Almost a year ago, Odd Johnny (OJ) Winge delivered the Cisco keynote at Enterprise Connect. At the time he was the SVP over Cisco's Collaboration unit. Before Cisco, OJ was an officer at Tandberg, and he moved to Cisco as a result of its acquisition of Tandberg in 2010. He then held several leadership positions at Cisco within the Telepresence and Collaboration groups. Last November, OJ and Cisco parted ways.
OJ is home again--referring both to his homeland, Oslo, Norway, and to his family, which includes his wife (high school sweetheart), two sons, and an Irish Setter. I had to fit the interview in between ski trips. But his vacation is drawing to a close, and OJ will soon be starting as a partner at an investment firm that focuses on early-stage technology and growth companies. Sounds like he's had enough with public companies.
Tandberg and Cisco together gave OJ some 10 years of enterprise telepresence and collaboration leadership experience. Ten chaotic years as the industry evolved and responded to broadband/IP, SIP, UC, mobility, and HD. No longer tied to corporate objectives or positions, OJ shares his candid views on the industry and technology from the perspective of a former insider.
DM: What do you think the future offers in terms of visual communication? What video device will people use?
OJ: People will use whatever device is convenient as long as it connects them to the people they need. That means the future is more about screens. Imagine being able to walk up to a screen, any screen anywhere, and use it to place a video call. Twenty years ago, phones were only in specific rooms of the house and today mobile phones are everywhere. I believe visual communication will become integral parts of our lives. With the dramatic increase of high resolution screens out there, we could--with good cameras--be visually enabled everywhere. From my perspective, that will be through purpose-built devices for visual communication as well as mobile devices. We need video to become an integral part of people's work flow, not something that exists separately from their other ways of collaborating.
DM: Purpose-built? Do you feel dedicated video devices will dominate over general purpose computers as primary video endpoints? Is an iPad a purpose built device?
OJ: I think it is hard to talk about a primary device in today's world, when every knowledge worker is operating with a multitude of devices. It is not a matter of primary endpoint, but accepting that different devices all have their uses depending on how people want to communicate. Tablets and other mobile devices will continue to grow as the most adapted video device, but it is hard to beat the experience from a larger screen displaying real-sized individuals.
Is this going to be delivered through video conferencing endpoints as we know them today? From my perspective, today's video endpoints have to evolve, and we will see more and more large screens turning into video devices. Most likely serving more use cases than only video--as the iPad. The future in my mind is that people will use a mix of devices--appropriate for the situation they are in. Larger screens with more real-sized people is definitely a part of that, but cost and usability need to improve to get a broader adoption.
DM: I am guessing you didn't see Skype as a competitor at Tandberg. When did Skype emerge as a competitor?
OJ: Skype did us at Tandberg a huge favor, it exposed the masses to the world of video. Most importantly, exposing more people to the benefits of having richer interactions with video. Skype being owned by Microsoft and integrating with their Lync product definitely changes their competitive nature in the UC and collaboration industry.
DM: Was it an industry mistake to allow Microsoft to acquire Skype?
OJ: There is no doubt that the Microsoft acquisition will change Skype and their position in the market. Today it seems like [Skype chief] Tony [Bates] is doing a good job in positioning Skype inside of Microsoft, and according to the press, business is good for the Skype division.
From an industry perspective, I am quite concerned about the proprietary nature of Skype, and from that perspective the acquisition is not good for the industry. I am quite surprised that there were no required concessions from the regulators. It is going to be interesting to watch the continuation, both how they continue to integrate with other Microsoft assets and how new technologies like WebRTC will change the game.
DM: How do you think WebRTC will impact enterprise video? Is it good or bad for the vendors?
OJ: There is no doubt that WebRTC will have an impact on enterprise video. When browsers are communication- and video-enabled it will have a significant impact, both on software clients and hardware endpoints. All vendors need to adapt to this new reality and decide how they create interoperability with WebRTC. New use cases will definitely emerge as a result of this. If it is it good or bad will depend on the strategy the vendors adopt. It will have an impact on software clients like Skype, but I am not one of those that think Skype will "go away" overnight.
DM: Were the Cisco Cius enterprise tablet and Umi home telepresence system doomed to fail from the beginning?
The ideas were good, but the products did not live up to their promises. The idea around tablets with apps specialized for the enterprise market was not necessarily wrong, but it was late to the market and the product was not good enough to compete with the other devices out there. The wave of BYOD was coming way faster than most could imagine. You can put Umi in the same category. You label them failures, but I will argue it is the type of risk you have to take as a technology company.
Looking at immersive TelePresence, it is a different story. It was a big risk, but turned out as a success for Cisco. I will give credit to Marthin De Beer and the others I worked with at Cisco for having the courage to take some of those risks. Of course you would like all of them to be successes, but you can't win them all.
