Tim Banting.

Simon J Dudley (00:00:02) Hello everyone, welcome to the Before It Was Obvious podcast. This week we have an old friend of mine, Tim Banting. ⁓ Tim has been well, actually, we were just talking about this before the show started. I've known Tim for probably ten years, maybe a bit longer than that, but I have no idea how he got started. So, Tim, welcome to the show. Why don't you start by telling us who you are and what you do today, and then we're gonna go in the way back machine and Found find out how you actually got here. Tim Banting (00:00:34) Excellent. We're jumping the TARDIS. There's a nice UK reference and that also dates me as well. So, ⁓ yeah, my name is Tim Banting. I'm the founder and principal analyst of a company that I founded called So What Now What. The reason why I chose that name is a lot of market intelligence out there answers the what. ⁓ So they go ad infinitum on what's been announced or what press announcements ⁓ sort of cover. What I wanted to do was to provide the now watch is that sort of actionable insights. So I try and curate out the fluff, ⁓ sort of strip out the marketing fluff, find out what's real for the competitive intelligence professional and market intelligence professional. Simon J Dudley (00:01:15) Okay. So you're a pretty important guy, as in you're all over LinkedIn, a lot of people know who you are, a lot of people read what you have to say. But you didn't come out of the egg doing this. So why don't we go back in our TARDIS Wayback Machine? ⁓ you would you be a Tom Baker era Doctor Who? Tim Banting (00:01:34) Paul. ⁓ I think I probably would have been. ⁓ I think when I wasn't hiding behind the sofa of Doctor Who, it may have even been John Pertwee, which really dates you now. But I think Tom Baker was my Doctor Who. Yeah, absolutely. ⁓ So where did I start off? I started off in a small village called Abbots Langley, which isn't too far from Watford. ⁓ So sort of outskirts of London really in Hertfordshire. ⁓ What can I tell you about my childhood? Money was pretty tight. ⁓ My father was a really good influence on me. ⁓ He was a shift working typesetter. So he worked in traditional prints to start with. ⁓ And one day he tells me the story of a sales rep that turned up in the car park in a brand new car. ⁓ And my dad was on a bit of a break. ⁓ So probably rubbing the oil off his hands or print off his hands and had a word with the sales rep and asked him what he did. And from that day on, my dad decided that's what he wanted to do. And that really sort of reshaped our family from that day on really. So yeah, it was a turning moment for my dad and it always made me think of, ⁓ know, that I've got a little poster on my daughter's ⁓ wall next door that sort of says luck is when ⁓ opportunity meets preparedness. So I think, you know, we make our own luck. ⁓ My dad certainly made his own luck that day and he just recognized there was an opportunity there and decided to go for it. So. ⁓ That was really, my dad was a big influence for me in that way. ⁓ Pretty traditional household, ⁓ usual sort of children should be seen and not heard. So that made me very quiet and rather observant. ⁓ Yeah, growing up, yeah, sorry, go on. ⁓ Yeah. Simon J Dudley (00:03:20) And what about what about you what about school? Because you know, we've had a bunch of guests on so far and it's been very interesting to see how much everyone's got an A V degree. ⁓ no, that's right. No one's got an A V degree. I don't think there is such a thing as an A V degree, but ⁓ no one kind of realized at sixteen, you know what, I'm gonna become an analyst in the telecoms business. I mean, so where where how what what was school like and and then did you I don't even know if you went to university? Tim Banting (00:03:34) you Tim Banting (00:03:49) Yeah, well, ⁓ I went to school at a ⁓ small called Palmeters, which was meant to be the posh school. We all had to have an interview to get in, although it was publicly funded. My claim to fame was I went to school with the guy that broke Behring's bank. So Nick Leeson was in my ⁓ geography and computer studies class. So that was a bit of a, that's a bit of a notorious name out there. So I left school with a handful of ⁓ O levels ⁓ or as I was going through my sort of O levels. ⁓ at the time, I hadn't really got a clue on what to do. And there was lot of redundancy, a lot of unemployment in the UK at that time. And I thought, what the heck do I do? ⁓ So as a kid, I grew up, my parents used to take me to the Royal Tournament, which was like a big military tattoo in Earls Court in London as a bit of a treat. And I always was found in the back of a Royal Signals Land Rover playing around with the Morse Keys and the radios and everything else. know, underneath the camouflage net that they have ⁓ in the sort of ⁓ stalls that they had out there. And I thought, well, actually, I quite fancy a crack at the royal signals. So ⁓ at the time, ⁓ I joined the Army Apprentice College in Harrogate, where I studied electronics and communications engineering. ⁓ So ⁓ that was my foundation. ⁓ I... How can I put this? I had a very interesting career. working alongside military analysts during the Cold War. So I spent, they used to call it sneaky beaky stuff. So I sort of supported all the intelligence corps, ⁓ special forces type deployments out there. And I watched them piece together all these little faint signals and indicators into patterns. ⁓ And it's really quite a link to what I do today, actually. So military intelligence isn't all James Bond stuff. Some of it is just looking at some very core signals around what the economy is doing and what the state of the Russian Navy was ⁓ during the Cold War. And they were piecing together all these signals and coming out with these fantastic insights into what was going on. I thought this is really exciting and interesting stuff. ⁓ Simon J Dudley (00:05:55) It's it yeah, so ⁓ just so we get a sense of this, ⁓ Tim, what year are we talking that you went in? Tim Banting (00:06:01) Yeah, so that would have been ⁓ 1986 through to 91. So ⁓ just as the Berlin Wall came down, so I was at the NSA listening station in Teufelsberg on top of the, ⁓ it's called the Devil's Mountain, ⁓ right out in the middle of Berlin, the biggest ⁓ landmark or the highest landmark in Berlin. ⁓ So I was there and then ⁓ my shift finished. and a colleague took over and he spent the whole of the remaining tour just partying because the Berlin Wall came down. So he had a great, I was doing all the work and he was doing all the partying, which felt a bit unfair. ⁓ So yeah, that must have been about, when was that? 90s, early 90s. Yeah. Simon J Dudley (00:06:45) Yeah, yeah, ninety one, ninety two. I forget what the year was that the early more well maybe a bit a bit before then. Early more was it eighty nine? I don't remember now. Eighty nine, ninety ninety one, that sort of era, wasn't it? ⁓ it's interesting in that you talk about ⁓ you talk about piecing together a story. ⁓ I I'm a big fan of that as well. I think it's interesting. There's that older Indian ⁓ story about the monks touching the elephant. Tim Banting (00:06:55) Yeah, that sort of era. Yeah, so, yeah. Simon J Dudley (00:07:14) You know, and the the one monk, the blind monk is touching the tail and thinks he's got an ⁓ thinks he's got a snake, and one th touches a leg and thinks he's got a pillar, and another one touches an ear and thinks he's got a massive leaf. And it's only when you add it all together that you actually work out what it is. Although I'm not certain if you were blind, you could really describe what an elephant is. ⁓ but ⁓ yeah, it's an interesting an interesting set of skills that you generated as a result of that. Tim Banting (00:07:25) tree trunk or whatever yet. Tim Banting (00:07:43) It was, yeah. And then left the army. ⁓ joined Mercury, who were the only alternative to British Telecom as a competitor then. So I sort of did all the SCADA stuff, the self, ⁓ what was it? ⁓ SCADA, ⁓ Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition. It's all this sort of telemetry that goes between muxes and networking gear. So I was programming those up and doing network provisioning. ⁓ in the long, long time ago in the networking days. I then joined, ⁓ where did I go from there? I joined a very small company that made their own ⁓ dialogic board-based IVRs and call center functionality. ⁓ And that was for, ⁓ the biggest customer there was British Telecom. So. ⁓ BT with all their North stars and Meridian option 11s and 61s and 81s. So really amazed. ⁓ Do you remember those days when we had PBXs the size of filing cabinets that had had their own room? I mean, it's it's amazing how far we've gone, but I was I was sort of installing in those sorts of locations. Simon J Dudley (00:08:55) Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? This was what mid nineties by this point. ⁓ this was an era before I mean I've talked in other episodes to people about the way that IT and ⁓ telecoms basically converged in the early two thousands. ⁓ I guess Cisco were probably the biggest lead with that with Call Manager, but but lots of other people did it as well, probably better. But Cisco clearly had the name. But in the mid nineties Tim Banting (00:08:58) Yeah. Simon J Dudley (00:09:22) The idea that telecoms and ⁓ IT would merge was laughable. I I remember talking to ⁓ to telecoms managers