Certified devices and data are making life easier and more informed for IT decision makers.

COVID-19 has meant that organizations are shifting to ever more flexible working schedules. This will bring positive changes to the way we balance life and work, but it presents additional challenges to IT teams. These teams need to be able to manage end-points easily and diagnose problems, no matter how many different locations they come from. So what can we do to support them with this? We spoke to Jeff Smith, Head of Zoom Rooms to
understand more about how using professional devices with the right kind of certification and data can shape a more seamless, collaborative experience, from initial (simple) set up, right through to usage.

On one level, certification is really just about validating the audio, video performance of a particular piece of hardware in a Zoom context. It’s a very baseline type of certification. With Zoom Rooms appliances, we’ve looked at the life cycle of hardware in the procurement, installation, management, and software interaction of hardware, relative to an IT team. This is a level of certification where we want to certify an experience for the IT buyers. This means looking at what kind of equipment is going to be the most efficient from a cost of ownership and time management perspective, with the minimum number of headaches and complications.

Certify the whole experience

What people are consistently looking for is ease of use, high performance, consistency and reliability. Our challenge is: how do we communicate all of this relative to a whole experience. It’s really about trying to create an environment where we can truly say that this experience is delivering on everything the customer is asking for and being able to communicate in a way that cuts through all of the industry noise.

Offering a better way

This type of hardware ecosystem can massively benefit IT teams, based on hardware and software functionality. What we look at when we are determining what data to capture, aggregate and display for an IT team, we start by thinking about the type of problem we are looking to solve. Then we start considering the sort of data we need to collect, aggregate, and display in order to solve issues and answer questions.

A question of space and spend

For now, our focus is on space utilization. When we think about how a space is being used, we consider a number of questions, such as:

“Has it changed from a month ago?”
“Are employees following the guidelines we communicated?”
“If not, why not?”
“Do they have the adequate space and equipment they need
to do the jobs they’re being asked to do?”

In order to answer these questions, there’s a set of data that Zoom collects. In addition to this, our customers are able to communicate these new and ever-changing policies effectively through our digital signage products and through the conference room products.

This two-way communication is not just about pushing out a policy, it’s about getting data on how that policy is being implemented by employees; it’s absolutely critical. We look at this as an end-to-end experience that includes evaluation and metrics.