Wainhouse Senior Analyst Craig Durr is joined by Jabra’s Aurangzeb Khan, Senior Vice President, of Intelligent Vision Systems, Collaboration Business, to talk about hybrid work and how Jabra is helping address meeting inequity by making it easier and more seamless to create a sense of in-person, human presence and participation.
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Transcript:
Craig Durr: Hi, I’m Craig Durr from Wayne House Research. We’re here live at Zoomtopia 2022 and very excited to introduce to you someone I’m speaking with today, Aurangzeb Khan, or AK. Aurangzeb, how you doing?
Aurangzeb Khan: I’m going great. Great to be here, Craig.
Craig Durr: Tell me a little bit about yourself, so our home audience understands.
Aurangzeb Khan: Sure. I’m one of the co-founders of Altia Systems a startup, which built the PanaCast Technology, which is an industry-leading multi-camera ray technology, we’ll talk more about it. People are buying it now in PanaCast 50 and Jabra PanaCast. We are also building other products using that technology.
Craig Durr: Right. What’s so great is I’m so excited that we’re here in person, right? It’s been so long since we feel like we’ve been in these opportunities to interact and to understand how communication really takes place. But it brings to mind something else that I’ve really noticed in that now with hybrid work, we’re actually finding these inequalities taking place where we didn’t expect them to take place. There’s inequity in meetings now taking place, and I know you’ve thought a lot about that, especially what’s taking place in the conference rooms where a person in a conference room may actually be at a disadvantage compared to somebody on video. Why don’t you share with me your thoughts about that?
Aurangzeb Khan: Yeah, you’re exactly right, and I think it’s just great to be in person and I was looking back, 2019 was the last time we were in person.
Craig Durr: Yeah.
Aurangzeb Khan: So it’s been quite a while. And in that time the world’s changed in a fundamental way, right? So hybrid work is just very normal. We’re going to meet in person, and we’re also going to meet in video all the time, and it may be one or two people, or it could be hundreds of people. And so how do you get that sense of eye contact and human presence and the kind of flow? We’re as humans, very good at reading each other, reading the room, and so on.
So when we look at the concept of equity, there are some basic building blocks. You want to hear and be heard clearly. If I sound tinny, there’s fatigue in your mind from that because something isn’t right. If my video looks fuzzy, if it isn’t well presented, then it’s like that doesn’t look right. So we got to get over those basic hurdles.
Then when I’m at home, for example, I may have a camera directed at me, so I’ll have a certain amount of what I call pixel real estate. And if I’m in a meeting room, I’m going to share that with a lot of people.
Craig Durr: Yeah, right.
Aurangzeb Khan: So we looked at that, and we said, “How do we give people who are very actively engaged in the conversation a way to show?” So the first step we took was virtual director where we curate an audio video stream based on our technology, and we’ll talk more about that. The latest step we have taken is dynamic composition here Zoom talks about smart gallery. That’s the idea where you can give people a bit more prominent pixel real estate and a way to stand out, whether they’re in a group or they’re by themselves, they kind of get that equitable coverage.
Craig Durr: You know it’s fantastic because you guys have always been these industry leaders in audio, Jabra is known for its audio. And then what you and your company has brought to this Jabra… And it’s been part of the Jabra family for so long. Now it’s just the Jabra IP around video intelligence is fantastic.
One of the key things I also like about your products is what I’m going to call the great story for IT administrators. They wind up doing this element of future-proofing. Let’s think about the PanaCast 50, for example, and how it’s certified across multiple different platforms.
Aurangzeb Khan: That’s right.
Craig Durr: And at the same time, there’s a great ease-of-use story for end users.
Aurangzeb Khan: Exactly, right. So as you said, maybe pick the first one. We work hand in glove with folks like Microsoft Teams and Zoom because, in the end, our experience is delivered to participants through these services. So we are a very early believer that AI at the edge can do very powerful things, right? It works in harmony with what’s in the cloud, but because we get the photons first, we convert that to which we get information.