of big financial houses, and they would say things like, Well, you know, we get five nines reliability. For for those who don't know what that means, it means ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent reliable. ⁓ just so you get a sense of what that means. Is that twenty minutes a year of downtime? ⁓ And they were like, IT can't even do ninety nine percent, let alone the three more nines. So did you see did you see the IT coming, or did you think that telecoms and IT would be totally separate forever? Tim Banting (00:10:04) Well, that's an interesting segue to my next part, which is, ⁓ so I went to Reading University to do like six month course on token ring just as we started moving to IP. ⁓ So that was sort of wasted six months of my life, but I joined a company called Rockwell. ⁓ They did very big ACD systems for call centers that were like, ⁓ I mean, you remember Rockwell from the NASA days, you know, they were great, ⁓ huge. really engineering heavy ⁓ companies. So I got into the contact center business. Then I joined a company called GeoTel. And I got my interview with GeoTel and then Cisco went and acquired them. So on the day that I was meant to join GeoTel, I missed out on all the shares. ⁓ On the day I was meant to join GeoTel, it was actually Cisco. So I started off at Cisco and at the time we were looking at network based contact centers and premise based contact centers. And that was at the time when they made the Celsius acquisition for IP telephony. I remember going to the TMA, the Telecom Managers Association in Brighton with a big bag full of ⁓ IP phones and they were the early Celsius ones. I can't remember what they called, the VIP12s or something like that. The ones that when you picked up the headset, they actually got hot on your ear as you're ⁓ putting the headset up to your ear. And all of my former... Simon J Dudley (00:11:19) Right. Simon J Dudley (00:11:25) Well ⁓ Tim Banting (00:11:28) ⁓ traditional telecoms guys were coming into this room and they were picking it up and clicking and blowing and ⁓ does this work? And they were trying to catch it out and they sort of thought well ⁓ maybe the writing's on the wall here, this looks really interesting. And in a very short period of time, there we go, straight into IP telephony. Simon J Dudley (00:11:44) C'était ⁓ Simon J Dudley (00:11:48) So you ⁓ y you kind of fell into IP telephony, right? The day you started Cisco bought you. I mean, it doesn't get any more falling into it than that. What I mean, what did you think of it? Because as I said before, ⁓ lots of telecoms managers, and I dealt with a load of them. I was selling these people I SDN lines well, I was selling a video conferencing that needed ISDN lines, and therefore telecoms managers would come and talk to us. And ⁓ they were all like, ⁓ IT, no, they'll never run this. ⁓ Tim Banting (00:11:51) Yeah. Yeah. Tim Banting (00:11:55) That's right. No, in very exciting time. Simon J Dudley (00:12:18) And then three years later all of decided to retire, ⁓ early, mainly. But did you see it coming? Tim Banting (00:12:25) I saw, ⁓ I did see, well, maybe that goes back to my military intelligence days where I was taught to sort of see these early signals because I did see to some degree, you know, the ⁓ telecom adoption life cycle, Jeffrey Moore crossing the chasm, which is a book that everyone should really read. ⁓ They were talking about this visionary, before you cross the chasm, you get this early adopter visionary stage where people are willing to sacrifice and ⁓ trial and beta and be the sort of guinea pigs. Simon J Dudley (00:12:48) Yes. Tim Banting (00:12:55) to see what this emerging technology would do. And I could see some very interesting ⁓ names, even in finance saying, well, actually this makes perfect sense for us. You know, we're going to converge everything. Cisco came out with the architecture for voice video and integrated data, which was moving everything ⁓ onto the same data network. And I thought, wow, this is really going to cut down on cabling costs, as moves and changes, all of that sort of stuff. don't have to have, goh, we had... ⁓ two different wiring schemes to the desk, one for data, one for voice. It just made no sense. So I thought this is really quite revolutionary here. So I thought this is where I want to be and this is where I want to focus. It's a very exciting time. ⁓ mean, and because it was oddly, it was Windows server based because it was software based, it moves so quickly because previously digital PBXs were, you had to wait a year until Nortel released a new type of software for the option 11 or whatever. Simon J Dudley (00:13:28) Yeah. Yeah. Tim Banting (00:13:52) option 61. So you went from a yearly cadence of software releases ⁓ to this regular cadence of feature updates. And we went from 10 features to 100 features to 250 features in a very short period of time, ⁓ moving as the technology advanced. So it's very exciting time. Simon J Dudley (00:14:12) Th there's been an interesting debate recently that I think you've also got involved in, ⁓ in some of the groups where they're talking about innovation versus reliability as opposed to an extent. It's not quite reliability, but ⁓ and it's interesting, isn't it? That the telecoms world, the old telecoms world, sacrificed all innovation for reliability. And IT the IT world came along and went No, no, no. We'll we'll build a a minimum viable product and then we'll just keep iterating and then it will eventually beat the the ⁓ the five nines reliability, the ninety nine point nine nine nine. I don't mean five nines as in the company. ⁓ entirely different, although painly based on that that number. So it's it's interesting, isn't it, to see how the innovation changed because my world was more video, yours was obviously more telephony. And it's interesting to see how in some ways video was ⁓ was innovative, but in other words in other ways it wasn't, because there was only at any one point there were only two players in the market. Now that whoever those two players were kept changing, ⁓ you know, Pitcher Tel and and ⁓ VTEL, and then ⁓ I spoke well very, very briefly VTel and Polycom and then Polycom and Tandberg. ⁓ and there was it was always Two companies. So the innovation wasn't that much. I think in a world where you've got lots of competitors, you get a lot more innovation. ⁓ Tim Banting (00:15:47) Yeah, you do. ⁓ Going back to those days, Simon, I remember we were speaking, know, obviously based in, we were at Bedfonte Lakes at that particular, no, we were at Stockley Park in that time near Heathrow and we were speaking to people in San Jose all over the place. ⁓ But again, you had to have, do remember the old days where you had to type in the IP address of the distant end? I mean, that was awful. And then at Cisco, was like, well, we can use an IP phone to dial the distant end. So we didn't even have to worry about, you know, Simon J Dudley (00:16:06) Yes. Tim Banting (00:16:17) using a, well, it was like the old days of using a phone for SMS. You had to keep pressing the button until you got the A and then press the button until you got the D. ⁓ Same with that horrible remote control with the ISDN. was like you were forever, you know, and it is a long format. If you mucked it up, it was really frustrating. ⁓ Sometimes you had to get facilities in. For some reason, facilities knew how to get all this to work. And then we moved into this world of, well, actually the IP phone can make the call to the distant end. And that was That was at the time when telepresence started making ⁓ its ⁓ way ⁓ onto the scene. Simon J Dudley (00:16:50) I've got a little story for you. In 2005, I don't know if you know some of these characters, but in 2005, ⁓ Craig Malloy, Michael Kenoyer and I went to see Cisco. We we were just about to launch the LifeSize Room System. So the world's first High Def video system. And we met a guy in San Jose, building 23, called Martin De Beer South African Tim Banting (00:17:17) Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Simon J Dudley (00:17:19) Very senior guy, don't remember Martin's ⁓ title. And ⁓ we ⁓ this is all under NDA and six people from Cisco turned up. They all flanked Martin and it was very confrontational across this board table. And they said, So what are you guys doing? And we and we wanted their version of SIP. ⁓ SCCP was it? Skinny. How how's SCCP become skinny? I that's a marketing statement of the first order. But anyway. Tim Banting (00:17:39) Mm-hmm, skinny, SCCP, skinny, yeah, yeah. Tim Banting (00:17:47) Because everyone got hung up ⁓ with the acronym. They could never pronounce it. Have I got one too many Cs in there? Yeah. ⁓ Simon J Dudley (00:17:53) Yeah. Ridiculous. So anyway, we met Martin De Beer and and he said, So what are you guys gonna do? And ⁓ Kenoyer stood up and said, We're gonna do high definition in one megabit. And he looked at us and said, Well, we're gonna do high definition in twenty megabits. And he said, Why would you do it in in ⁓ and I said, sorry, I said, Well, why would you do it in twenty if you can do it in one? And he looked at me and said, You do know what Cisco do. And I responded, because I'm don't have very good impulse control, where is with the phrase, well, but that's great. That's like Shell making a car that does one to the gallon. It would be really good for Shell, but it wouldn't be