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Extending the Skype Experience to Every Meeting Room: Implement Organization-wide Video Conferencing with Skype Room Systems INTRODUCTION For meetings to be truly effective, capabilities like video conferencing, screen sharing, and white boarding have become must-haves for all participants. Frost & Sullivan estimates that over 96% of meeting rooms currently are only equipped with traditional projectors or displays and audio communications. As a result, a large percentage of business users are missing out on the rich interactions that lead to more productive meetings and better business outcomes. Traditional barriers to broader video conferencing usage have included complex technology and expensive equipment. Microsoft, in partnership with audio/video technology partners, is breaking down these barriers and bringing HD audio/video experience and rich content sharing to every meeting room, with a user experience that is as simple as touching a screen. Partnering with leading A/V technology vendors like Logitech, Polycom and Crestron, Microsoft is extending the Skype Meeting experience to any meeting space, including huddle rooms, open spaces, large conference rooms, classrooms and auditoriums. Logitech is the first company to ship a complete solution optimized for Skype Room Systems with certified components that make it possible to launch meetings with one touch of a button and instantly share content, both in-room and remotely. This paper demystifies the capabilities of the new Skype Room System. It also lays down the steps to implement affordable and easy-to-use video conferencing over Skype for Business by leveraging partner devices that bring rich video meetings to everyone in the modern workplace. STATE OF MODERN MEETINGS Meetings form a core communication pillar of any organization’s collaboration culture and structure. Studies have indicated that most business professionals spend 60 hours per month in meetings, which is almost 40% of their work hours, and only half of this meeting time is considered productive.1 That adds up to about 30 hours every month per information worker in unproductive or ineffective meeting time.2 In sum, the estimated cost of unproductive meetings runs into tens of billions of dollars per year in the US alone.1 In today’s globalized mobile world, amidst the rise of the distributed enterprise, a substantial percent of these meetings involve at least one remote participant. In a Microsoft survey of business users, 78% of the people said they communicate with partners or colleagues that are located somewhere else on a daily basis.3 However, only 3.6% of the meeting rooms in the world are equipped with any type of video conferencing technology.4 This means over 96% of today’s meetings rely on old-world audio communications, in which remote attendees are relegated to second-class participants. They cannot participate in critical content sharing as well as completely miss the visual cues that lead to better meeting performance and enhanced decision making. In an era of massive digital transformation, businesses are changing the way they use technology to radically improve their performance and reach. Technology advances, including Artificial Intelligence, cloud computing, analytics, mobility, and social media, are redefining the modern workplace. To better connect people, businesses must invest in delivering collaboration experiences across the spectrum, conveying all forms of human expression — verbal, written, and visual. Modern meetings enable fluid conversations that are centered on intuitive and natural forms of communications; therefore, the outmoded meetings of yesterday that rely solely on audio communications must go. Video conferencing is becoming a norm for businesses undergoing digital transformation by offering rich and agile collaboration across multiple functional teams within and outside the organization. VIDEO CONFERENCING: INCREASING EMPHASIS ON STRATEGIC VALUE The move from traditional business phone systems to multi-modal communication platforms supporting rich audio, video and data applications is well underway. The massive shift is due in part to organizational decision makers requiring that their communications technology investments become a strategic business asset and deliver far more than the simple utility of dial tone and voicemail that was previously acceptable. Organizations are specifically looking at their communications technology as a means to achieve strategic benefits, All rights reserved © 2017 Frost & Sullivan 3 Extending the Skype Experience to Every Meeting Room: Implement Organization-wide Video Conferencing with Skype Room Systems such as expanding into new markets, boosting product innovation, improving marketing effectiveness, enhancing collaboration, gaining competitive advantages, accelerating decision-making, and improving the customer experience. In a recent Frost & Sullivan survey of C-level executives, video conferencing is seen by a dominant percent of users as critical in reducing meeting times and making meetings more effective, leading to improved productivity and revenues (Exhibit 1). Exhibit 1: Growing Strategic Value of Video Conferencing 80% 22% 17% 29% 35% 50% 40% 29% 30% 20% 10% 27% 23% 23% 16% 14% 12% 4% 4% 3% In June 2016, Frost & Sullivan conducted an extensive analysis of the enterprise video conferencing market in the report, “Growth Opportunities in the Video Conferencing Market: A Holistic Evaluation of Technology Adoption and Growth Trends.” The report states, “User demand for video communications has been accelerating. The proliferation of mobile devices combined with an unending appetite to consume video in all its forms has been a major factor in breaking traditional barriers to adoption.” The overall video conferencing market is on a high growth trajectory and is forecast to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.2% from 2015 to 2020 to reach $11.44 billion by 2020. While video has become the de facto mode for modern communications for consumers globally, usage by business users has remained riddled with challenges. It has primarily remained complex to use and expensive to deploy on a wide scale. All rights reserved © 2017 Frost & Sullivan 16% 21% Agree completely 5 4 46% 28% 6% R de ed ve uc lo es pm p en rod t t uc im t e Sh rin ks m ee tim ting es Su pp or ts di s wo per rk sed er s D ire ct ly im re pro ve ve nu s es 0% 36% 12% 2% Disagree completely 1 9% 1% R tim edu e ces an tr d av co el st s 60% M a m kes or m e ee ef ti fe ng ct s ive 70% Source: Frost & Sullivan SKYPE ROOM SYSTEMS CHANGE THE STATUS QUO Microsoft has established itself as a leading provider in today’s business communications marketplace. Skype for Business, Microsoft’s unified communications (UC) platform, offers a tightly integrated set of real-time synchronous communications applications that allows users to do inst

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