If I can respond on that in let’s say 30, 40, 50 milliseconds versus sending megapixels to the cloud, taking three to 500 milliseconds back, and it’s just a whole different thing. Much greener and a much more fluid and dynamic experience. So that experience is the same, whichever service you prefer to use, it’s the same whether you’re using us in a BYOD mode, you plug in your device or you’re using us in a Zoom room for example.
And what many of us like about our home experience is I just know how it works. So I’m very familiar, so I don’t have to think about it, it’s automatic. I just know how to get going into a meeting and get into my conversation, right? And now I can do that either that way or in a room and very, very comfortably get the same experience.
Craig Durr: Exactly. That experience winds up being the same, everything from the PanaCast 20 camera, for example, to the PanaCast 50. Some of those controls, some of the same way that the camera intelligence works. It’s very seamless. I really enjoy that. But it’s also the certification, right?
Aurangzeb Khan: Yes.
Craig Durr: The fact that as an IT administrator, you’ve taken on the burden for these IT administrators that they don’t have to worry about, “Does this product work with Teams? Does it work with Zoom?” Right?
Aurangzeb Khan: Exactly. And as you know, those standards are going up every year. So those folks do a pretty rigorous job. And I’ll just say this is a plug for all certified devices. I hope participants and consumers use them because they really, everybody goes into a lot of work to make sure that they achieve the right experience, right? Other things may work, but they’re not going to give you that fully high-performance experience you’ll get from a certified device.
Craig Durr: I bet. Yes, I agree with that. Now, so we’re here at Zoomtopia. You guys have a fantastic, preeminent partner of Zoom. So I’m curious, what are some of the key messages you guys are getting across here? Maybe some product messages or some inter-op stories that are taking place here from Zoom.
Aurangzeb Khan: We were working back with Zoom very early on as a startup. We had integration even back with PanaCast 2 and so on, so that built a very strong foundation on video. And then as Eric talked about today, Zoom is expanding from that to phone, to contact center, to spots to so many new innovations. So we’re tracking right along with them on all the innovations in audio and video communications. A lot of our audio products, our headsets are certified.
Eric also talked about the contact center being a big issue. And of course, we have a long history and a long presence in the contact center. It’s a very sophisticated ecosystem. We play well in it, including with Zoom now. So we’re finding that that experience is just expanding from let’s say a video-oriented initial relationship now to a full spectrum, personal use through group use kinds of devices for audio and video into these different verticals.
Craig Durr: Fantastic. So you guys just recently announced your new Jabra-based room systems. Now, like I said, I love the PanaCast 50, but now with these partnerships, you’re actually able to put the complete room system into the market. Tell me about that.
Aurangzeb Khan: Exactly. Yeah, it’s just back to your points earlier about kind of familiarity and comfort, right? So we got feedback from our customers that they love the devices of peripherals, such as BYOM, but many people are just deploying room systems as a very easy, simple way to do it. There are, of course, all-in-one devices. What the room system allows you to do is to buy what is right for you in terms of the computer, the controller, and the screen, and create a pre-defined skew. So we work with leaders like Lenovo to put a think smart based controller and compute with our device. And then with Crestron, who of course have their own ecosystem and the whole XiO cloud integration and so on. So just trying to make it easy for our customers to do this at scale.
Craig Durr: Well, these people are smart to come to you guys. I think you guys have world-class cameras and world-class audio. It’s a win-win for everyone. Actually, who wins in the end and all this is the customers, right?
Aurangzeb Khan: Exactly. That’s exactly right. And that’s where our eyes are, is folks are coming together. I love technology, you can talk about it all day, but they’re just trying to get something done. They want to have a meeting, they want to have a great meeting, not be worn out, get the job done, and move on with their life, and that’s our goal.
Craig Durr: Well, AK, thank you so much for sharing these thoughts with us. We hope you have a fantastic Zoomtopia and I look forward to seeing you on the showroom floor.
Aurangzeb Khan: Perfect. Thanks very much, Craig.
Craig Durr: Take care.
Aurangzeb Khan: Great seeing you.
Author Information
Craig holds a Master of Business Administration from the Texas McCombs School of Business as well as a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Tulane University.