very good for the consumer. ⁓ And ⁓ and the meeting broke up at that point, and no, we never got skinny support. And then they went off bought some years later went off and bought Tandberg. But it's interesting, so you were a part of Martin I assume somewhere you were part of Martin's world. Tim Banting (00:18:35) Absolutely. Tim Banting (00:18:49) That's right, yeah. then ⁓ Barry O'Sullivan with Voice Technology Group, ⁓ VTG, and Barry sort of made his money from the ⁓ telephony world. And Cisco, think lost a bit of, ⁓ I think Cisco lost its way a little bit because we ended up with, I remember saying at one time, why have we got 30 different types of IP phone? You know, it's like we've got one for every day of the month here. It just doesn't make much sense, but. I think at the time Cisco were, you know, obviously ⁓ for every $1 of IP telephony sold it pulled through, you know, $6 to $7 of networking gear. But also there's a lot of margin to be made on IP phones then because the world wasn't ready for PC based communications and the way in which we're communicating now, ⁓ which sounds very odd looking back at it, ⁓ you know, a long time ago. Yeah. Simon J Dudley (00:19:39) It it does, doesn't it? Telephones, people couldn't really get their ⁓ a ⁓ a VoIP phone or a ⁓ what's the word? Not a VoIP phone, sorry, a soft phone, as they used to call them. Something that users just could not really get their head round. ⁓ they preferred the physical location of a phone on their hand and the desk, which didn't really make a lot of sense. Tim Banting (00:19:55) And, ⁓ and... ⁓ Yeah. Yeah, and there's nothing better than slamming a phone down, is there, in disgust or, you know, when you're angry. But the weird thing was the soft phone was actually a graphical representation of the phone on the screen. You know, there was no but it was all let's let me dial out the sort of ⁓ three by three ⁓ phone pad and you had to tap it out with a mouse. It was it was strange. ⁓ But that was the user interface back then. Simon J Dudley (00:20:18) Yes, it's ridiculous. Simon J Dudley (00:20:26) So why did they go for thirty different phones? Is it just because someone in product marketing just couldn't control themselves and decided they did need one for every day of the month? Tim Banting (00:20:34) I think it was the endless pursuit of more. It was like, well, what we need is more phones and more opportunity to upsell phones. And why have two speed dial keys when you can have six and then we can add a sidecar and have another 12 on there. And ⁓ maybe we can have a speakerphone on this one and maybe we can have a colour screen on this one with some of those XML apps that ⁓ everyone sort of wanted, but no one could tell you what. what the app was that you could use with it. ⁓ It was just a very odd time where I think it was a case of there's the portfolio, pick what you want. But I think in the end, it just ended up confusing a lot of people. They just didn't know which ones to go for. ⁓ So maybe they lost their way. Simon J Dudley (00:21:03) Yeah, yeah. Simon J Dudley (00:21:17) I think it's a good example. I think it's a but I think everyone did at that time. I I genuinely think that it wasn't just Cisco. Almost every player in the market was looking at it, going, we don't really know which way this market's gonna go next. So we'll spread the net as wide as possible, ⁓ and then just see which direction it starts going in. ⁓ it's interesting, isn't it? And that was a time where Polly, well Tim Banting (00:21:23) Yeah. Tim Banting (00:21:31) No. Simon J Dudley (00:21:43) Yeah, Polycom was building VoIP phones and competing with Cisco. In fact, that was a time where ⁓ I know that Cisco got really upset with ⁓ Polycom because apparently Polycom reps would literally follow Cisco reps around in the city of London and other places ⁓ and walk in the door and say, I know you're looking to buy ten thousand Cisco phones, ⁓ we can do them for fifty dollars cheaper. ⁓ which upset Cisco rather badly. And then Yale ink started up and just destroyed everybody's business. Tim Banting (00:22:11) Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. mean, but it was interesting because, you know, Cisco clearly led the market, drove the market. Great success there, both in IP telephony video, ⁓ still doing extremely well with their ⁓ UC capabilities and collaboration capabilities. But I knew that it was time to move on for me when in ⁓ 2010 Cisco launched this UMI, which was like a consumer video telepresence unit for six hundred dollars. the hardware and $25 a month subscription. And this was at a time when Skype was already offering free video calls. ⁓ And I thought this is going a bit wacky now. ⁓ And I remember Martin De Beard sort of he was quoting the press release saying, you know, everyone will have one. ⁓ John Chambers was sort of saying, I bought one for me and one for my family members. ⁓ And it almost remembers. I almost remember when AT &T launched the picture tell back in 1964 at the New York ⁓ trade conference. Again, it was about a thousand pounds, I think, ⁓ in today's money just for a ⁓ 30 minute video call. mean, crazy prices. And I think that ⁓ what I found at the time, I was a market intelligence manager at Cisco, was ⁓ I felt ⁓ it was very difficult working internally to tell people that are built up these businesses. you know, is this wise? ⁓ You know, are we going in the right direction? ⁓ Is the writing on the wall? You know, have you looked at the early signals here? ⁓ So I think... Simon J Dudley (00:23:51) Well, they get they end up in their own bubble, don't they? Th this is the problem I think among all companies do it. ⁓ I I spent most of my career, or much of my career sort of by accident, trying to keep CEOs ⁓ grounded with with varying levels of success. And y yeah, when someone like John Chambers is a good example, ⁓ a man I have a I don't know him, by the way, but I have a huge amount of respect for what Chambers did for Cisco. He was a remarkable CEO. ⁓ Tim Banting (00:23:55) All companies do. All companies do. Yeah. Tim Banting (00:24:18) yeah, yeah. Simon J Dudley (00:24:21) But does show a level of ⁓ was it hubris really, that you would think that it would be a good idea for the CEO of the company that makes it to turn around to the market and say, a multi millionaire, which he clearly was even then, a multi millionaire has decided to buy a product that his own company makes. As if in any way that's a testimonial for normal human beings to go, well, you know, John Chambers has got one. Well I I must buy one as well, said the four other CEOs on the planet, who were of the same level, you know. It it Tim Banting (00:24:52) He also had a private jet, Simon. ⁓ I didn't rush out. Yeah, and he also had a private jet. So ⁓ that wasn't a very good... Yeah. Simon J Dudley (00:25:01) Well he probably had a telepresence room in his house, I suspect. Tim Banting (00:25:04) Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't be at all surprised. Telepresence was an interesting one as well. I remember the first time I saw that, that was a wow moment for me. But the ⁓ Rob Lloyd actually ⁓ came into the first Telepresence room in ⁓ Stockley Park with a big hot mug of coffee. And at that time, you know, we had all the all the lovely furniture and everything was built with the with the brown, the brown paint to make sure that your facial, your ⁓ Simon J Dudley (00:25:29) Yeah, yeah. Tim Banting (00:25:33) skin tone and everything was absolutely perfect. He came down with this very big hot steamy mug of coffee, put it on the furniture in the first telepresence session and made a perfect ring on the furniture. And then after that, we got this, you know, there were posters made, no food or drink in this room. ⁓ And everyone was busy trying to polish out the ring, the coffee ring mark that he made. But yeah, ⁓ really interesting times. Technology moved on so quickly, but at the time it was breathtaking. You know, it was so I know I've spoken at length of ⁓ mistakes that Cisco have made, all companies do. Nortel made lots of ⁓ mistakes. All companies really do. But I think ⁓ being at the forefront of that technology and that leading edge was an exciting time for me. I really enjoyed it. Simon J Dudley (00:26:21) Now, ⁓ a question for you, right? Cisco clearly became a major, major player in IP telephony. Do you think it was the product, or do you think it was the business machine that Cisco is? I mean, I I I'll I'll I'll lay my own hand out here and say Cisco to me is a company that is a sales organization and a a magnificent sales organization ⁓ with a product thing attached. And what they do is buy companies in to make to to allow their sales organisation to go and sell them again. And this that sounds a bit like I'm being ⁓ disingenuous to to Cisco. I'm not. I think it's a genius business model. But ⁓ do you think they won because their product was better or they won because their their sales model was better? Tim Banting (00:27:08) I think they're so, yeah, I think you rightly pointed out at that particular time, the sales model, that they made so many acquisitions. I think John Chambers said, you know, if ⁓ five out of eight of them ⁓ find those acquisitions ⁓ work for us, that's great. We can afford to, you know, ⁓ learn from our lessons with the failed ones. At that particular time, that was it. It was right inside the