DM: What do you think made Tandberg become the biggest in the market?
OJ: From my perspective, there were two keys to Tandberg's success. First, we changed our go-to-market strategy to appeal to end users directly as well as IT managers. Second, to effectively make this change, it required a shift in thinking and cultivating adaptability. We developed unique interaction and coordination across our whole product chain--from product development to marketing and sales, also including our partner network. On top of this, it does not hurt to have the best talent in the industry in all these functions; it was definitely a great team with a great culture that made it possible.
Next Page: Future prospects
DM: The traditional MCU is highly CPU-intensive--newer companies are routing SVC layers instead of transcoding, then there are MCU-as-a-Service solutions. What is does the future of the MCU or multipoint look like?
OJ: Most cloud providers are currently using transcoding MCUs behind the scenes, due to the many standards that are used in the real-life usage of video. Layered coding for sure has its positives, but it is unlikely to be a universal solution by itself with the installed base of H.264 and future moves to H.265, WebM, VP9 and even scalable extensions to H.265 on the horizon. It is impossible to interoperate between these standards without some transcoding.
Until every device, room system, PC, mobile device, and browser moves to a single scalable standard, transcoding will continue to have a key role. I believe we will live with a combination of layered and transcoding for many years, and the winners will be the ones capable of handling both in a resource-effective way. The same arguments go to the software vs. hardware solutions; in real-life usage scenarios, we will live with a combination of software and hardware MCUs.
At the same time, I personally believe that the whole discussion on transcoding vs. switching, and hardware vs. software, should be redirected to making it easy for the end user. It's like flicking on a light switch when you walk into a dark room. You don't care about how the electricity gets to the house and lights up the filament in the light bulb, you just don't want to enter into a dark room. The future solutions that will succeed are those that don't force the end user onto some particular technology island. The focus should be on connectivity and convenience for the end user, with a holistic view to quality and cost, not on an individual video technology or deployment model. This means being inclusive of different technologies and moving the industry above and beyond theoretical arguments about video coding to development devoted to user experience. End users deserve the best possible quality at a cost level scalable to the masses.
DM: Will interoperability improve through organizations like the ITU or industry consortiums like OVCC and UCI Forum?
OJ: All these organizations and consortiums do an admirable job in pushing a more interoperable world. The unfortunate truth is that the industry has become more complex with more players coming from very different backgrounds than players from the "old" communications industry. With this in mind, I don't anticipate we will anytime soon reach universal interoperability, and we have to work in multiple forums and with multiple standards to create the most seamless experience for the end users.
My personal point of view is that we way too often end up with very detailed technical discussions where vendors are trying to differentiate based on intellectual property, where we should be focusing more on the broader picture on how users can find each other and start to communicate.
DM: Will the WebRTC effort effectively replace prior attempts at interoperability? What is your take on the WebRTC video codec debate?
OJ: Aligning the industry around one standard for the codec in WebRTC would have been a good thing to enable all the new use cases for video through browsers, however it might be naive to believe this could happen overnight. If we look to what happened with HTML5 video for streaming, there is no agreement reached and there is no mandatory codec; browsers are free to implement what they want. Part of the reasoning has been around the licensing costs for H.264, but it could be more strategic for some of the participants. So the chance of a fully interoperable WebRTC standard with a mandatory set of baseline codecs any time soon seems slim.
Behind the scenes, many players all have their own platforms to protect and this is more important to them than interoperability, which is a bit sad for the end users. The only sensible choice for baseline interoperability (and this is in general not just for WebRTC) was, or is, H.264 baseline. It has taken a number of years, but this code is prevalent across all devices, with low power hardware and software implementations on everything from smartphones to PCs to high-end room systems, in addition to well understood capability negotiation, error recovery mechanisms, and decent bandwidth performance
DM: In five years time, let's assume video communications at work are far more prevalent--what percentage of the calls are "enterprise video" versus "consumer video"?
OJ: I don't think there will be a difference. Think about applications like customer service. That's B-to-C. Look at the momentum for BYOD. Why would that be limited to audio and data? Delivery models may be different, but the integration between consumer and business video is inevitable. You are not using a different device to call your friends on audio are you? You are using the same phone you are using for business, if that is the one close to you.
The balance of which will be more prevalent again comes down to applications. There are definite productivity reasons for bringing a far-flung project team together over video. And if workers are increasingly allowed to live where they want versus close to the office, that could mean an increased need for business video. What used to be the barriers between consumer and business, will be broken down and make the distinctions irrelevant.
DM: What's next for OJ Winge?
OJ: I am entering as a partner in an investment company focusing on tech and growth companies. I'll be looking closely to pick the best new companies and technologies to get involved with. My partners and I have a very "hands on" philosophy, so I'm looking forward to getting active with some of our opportunities soon.
Dave Michels is a Contributing Editor and Analyst at TalkingPointz.
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