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UC Today’s David Dungay spoke to Chris Bischoff, Senior Manager of Infrastructure Engineering at Republic Services Inc, at Infocomm 2024 about challenges of integration in the enterprise, AI’s evolving use cases in businesses, and more
Published: June 17, 2024
Kieran Devlin
As technology continues to accelerate in its functionality and flexibility, it also accelerates in its complexity. That’s why sharing best practices and strategies and learning from past challenges and successes is critical.
Integrating UC and collaboration technology across an enterprise is one such example of an increasingly complex task, and also why Chris Bischoff, Senior Manager of Infrastructure Engineering at Republic Services Inc, presented at Infocomm 2023 last week about Microsoft Teams integration for the enterprise. What best practices did Bischoff share? What challenges and successes did he suggest participants could learn from?
“I focused on three key points: know your stakeholders, know your users and know your support structure,” Bischoff told UC Today at Infocomm 2024. ” Because, as we look around here, all this equipment has to be supported. It has to connect to your network. It’s going to need updates in firmware. It’s got to run, not just today, but next year and three years from now.”
Bischoff oversaw the integration of Teams in Republic Services, an environmental services company headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona. The company’s remit encompasses landfills, hazardous wastes, and trash collections. The company has embraced collaboration, particularly Microsoft Teams.
“It’s become our communication platform, and so, for the last few years, I’ve been building out collaboration spaces for organisations across the nation.”
Bischoff has spent four years in the collaboration space and has developed the kind of lessons learned that could be invaluable for organisations in a similar integration situation.
“The trial and error that I went through, ‘How can I prepare another organisation so they don’t skip some steps?’” Bischoff said. “The lesson learned is that your integrator is one of your biggest partners in this collaboration journey, and that relationship is really changing. It’s a close partnership, but you’re trying to know as much as the integrator knows so you can put the right collaboration technology that’s going to meet user expectations and your business needs.”
“That’s even why I’m here this week with two of my engineers: so we can look at the same equipment and understand the same technology that our integrator would. Then, obviously, you have to have a support strategy. You have to have a day-two support strategy and a day-30 support strategy because how do you have the staff or build the staff to support a collaboration environment in conferencing?”
What about relationships with AV integrators?
“The integrators are important because they are the subject matter expert in AV and in collaboration because they are seeing more customers than what’s being deployed and what works and what doesn’t work,” Bischoff stated.
However, Bischoff suggested that after the integrator oversees the installation, success then requires in-house expertise and knowledge to maximise the value of the AV technology.
“That partnership is based on building that solution and those requirements, but when it comes to the actual installation, that’s where that relationship starts to change because my network team and administrators can take over from there,” Bischoff said. “You install it, but it’s got to plug into the network, it’s going to need an IP address, and it’s going to need updates. We’ll just take it from there.”
“I’ll tell you where to plug it in, so we’re taking on more ownership from that day-one standpoint. We’re partnering with them but taking more ownership of the technology because, ultimately, we have to run it and support it. The equipment will fail, it will break, rooms will go offline, displays won’t work, and your network will have problems. So, we have a greater level of ownership, maybe than ever before, as opposed to an integrator.”
Bischoff stressed that, despite his emphasis on in-house tech ownership after a certain level, Republic Services is keen to be a long-term partner with AV integrators as there’s naturally an opportunity to develop collaboration because it’s a moving target.
“Technology is changing quickly,” Bischoff expanded, “the OEM platforms are developing at a very rapid pace. There are updates that are coming out quarterly that are changing something, and AI is having a big influence.”
How has an environmental services organisation adapted to the rise of that infamous two-letter word that has emphatically taken centre stage in UC and collaboration over the past two years—AI?
“With Microsoft as our platform and Microsoft trying to be a leader in the AI space with Copilot, we have not embraced Copilot yet,” Bischoff admitted. “There are licensing costs and a lot of other things to consider, and a lot of governance that an organisation has to understand first.”
However, where Republic Services has dabbled with the technology is in intelligent meeting use cases. “Outside of Copilot, for example, we’re starting to get a lot of influence with camera technology and how AI is trying to help improve that collaboration experience,” Bischoff explained.
Although, in his view, users aren’t necessarily as ready for a fully AI-powered meeting room experience quite yet.
“To be honest, in our environment, I pretty much disabled every camera feature that is an option out there right now because I have to follow a formula,” Bischoff said. “I have to keep it very simple for that user to walk into that room, press the join button, and consume that meeting.”
“That experience needs to work all the time and be very consistent, so the feedback that I’ve gotten is if I enable too many camera features and then the cameras are trying to stitch together the best view of the room and the people in the room, that in itself has become somewhat distracting.”
“Maybe they’re just not ready for it because it means coming up with ways to introduce a lot of AI capabilities to that collaboration environment because it has to be the same across all of my ecosystem.”
“It comes back to scale,” Bischoff concluded. “How do I scale it? I need it to work every time, all the time. My team are trying to figure out how that’s going to fit, but six months from now or next year, it might be a different conversation.”
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Collaboration
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