tornado and with the go-to market and the channel partners ⁓ and the CCIEs, you know, all of that was geared up. perfectly to just take these ⁓ products in through acquisition, build your own business unit through it, sell it through the channel ⁓ and repeat. I think Cisco's model now is more around looking, they make more ⁓ informed decisions on the companies they're gonna require, Splunk being one of them, and look at ways in which that can really start telling the Cisco integrated story a lot more. At the moment, Sorry, at that particular time, think when Cisco was going through their major acquisition strategy, ⁓ it was more a case of, it sits on a network so we can sell it rather than how can we integrate this to add value through the whole ⁓ portfolio. Simon J Dudley (00:28:20) Yeah, I mean to to give the the audience a bit of a sense of scale, ⁓ I I I I think I would agree with you, Tim, and obviously you're much more involved or were but much more involved with Cisco, you probably still are than I ever have been. But I do remember when Cisco bought Tandberg in whatever that was, two thousand and nine or something, they were ⁓ they were the hundred and thirty-third company they'd bought. Which is quite remarkable. They they do a very good job. I mean it's all What Cisco do is they they they partner with a bunch of little companies, they wait to see which one is the best of the ones that they partnered with. ⁓ best doesn't necessarily mean technically best, but certainly the best overall fit, should we say, for Cisco. ⁓ then they cut off all the others and say to the one that they're gonna buy, we're gonna buy you, but we obviously get to pick the price, 'cause without us, you're nothing. ⁓ It it's hard to argue with the with the the success of that. They effectively run all these little companies as incubators, ⁓ because they know they're not very good at building it themselves. ⁓ and it's cheaper to build to have somebody else build it and you just pick the winner. Tim Banting (00:29:31) Yeah, was bill acquire or partner, though that was it. ⁓ I mean, I almost felt like that should have been written on a T-shirt and we could have worn it all around Stockley Park. yeah. ⁓ Simon J Dudley (00:29:42) Well, you don't want to give away. It's a bit like pen and tell her. You don't want to give away how you do the s secret stories, do you? ⁓ Even if that is fairly obvious if you look at it. Okay, so twenty ten comes up. You're now you've been at Cisco was ten years or something similar. ⁓ so you decided this I d I do vaguely remember this UMI thing. They were trying to push it towards consumers, weren't they, at that time? ⁓ Tim Banting (00:29:53) Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Tim Banting (00:30:05) Mmm. That's right. Yeah, they were because they acquired this company called Linksys. We're going to go into the big into the consumer world because they thought, well, if it works in the world of business, it must work in the world of consumer. But unfortunately, that didn't pay off for them. At the time, I was market intelligence manager ⁓ looking at this new upcoming company that was stretching their legs and sort of their way into ⁓ software based communication called Microsoft. So ⁓ you might remember them. Simon J Dudley (00:30:35) Rings a bell. Tim Banting (00:30:37) Yeah, well, going back to your interview with PK, Patrick Kelly, as you were going through all the various iterations of OCS, I actually joined Microsoft ⁓ to help them out as a Senior Product Manager for Lynk, which was just at that transition to Skype for Business. So we went from OCS to Lynk and then went to Microsoft Teams. So I spent two years in Redmond. ⁓ Great time there. ⁓ very, very busy. They looked at market intelligence and competitive intelligence with a completely different lens. I was up briefing senior ⁓ members of the team. They were flying in people for compete retreats. So was getting up at half past five in the morning to brief VPs and country managers on what was going on. They were doing a lot of battle cards ⁓ and scenario planning and war gaming. Really exciting, really, really interesting stuff that really helped position Microsoft. ⁓ I would argue to the place where they are now. Simon J Dudley (00:31:37) You know, it's really interesting you talk about Microsoft, isn't it? And and I've got some questions for you about the Skype situation. But it's interesting to see how different culturally Cisco and Microsoft are. Microsoft, I mean, they do buy product in, but they don't do it at an industrial scale like Cisco do. And they have a sales organization that is cycled through, but not like Microsoft's is, where basically every year everyone seems to have to apply for their job again. ⁓ Cisco just w takes out the bottom, whatever they define as the bottom ten percent each year. So it's kind of interesting to see how culturally different they were. And I wouldn't have expected Microsoft to be better I don't know if they are better at competitive intelligence, but from what you've just said, they appear to take it more seriously. Tim Banting (00:32:28) I would think that was probably it. sort of realized, and obviously at the time or ⁓ prior to me joining, Bill Gates was going, he was wheeled in front of ⁓ Department of Justice, I think, sort of explaining ⁓ the ⁓ monopolistic sort of approach that Microsoft had and he was taken to task there. So there was a lot of, let's tread carefully, let's be respectful, ⁓ let's run this past the lawyers. So there was a lot of ⁓ concern around. ⁓ litigation, that sort of thing. There was also a lot of business units competing against each other. So the way in which instead of acquiring companies, you would get business units competing against each other and everyone would be backing against each other and may the best be you win. ⁓ So I think those were during the Bulmer days, the Steve Bulmer days. ⁓ And I think ⁓ Satya Nadella has made a really great job of changing that culture around. It's a very different Microsoft. compares to the one I was at. Simon J Dudley (00:33:30) Yeah, Bolmer seemed very competitive and competitive as a as a CEO. And maybe you want to talk about I'm interested, you know, having worked for both Cisco and Microsoft, who are the stalwarts of the industry. ⁓ the difference in the way that the CEO's voice changes an entire organization. I I mean I certainly experienced it in well, every company I've worked for, but I've never worked for a company with 70,000 or 200,000 or however many people Cisco and Microsoft have got. ⁓ but the the it always the CEO, even if they didn't meet 95% of the population of the organization, they definitely set the mood music. ⁓ I'm interested to understand in your experience. How do they do I I I've never really understood this myself. How do they manage to set the mood music? I mean, I don't know if you ever met Balmer but ⁓ you know, he was an example of someone who affected the mood of a hundred thousand people at Microsoft at that time. Tim Banting (00:34:37) Absolutely. ⁓ I'm trying to sort of explain, ⁓ I'm trying to pick my words carefully because it was, ⁓ he had this absolutely incredible energy. He wants to know exactly how do we get through this? What's the path? was very, if you ever done that sort of color psychology, he was very red. ⁓ You know, just give me the highlights, ⁓ tell me where we're going, give me the action, go, go, ⁓ And that sort of... dominated all the way or percolated all the way through the sort of Microsoft senior management team all the way through to managers. ⁓ And it was this constant, let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go. ⁓ Not really giving yourself much breathing space to sort of make sure you're going in the right direction. But it was this sort of, we'll learn along the way. ⁓ So it was a very... It was a very difficult situation and very difficult environment to manage and very alien to, oddly, very alien to my military career, which was a lot more collaborative. You'd think it'd be the other way around. But I think, you know, the military is more around, you're the expert, you know what you're doing, advise me, where it was top down, this is what we're going to do. ⁓ So it was a very strange environment for me. Simon J Dudley (00:36:01) Well, the British military, of course, and as does the US military, has very strong NCOs. ⁓ where say, for example, the Russian military doesn't really have any kind of NCO level that that matter. It's all from the top down. Now what about so compared with those two, compared with your military experience and your Microsoft experience, how was Cisco at that time? Because you would have worked under John Chambers, another very big personality. Tim Banting (00:36:27) Yeah, very charismatic. More of a listener. ⁓ Very, very much focused on the customer. ⁓ Almost evangelical. I remember going to my first sales conference out in San Jose and people were running to get to the front. ⁓ It was really quite ⁓ incredible, very charismatic person, spent a lot of time listening to customers, a lot of time listening to partners, which was very refreshing and ⁓ really good. I thought that was really good for Cisco. The fact that he'd go on to conference calls, ⁓ speak with Bank of America, speak with some of these very large corporations, find out what their problems are, what the issues were. ⁓ Even when it came to