Before Covid hit us in early 2020, the development in the world of video conferencing had been largely focused on the same legacy principles: standards-based video conferencing units (codecs) and multipoint bridges (a.k.a. MCUs) that created the meeting room experience and allowed multiple rooms and persons to join the same meeting. Many companies had already started the migration to cloud-based Unified Communications (UC) solutions from their on-prem UC platforms. For enterprises, this meant, in most cases, transitioning to Microsoft Teams. To ensure employees could join Teams meetings using legacy video conferencing solutions, many companies started rolling out Teams gateways.
This, however, changed rapidly when everyone was forced to work from home (due to the pandemic) and all meetings were held by employees using their personal devices. In an instance, room-based video conferencing technology had become obsolete. This was a giant leap for the video conferencing industry as in just a few months the use of video in meetings became the standard worldwide.
Although the Covid-19 crisis is ebbing out the newly adopted ways of working remotely are still being impacted employees are increasingly asked to return to the office. The most notable difference between pre-covid meeting patterns and today’s pattern is that nearly all meetings that take place in an office environment have at least some remote participants. This means that every in-person meeting is also a Teams meeting and each meeting space must easily be able to connect to a Teams meeting. In addition to the fact that most spaces are not equipped with a MTR or are meeting remote meeting requirements in general, the users are also expecting a user experience that is more aligned with their personal Teams experience.
These factors have pushed CIOs to do overnight mass deployments of MTRs to meet the requirements of employees returning to the offices on an increasing scale.
“Although Microsoft Teams has really impacted the way we work on daily basis, the development of room collaboration solutions is still ongoing. Customers have only started to realise that MTRs need a different approach than workstations to get them working, to begin with let alone supporting them in the long run” says Pekka Haataja, VP Global Sales, Elisa Videra, and continues: “Most customers need support with this transition to ensure that the MTR rollout is successful and to avoid the pitfalls the fast-paced development of the complex ecosystem has created. Elisa Videra has benefited greatly by being an early player in delivering large MTR rollouts for global enterprises. As part of these roll outs, we have been able to finetune our capabilities ranging from supporting legacy video conferencing systems to becoming a specialist on delivering, onboarding, and managing MTRs.”