?

**53:35**

It’s all landscape, but we do have a 55-inch panel called the Onboard. It has no camera or microphone stack on it, but it’s a touch-enabled screen running whatever it needs to run for wayfinding, mapping, digital signage, and those kinds of things.

**54:04**

It can also be used as a companion whiteboard in the Zoom environment.

**54:12**

On the 27-inch screen, if you’re doing signage as a virtual receptionist and they want to call a cab, for example, is that using Zoom to call out, or is that a SIP connection?

**54:30**

It would be a Zoom call.

So Zoom can take care of that? Zoom can call landlines, right?

Yes, that’s correct.

Very cool.

**54:46**

We’re at the top of the hour. I have one last question for you, David. What are you having for dinner? No, I’m kidding.

What are you having for a drink after dinner?

**55:04**

I can answer the second question: I’ll be having red wine after dinner. I have red wine with dinner and after dinner. I know that much.

Very nice. We’re on the same team.

**55:22**

What do you wish more integrators understood about the UC market? Is there anything you’d want them to know more about, especially in the AV space, when they’re pushing that or educating customers?

**55:41**

The UC market is a huge opportunity for the traditional AV integrator, because traditional AV integrators are certainly more focused on the customer than some IT integrators that come along.

**55:55**

IT integrators are often more about moving boxes, getting them in, getting them out, and away you go. AV is more focused on the customer and their experience. It’s a prime motion for AV integrators to step into that space and take it over.

**56:17**

That’s why, in my head, the starfish phone on the table, or the TV hanging on the wall with the webcam hanging halfway down by the wire, is the perfect example of someone who didn’t really care about these rooms. AV people care about the people using them.

**56:40**

That makes total sense. IT people — and I don’t want to overgeneralize — often have to conform to a certain type of technology and can put user experience in the back seat. AV people are more focused on the AV experience because if that experience is bad, nobody will buy the system or solution.

**57:13**

The other point is that I know AV seems complicated. We do a ton of different things, from video walls and stadiums to live concerts and boardrooms.

**57:26**

But if you look at what an IT person has to deal with — phones, laptops, security, software — there are so many components under the IT realm. It’s hard to become an expert in any one of them.

**57:44**

Here we are as AV people. We are the experts in AV. We might as well bring that right into UC and help it out.

That makes total sense. Well said.

**57:56**

David, thank you for your time today and for presenting DTEN. It was a great conversation. Whenever you want to come back on the show, it will be our pleasure to have you — and hopefully one day in person, too.

That would be great. If you’re ever in the studio, that would be fun.

**58:14**

Thanks a lot.

Thank you very much, David.

All right. Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody.

Thanks, David. Have a good one.

Bye-bye.