customer support calls. there was a clear escalation path and if it got ⁓ to a particular level of escalation at the TAC, it would be a case of John Chambers would be ⁓ on the call. you ⁓ do not want to, you do not. In fact, I had another colleague that was called John Chambers ⁓ and ⁓ not the John Chambers, but a different John Chambers. And I remember ⁓ on the conference calls, you used to get announced and the computer voice would say, Tim Banting joined the call. Simon J Dudley (00:37:25) You don't want to be the manager who's ⁓ the terrifying. Tim Banting (00:37:43) One call, John comes in late and it said, John Chambers joining the call. And everyone, know, ⁓ it all went silent and everyone was waiting for a, you know, a ⁓ Southern drawl ⁓ accent to be on the line, but it wasn't. ⁓ yeah, he would get involved where he needed to get involved. ⁓ Quite hands on from a customer perspective. Simon J Dudley (00:38:05) You know, it's interesting. Tell me about CEOs, a little a side story. ⁓ I think the best CEO I ever worked with was ⁓ Bracken Darrell at Logitech. ⁓ that's possibly not true, actually. ⁓ Not that Bracken wasn't fantastic. He was, but I've worked for some really other great CEOs as well. ⁓ Craig Malloy in the early days, ⁓ Bob Haggerty when I was a polycom. ⁓ very different. But but ⁓ Bracken he he wasn't particularly colour he was he was retail focused. So he didn't really ⁓ he understood the market, but he you couldn't put him in front of a big B2B customer. He just didn't have the the language to speak to these folks. But I I once heard ⁓ Bill ⁓ Clinton described as a man who ⁓ everyone felt if they'd met him that he was their best friend ⁓ and that he really cared about them. And As I used to say about Charles the Gall, he could fake sincerity. And I never really knew if Bracken faked it brilliantly or really did care. And I would meet him once a year at some conference or other. ⁓ I mean, I met him more often than that, but in person probably once a year. And you come away from a 20 minute conversation just pumped, just what a great he's listened to everything I've said, he's understood. He ⁓ I've given him all the background, ⁓ nothing would change, ⁓ but my god, it g made you feel good. And it's very interesting to see how different CEOs manage things in different ways. Tim Banting (00:39:41) No, absolutely. And it does set the precedence for the whole company. It's not just a poorly written vision statement slapped on a wall somewhere. ⁓ It does really, it starts with the leader. Simon J Dudley (00:39:52) It does, yeah. those AI, those things are always nonsense. I think they were always written by AI, even before AI existed. Uh-huh. So, okay, so Microsoft. ⁓ you did all the links up. I did have a question about Skype. So Microsoft bought Skype for eight and a half billion dollars. ⁓ and they kept the label. Did they keep anything else? Tim Banting (00:39:59) Hahaha Tim Banting (00:40:19) I'm not sure that they did because I remember when I first moved out to the US, I got a Skype mobile handset that would connect on any Wi-Fi ⁓ network and it would allow me to ring my folks back home. But I don't remember anything sort of, I don't ever remember anything surviving that. And ⁓ I think, ⁓ you know, Lynk had its own separate infrastructure, Skype had its own separate infrastructure, and then everything went away when they came out with Teams. It was like, let's just completely change. Yeah. Simon J Dudley (00:40:50) Yeah. Well, Skype was all distributed. I mean, for those of us who aren't old enough, those of you watching this ⁓ who aren't old enough, unfortunately Tim and I clearly have almost exactly the same vintage. ⁓ Skype the biggest thing about Skype in the early days wasn't telephony, it was instant messenger. And all your friends could work at different companies, and Skype was the only instant messenger that allowed you to talk to anyone across any network. ⁓ it got past everyone's firewalls in those days very easily. And as a result, everyone already had Skype on their desktop because they'd send each other messages who's going for lunch, that sort thing, for different companies. But so it was completely distributed. And then Microsoft bought it and then they kept the label, but I think all the infrastructure behind it just disappeared. So do you think it was worth eight and a half? I mean, I suppose now eight and a half billion dollars to Microsoft is like find it down the back of the couch. But at the time it seemed like a lot of money. Tim Banting (00:41:49) It certainly was. ⁓ And I'm not too sure. I'd love to sit on a call with Mahendra or other people that I know at Microsoft still and sort of talk through that. That would be a really interesting angle to explore. ⁓ Yeah, there was Yahoo Messenger and all sorts of other consumer versions out there. I have a feeling that, you know, someone somewhere thought, well, if we can have a foot in the business world and link to... the consumers. ⁓ And I remember at the time there were things like Microsoft experimenting with eSIMs in the early day for laptops. And they obviously had their Windows mobile phones as well. And that partnership with Nokia. I wondered if they thought, well, this will be a way of connecting B2C. I'm not too sure ⁓ what was going through the minds. Simon J Dudley (00:42:39) Or or it could have been a high level exec who decided he wanted an MA ⁓ on his resume when he moved on to some other company. And believe me, that happens all the time. ⁓ I need I want to be a CEO next, but I haven't done an MA. I better do an MA. ⁓ da da! We found another company to buy. Okay, so ⁓ let's move forward a bit. ⁓ Microsoft, you you did you got through Lynk, you got to Teams, then what happened? Tim Banting (00:42:46) Yeah, there'll be an interesting one to look at. yeah, yeah, yeah. Tim Banting (00:43:05) Yep. Yep. ⁓ What happened then? I got a phone call from someone saying, ⁓ have you ever thought of being an analyst? ⁓ And I thought, well, that sounds interesting because I've done market intelligence inside of Vendor. And I've spoken to all these ⁓ interesting guys like Gartner, Forrester, IDC, Current Analysis, all of these sorts of people. I thought, ⁓ I wonder what it's like on the other side of the table. ⁓ So having a ⁓ very large budget ⁓ to buy all this market research, I thought, well, it'd be great to be the other way around, ⁓ working for a market research company and selling into these vendors. So I've been on the buy side of market intelligence. I thought, well, ⁓ I'll move on to the sell side. So I joined Current Analysis. ⁓ That was my first ⁓ sort of foray into market research. ⁓ And then I joined, from there on, I joined to Omdia. ⁓ And then after that, ⁓ I sort of formed my own company. yeah, I ⁓ sort of poached it turned gamekeeper, not only Cisco to Microsoft, but also then from one side of the table to the other from market research ⁓ purchaser to market research vendor. Simon J Dudley (00:44:19) So talk us through that because I don't think many people have done that. ⁓ and and no one we've had on the show yet. So what fundamentally is the difference between the two roles? Is it a completely different world? ⁓ I and and I say this because I remember an old boss of mine once said, ⁓ I was I was joining Polycom in back in 1999, and the ⁓ the VP of sales said to me, He said, Well, we we because I asked him about the role, I'd never worked for a vendor, and he said, Well, we sit up here on our ivory cloud ⁓ and ⁓ we encourage things that are good and we discourage things that are bad. ⁓ And I thought to myself at the time, I thought, well, ivory clouds don't float very well. And when I got there, it was more like the battle of the song than it was standing on a cloud, right? It was absolute chaos. Yes, it really it was. It was. you don't go from twelve percent market share to sixty-five percent market share in under two years. Tim Banting (00:45:07) Muddy trench warfare, yeah. Simon J Dudley (00:45:17) without there being a bloodbath and there was a bloodbath. Great fun, but my God, it was chaos. But anyway, did you f ⁓ what did it look like you were an Ivory Cloud when you joined and then two days later you're stabbing people in the face in a trench? Tim Banting (00:45:31) In terms of market research selling into vendors. Simon J Dudley (00:45:33) Yeah, I mean just I'm just wondering, d did it look quite different from the outside than it turned out to be on the inside? That's perhaps the real question here. Tim Banting (00:45:40) Yeah, yeah. So part of my role as market intelligence ⁓ for Cisco and Microsoft was really about looking at all the different market research firms and trying to synthesize and ⁓ read between the lines of all of the different market research firms, because some of it was actionable intelligence, some of it read like ⁓ somebody's thesis, ⁓ very, ⁓ very sort of ⁓ high level thought leadership stuff. ⁓ And it was very much a case of trying to read between the lines, trying to find out what was actionable, ⁓ trying to work out whether or not there was any middle ground between all the different vendors because everyone had their different perspectives. ⁓ So I found out with like a million dollars worth of budget, I'd be buying market research and I'd still have to be doing work myself. ⁓ So on the other side of the table, it was, ⁓ right, how can my experience help drive what I know is needed for the vendors. ⁓ at that particular time, current analysis was very much focused on actionable insights. ⁓ Just don't throw something out there and then hope that the vendor will pick it up. Tell them what they need to know, which is great. But of course, ⁓ it still has to be very generic. ⁓ because you don't know which vendors you're writing for. It would be a mix of Microsoft, Cisco, and someone else, or Tamber, Poly, and Logitech. So it was generic, but it wasn't really precise. That's where you go into the wonderful world of ⁓ projects and customization and that sort of thing. ⁓ yeah, was an interesting, ⁓ I had to sort of think, if I was reading this, what would I want to? ⁓ get from it and what would I then pass on that would be actionable to ⁓ a senior product manager. Simon J Dudley (00:47:32) Yeah, one of the one of the things that I think is always interesting is ⁓ there's an old phrase that Napoleon used. He said, if you want to ⁓ lead the English, work out which direction they're marching in and walk in front of them with a flag. ⁓ And ⁓ I think it's intriguing to me that we are in a world where some folks within an organization and having been on the other side as the buyer of of competitive intelligence, ⁓ There are folks within organizations who want to pick the one that fits their world view. ⁓ I believe this, find me information that fits that. And I always resisted that massively. It's like, no, no, no. We've got to know the truth, not just comforting lies. But of course, there's always gonna be folks within organizations who just don't like the answer you're giving them and try and affect how you report to them as a result. ⁓ Tim Banting (00:48:31) Yeah, yeah. Simon J Dudley (00:48:32) How I remember somebody saying to me, I I won't name the company because people will work out the individual, but people say what we pay these analysts money and then they're not saying we're the best. And I'm like, because everyone pays the money, and if everyone just got an analyst to say they're the best, they're not an analyst now. They're a they're a YouTube marketer. I mean, what what do you want? Just say we're the best and be done. Well, that's great, but it doesn't really mean anything, does it? It's self praise is no recommendation. I'm a Tim Banting (00:48:54) Yeah, I'm. Simon J Dudley (00:49:02) I am in fact the world's greatest lover and racing driver. ⁓ And ⁓ few few people know that, ⁓ because no one else has ever said that about me. But and I suspect many of you, if you're watching this, I think you'll know already that neither of those things are true. And if you're listening, I will let you know now, neither of those things are true. But there is this sort of ⁓ pressure, there is must be a pressure on you as an analyst to just say what people, what you think people want to hear. Tim Banting (00:49:07) Ha Simon J Dudley (00:49:32) how did you solve that or solve for that? Tim Banting (00:49:36) ⁓ I used to say right from the start, said, look, if you're a friend of mine, I'm going to tell you you've got spinach caught between your teeth. And I'm going to do that in private, never in public. So I wanted people to understand that, ⁓ you know, ⁓ I'm going to tell you as it is, ⁓ but I will do it discreetly. ⁓ So that's my thought is that the sort of, well, almost I was going to say like the gesture in the court. You know, in the King's Court, the jester, you know, it's a case of, you know, I will, here's my counsel. ⁓ I will tell you what I think is really good. I will tell you why you're different. And I will also tell you you've got spinach in between your teeth. And I think once you start doing that, you establish that degree of trust. ⁓ I'm not gonna, you know, there's all too much in the analyst community, this sort of perception that it's pay to play. ⁓ I don't know of too many vendors, ⁓ if any, that actually do that. So ⁓ it's one of those areas where you have to tread very carefully. ⁓ You have to realize that not only they're a client, ⁓ you ⁓ have to tell them the good, the bad, and the ugly. ⁓ You're doing themselves a disservice if you don't. ⁓ It's great. Simon J Dudley (00:50:55) Yeah, I think that's fair. But it it takes a level of bravery that when you're on the buy side, you don't necessarily need to have. ⁓ And I I do agree, I mean I think there's been a few occasions in the thirty years I've been doing this where companies have paid certain ⁓ very large analyst firms large sums of money and suddenly they're at the top of their two by two thing. ⁓ and then as soon as they stop paying them, they're not even on the list anymore. Tim Banting (00:50:59) Yeah. Simon J Dudley (00:51:22) But I do think the pay-to-play gets thrown around more because it's easy, it's an acquis it's an accus accusation even that no one can refute. ⁓ so it's easy to throw around if you don't like the answer you're getting. Yeah. Interesting. Okay, so you're doing your own thing now. ⁓ what are you concentrating on? Tim Banting (00:51:36) Yeah, no, that's right. Tim Banting (00:51:42) Uh-huh. Tim Banting (00:51:46) ⁓ well, I'm trying to concentrate on market adjacencies and the way where the market's moving. ⁓ I've seen so many transitions from digital telephony to IP telephony to collaboration ⁓ to ⁓ contact center to customer experience. ⁓ What I'm trying to do now is look at where the market's going or skate to where the puck is going to use a ⁓ Wayne Gretzky quote. ⁓ So ⁓ I look at the unified communications ⁓ side of things. ⁓ I look at customer experience. I look at CCAS, contact center as a service, also CPAS, communications platform as a service. Because on the customer side, they're all converging. CPAS players have got, or CPAS vendors have got an element of contact center in there. Contact center have got an element of CX in there. ⁓ CRM vendors are adding contact center. It's all this. It's all going into this big blob. So I'm trying to help ⁓ customers and clients understand where that's all going. ⁓ UCAS as well, ⁓ that seems to be very stagnant in terms of development. And we're seeing a lot of ⁓ UCAS vendors, Zoom, Ring Central, Dialpad, ⁓ and others sort of integrating contact center capability in there. So all of this is very much blurring, which is leading to ⁓ buyers turning around and saying, I don't know what to do. ⁓ I'm not going to make a decision. and vendors sort of saying, where do we go next? So I'm hoping that my service will help vendors walk through that difficulty. Simon J Dudley (00:53:21) Now, ⁓ I know this is about this podcast is meant to be about, you know, how things have turned out when in hindsight they always look obvious, but at the time they certainly didn't look obvious. And we talked about that at some level. One of the things that in the last fifteen, twenty years I've noticed is everyone has always said software is eating the world, right? And we already talked about how VoIP did that to the old telephony world as an example. Just ⁓ monstrous iterations, forever better. Do you think AI is changing that? I mean, I I gotta say, from my own experience, I haven't actually written myself a CRM yet. But to be honest, I probably could. When I say I would write, I mean I turn around to ChatGPT or Codex or Gemini and go, write me ⁓ a CRM. ⁓ I've done a number of applications of for my own use, and they turned out to be really quite useful. What's your thinking on that? Do you think that customers are gonna start just saying, Well, I don't need to spend all this money on a SaaS model anymore, I'll simply build my own. Is that turning into a practical op option now? Tim Banting (00:54:24) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think Salesforce has seen the writing on the wall and that's the reason why they went headless CRM very quickly, knowing that, well, actually it doesn't matter what user interface you got on the front, ⁓ it's all about the data on the back. I think a lot of the data is the new currency, ⁓ AI is only as good as the data that it's got. And I think with this sort of, and I hate the term vibe coding, but I think with this sort of vibe coding environment. You're going to get business analysts or business people that will just be able to say, ⁓ I want a composite dashboard of this, this, this, and this. ⁓ I think the user interface with Unified Communications is going to disappear. It will be very Claude-like. You'll have a chat session, a couple of buttons, and a canvas that will produce these artifacts based on what you want. I'm hoping at some time AI will work out what's important so it'll be able to... doing my own personal workflow. So if I'm working on a project with you, Simon, will say, well, Simon wants this delivered by Friday. You better start working on this bit now. I'm hoping that AI will start leaping forward in terms of productivity there. And I have a feeling no one's really going to care about the user experience because we'll create what's useful for us. Simon J Dudley (00:55:36) Yeah, yeah, I th ⁓ yeah. Which probably segues us nicely into so what's gonna happen in what we talked throughout your career of you noticed things were changing and ⁓ more clearly than many of us have, by the way. ⁓ so you know, well done you, or at least that's what the story you told us. So I but I I completely believe you. ⁓ what do you think's gonna happen next? Do we think that AI is gonna eat the world in the same way that software ate the world in the last fifteen years? Tim Banting (00:55:55) Ha Tim Banting (00:56:06) I'm really concerned about AI. ⁓ I am a little more skeptical and I'm also concerned that there's a bit of a bubble going on. ⁓ I don't think the world's got enough water. I know the UK hasn't got enough water to service all the data centers that it needs. I'm seeing things like the EU AI Act putting a big brake on things. ⁓ There's concern in the EU around the US Cloud Act and the way in which ⁓ you could... any US vendor could go into ⁓ any ⁓ data center and pull European data out if the government decides that it's in their interest to do so. I have a feeling that we're to see a lot more regulation in place. ⁓ There's a lot of concern around these frontier models that are doing some amazing things, lying about things ⁓ and replicating and ⁓ stuff of science fiction movies. I have a feeling that ⁓ some of this is going to actually slow down. ⁓ I think regulation is going to be enforced ⁓ and I'm hoping that it slows down rather than the bubble bursts. ⁓ But I do have a feeling that there's only so many Nvidia chips that you can put in your data centers and recycle every single year. There's only so much of that you can do. ⁓ And we're seeing people like Uber burning through all of their annual use of tokens in a couple of months and realizing how expensive it is. ⁓ And I'm not sure there's too many marketing departments are going to get pats on the back for doing wonderful creative slides and burning through a load of tokens when there's developers sitting around saying, well, where did they all go? Where do all those tokens go? I don't know. think we've we've we're reaching this point where ⁓ there's a lot of hype and I think that that's going to level out and hopefully it's level out rather than burst. But I'm rather skeptical about. ⁓ AI, know, great tool, fantastic, but I do wonder ⁓ at what time do people turn around and say, well, actually, it's too expensive. I do need some humans in the loop for judgment calls ⁓ and to validate all of this ⁓ and to understand context. ⁓ I'm amazed at how many hallucinations I've seen in things like LinkedIn posts and copy and. Tim Banting (00:58:23) If you used AI at all, you need to have that human judgment, that awareness and that context ⁓ to understand if it's real or not, or actually to make sure that the prompts were engineered enough to give you a decent output. Simon J Dudley (00:58:36) I I I couldn't agree with you more. ⁓ unfortunately I'm more skeptical than you even. I I think it's gonna burst. ⁓ I think Anthropic and OpenAI, you know, they say, we've got OpenAI's just stated just yesterday ⁓ that they've got a billion dollars worth of ⁓ of ⁓ ad revenues. It's all that really proves is that human beings don't understand the difference between a billion and a trillion. ⁓ they would have to have trillions of dollars worth of ad agents or ad ⁓ revenues to justify the valuations these organizations are getting. It's ⁓ and it doesn't mean that people don't understand that. They they think, well, AI is useful, and I think very few people would disagree that AI is useful, but it's not useful enough to justify the valuations these organizations are getting. ⁓ And ⁓ There's obviously a big backlash now in the US. No one wants a data center within fifty miles of their house. And that's true across the entire country. So I think that's becoming an issue too. And I think we're living in a world where I think we we might be ⁓ I hope, maybe I'm just being hopeful here for a second, which is not my standard methodology, by the way. I'm not a generally hopeful person in these senses, but one wonders, are we at peak social media and are we at peak AI? ⁓ I think people are getting bored with the AI material. You can see it in it feels ⁓ non authentic. ⁓ it Tim Banting (01:00:12) it's very artificial as the word as the acronyms suggest. Yeah. Yes, absolutely. And it's not very intelligent at times either. Simon J Dudley (01:00:15) It is artificial, yes the yes yes, the clue in the name, isn't it? ⁓ No, no. Well, no one really you can't even define what intelligence is, can you? So all right. So as we come to the close on this, you've had a very interesting and diverse career, and I knew very little about any of it. ⁓ so this is great, and thank you for spending the time with us. Couple of questions. If you ⁓ were a young person now, or or you knew a young person now that you were advising, ⁓ I've asked another everyone we've asked so far has given me an answer to this one. Would you what would you say about education? Is is university worth it? Would you do something else? Would you recommend a military career perhaps like you did? ⁓ would you say just go and do a C CIE? Or would you just say just go and get a job and work it out from there? Tim Banting (01:01:10) It's a tough one, isn't it? I ⁓ I've got a 12 year old daughter, so I came to parenthood very late. And I probably say to my daughter, ⁓ look ⁓ for something that is a trade, ⁓ something that AI won't replace, ⁓ whether or not that's a heating engineer like her mother is, or whether or not that's nursing or doctor or something where AI is ⁓ not going to come along and steal your job. ⁓ Peter Drucker coined the term knowledge worker. I don't think he ever imagined that AI would come and take a lot of people's jobs in that space. So I think I'd probably say look for a trade. ⁓ Try not to sell yourself with debt. ⁓ know you have to, you know, the average ⁓ UK student I think leaves education with at least 30,000 pounds worth of debt, which is really quite worrying before you even jumped on the housing market. So it'd probably be learner trade. Or the other thing that I like the idea of is being T shaped. So if you think about a T, you want to be ⁓ deep in something like an IT domain, if you want to move into our space. So network protocols, cloud security, collaboration, and then broad in the skills that you have like ⁓ soft skills like cross team collaboration and communication skills. So deep expertise and then this broad set of skills. I think that applies to anything. ⁓ even trades. It's no good being an excellent carpenter if you can't go out there and win business or do your own sales and marketing if you're self-employed. So I think the whole idea is really based on this T-shaped, deep in a domain and broad in a set of soft skills. I think that's what I'd probably say to people. Look for areas where can be T-shaped. Simon J Dudley (01:02:58) Interesting. I always ask everyone this as their last question. What should I have asked you that I didn't? Tim Banting (01:03:06) ⁓ Tim Banting (01:03:09) What should you have asked me that I didn't? Or some of the stuff that we could talk about about military intelligence, I'm not sure that I should ⁓ have answered. ⁓ Maybe that's one for a beer or a coffee at another time. ⁓ that's a very interesting one. I'm not too sure. probably something along the lines of what did Steve Baumer do with a Manchester United proposal that came to him on an Apple iPad. Simon J Dudley (01:03:45) ⁓ I'd like to see a video of that, I strongly suspect. Tim Banting (01:03:48) I wish I was at a time when I could have used a smartphone to record it. Simon J Dudley (01:03:52) Yeah, I hope that you would. ⁓ everyone, thanks for getting this far into the show. ⁓ I will link all of Tim's details into the descriptions. ⁓ we'd love some feedback. ⁓ so you know, let us know what you thought of Tim and I's conversation. ⁓ we certainly got into some ridiculous technical detail and that was wonderful. I mean I thought I I was very controlled when I didn't talk about token ring. ⁓ after you said I did a six month call so I was like No, no, no. So with that, Mr. Tim Banting, thank you so much for your time, my friend. It's been a real joy. ⁓ join us next week, everyone, for another hopefully scintillating interview. It will be because they're all scintillating. And with that, goodbye. Tim Banting (01:04:38) Thanks, Simon. Simon J Dudley (01:04:42) Right, brilliant. Tim Banting (01:04:44) That was great fun, I really enjoyed that. ⁓ It's lovely going down memory lane. ⁓ It's very nostalgic. ⁓ And it's funny how little things start playing in. ⁓ I was actually part of the discussion around the Tandberg acquisition with Cisco. Simon J Dudley (01:04:46) Was fun, wasn't it? Tim Banting (01:05:10) and they wanted to buy Kodian before Tamberg acquired it because they thought that that was going to be a competitive threat to them. ⁓ it was a case of, ⁓ Tamberg's bought Kodian, we'd better go and buy Tamberg then. ⁓ It was an interesting... Simon J Dudley (01:05:25) And Tandberg spent two hundred and eighty million buying Tandberg and Cisco spent three point four, was it three point two billion dollars buying Tandberg Tim Banting (01:05:29) Wow. Tim Banting (01:05:33) Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's incredible. Simon J Dudley (01:05:38) ⁓ and of course Tanberg had actually already built their own ⁓ of course they'd built an Accord competitor, which was a terrible answer. I but I remember seeing one of those things. I felt a little sorry for all the engineers that Tanberg had hired to build that thing. Because they built it, it came out, and then literally a week later or something, they went and bought Kodian and just sh sh and just swept the whole thing into the bin. Tim Banting (01:05:47) Yeah. Tim Banting (01:05:59) Yeah. Yeah, yeah, was interesting. But that was the problem with a lot of these big companies. The business units, ⁓ if you failed, you failed spectacularly. And then 200 people, ⁓ that was it. ⁓ Game over for 200 people. ⁓ So yeah, it's ⁓ interesting times. Simon J Dudley (01:06:21) What do you think of ⁓ we're not in this this isn't going in the recording, so don't worry about it. ⁓ what do you think of Neat's situation right now? But by the way, they've they they just announced, I was very impressed. they announced a hundred hundred million dollar quarter, which seemed dramatically bigger than anything I've seen from an analyst. ⁓ but anyway, do you I I'm I'm really s ⁓ Neat to me. ⁓ Tim Banting (01:06:24) Yeah, yeah, my problem. Tim Banting (01:06:38) Yeah. Tim Banting (01:06:44) Yeah. Simon J Dudley (01:06:52) ⁓ you know, playing my own hand here first before I get your opinion. ⁓ to me I I don't understand why NEAT is still a thing. ⁓ they're the B and W in a market where Microsoft is pushing hard to turn everyone into a Honda or a Kia or a BYD. Tim Banting (01:07:03) Yeah. Tim Banting (01:07:08) Yeah, they've out-ciscoed Cisco. ⁓ Simon J Dudley (01:07:12) Well, like they're kinda I would argue they haven't done that because Cisco's product is way better. Tim Banting (01:07:15) No. Well, they've out ⁓ marketed and ⁓ out priced, which is really strange. ⁓ But I guess if you look at, ⁓ people will pay a premium for whatever in the assumption that it's better than anything else. And then you've got on the other side, you've got Yealink that are doing amazing stuff at a much more cost competitive sort of position. And then you've got Simon J Dudley (01:07:42) And a better product. Tim Banting (01:07:43) Yeah, and then you've got Cisco in the middle that sort of saying, well, we can work with Teams, we can work with Zoom, ⁓ you know, or we can work with Google or we can work with. So it's a really weird place to be. And I know that Neat's doing similar sort of thing. It's almost like, well, whatever Cisco can do, we can do. And having hired ⁓ ex Cisco VP to be the CEO, that was an interesting move as well. ⁓ Yeah, it's. ⁓ And it's all, of course, that there are private companies. whatever they report, they report. We don't know what's behind the ⁓ numbers. ⁓ We don't know how much margin there is there or how much cost or OPEX or anything like that. ⁓ they're still recruited. Simon J Dudley (01:08:19) Yeah, I know. But you Simon J Dudley (01:08:23) I agree with all of that. Yeah, I think y you get yourself in trouble medium term if you start if if you say nothing and let the market speculate on what your revenues are, that's one thing. If you publicly state your revenues are a number and then they're nowhere near that, ⁓ it comes back and bites you in the arse. And I don't think the boys are ne are likely to do that. But then, you know, the rumour I heard recently was that Janine got put 'cause j full disclosure, you and I are talking. Tim Banting (01:08:52) Yeah Simon J Dudley (01:08:53) ⁓ I was talking to their global head of sales, their CRO, ⁓ whose name escapes me off the top of my head, just before Christmas, as potentially coming in to run sales enablement for them. ⁓ And he said, Let us get the end of the financial year out of the way, which was the end of January, and then you know, we'll we'll we'll work this out. ⁓ And ⁓ I was like, All right, I I I'll again be really honest with you. It wasn't exactly going to be the most exciting job in the world running sales enablement for Neat. ⁓ but it would have been somewhat interesting, and more importantly, they would have paid me to do it. And then on the 20th of January, 10 days before their end of financial year, the CRO decides to resign or retire at zero notice. ⁓ And ⁓ and this is a man who in December the previous December had told me he had about five more years than him. Tim Banting (01:09:29) Yeah. Tim Banting (01:09:39) I hope. Simon J Dudley (01:09:50) And then Janine, the C CEO, was whacked. And my understanding is that was because they failed to sell it to Cisco in September October timescale. Because it just so happens a friend of a friend, but a very good sort, you know, I believe this source, just happened to bump into the entire neat senior sale senior leadership team leaving Building twenty three in San Jose in September. Tim Banting (01:10:01) Interesting. Right. Yeah. Tim Banting (01:10:20) Wow. Simon J Dudley (01:10:21) So I don't know what the looks on their faces were, they may not have been told at that time that they weren't being bought, but one way or the other it's interesting to note that neat is very obviously for sale. But I can't imagine why they imagined that Cisco would want to buy them. It just seems strange to me. Tim Banting (01:10:33) Yeah. Tim Banting (01:10:40) Yeah, ⁓ one hardware vendor with their Scala, what they call it, Scandifornia and design meets another Scandinavian design team, but even ⁓ sells more expensive gear. ⁓ mean, it's just, yeah. Simon J Dudley (01:10:53) Yes. But ⁓ and technically the Cisco gear is far more advanced, being based on Nvidia's rather than the underneath the there's nothing special about the neat gear at all. It's no better than a Logitech or a Poly or a NIC or a Yalec for that matter. ⁓ Yeah, interesting. It's really also interesting. I looked at the Synergy and I accidentally got hold of the latest Synergy data. Well, maybe six months old now. ⁓ And Tim Banting (01:11:10) Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. But yeah. Tim Banting (01:11:23) Mm-hmm. Simon J Dudley (01:11:24) You you look at it and you someone said, Well, do some analysis. You know, they waved at me, said do some analysis for me and tell me what you think. ⁓ I probably shouldn't have had the data, but whatever. So I did it for them and I said, Here's the thing I don't understand is the two companies that are growing are the cheapest and the most expensive player in the market. And everyone else is flat. ⁓ What what can I ⁓ what analysis can I do with that? I don't know what to make of it. Tim Banting (01:11:50) Yeah, no, absolutely. And if you look at meeting room refresh rate, what is it every five, seven years, something like that. Simon J Dudley (01:12:00) Yeah, ⁓ I've done some when I was at Lodgy I did some research on that one. So Rupalm has always cla and this is public domain, Rupalm's always said seven years. And that's probably true for a big corporate with a Cisco environment. But the average market, the market average, I did a a big survey across a whole plus that maybe a thousand customers live when I did the Lodgy work events last year. And the the average was five and a half years. ⁓ and and that was a very we we we Tim Banting (01:12:26) Yeah. ⁓ Simon J Dudley (01:12:29) We did a Mentimeter thing and we got them to show us. And it was very, very, very five to six years. It there was no threes and nothing above eight. ⁓ so I thought it was interesting. Now that should imply that loads of people are replacing stuff after the ⁓ after the pandemic. But but equally we're living in a world where why would I bother? I mean, a a rally bar is good enough or a Tim Banting (01:12:40) Yeah. Tim Banting (01:12:49) Yes. Simon J Dudley (01:12:57) Poly X72 or a Yalec A40, good enough. Why do need to change that? If the only reason to change it is because it's got an Android version that's no longer supported, well that's a different thing. ⁓ but it's not exactly a compelling reason, is it? Tim Banting (01:12:57) Thanks, Mark. Tim Banting (01:13:03) Yeah. Tim Banting (01:13:11) Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. ⁓ No, no, it's not at all. If they did something like had ⁓ AI local processing for face to face meetings rather than just online, that might be ⁓ a bit more attractive. If you're doing a ⁓ one to one in face to face in a physical meeting room, that might be interesting. But I don't know. I don't know what else it does. I mean, those those I could never understand why Cisco used to pass off these demos as ⁓ AI when it counted how many people in the room. And it's like, that's wonderful. Well, what can I do with it? Nothing. Simon J Dudley (01:13:49) Well, I mean I can say there are nine people in this meeting and there are only three in that meeting. In theory Tim Banting (01:13:54) Yeah, but they didn't open that API up to anyone to leverage it. So it was just, was just for ages and ages, it was just, look, we can count how many people there are in the room. Yeah, well, how do we make use of that? ⁓ How do you expose that through an API? What does it integrate with? Well, it doesn't. Simon J Dudley (01:14:12) Yeah, it's interesting though, isn't it? Even five years ago, counting people in in a room was considered magical. And now it it was like I could do this right it myself. I mean it would be pathetically easy. ⁓ I I think one of the fundamental problems I'd got, ⁓ this is a topic I did not bring up with Ilyad because I I needed to keep him on side when I spoke to him the other day. I I did the interview. He's he's one he's Tim Banting (01:14:13) You Tim Banting (01:14:19) Yeah. Tim Banting (01:14:26) Yeah. Simon J Dudley (01:14:41) It's not bad actually, and it will get a lot of views because it's Ilya, right? But it's next week. It's coming out next week. ⁓ But one of the fundamental flaws I think they've got is this idea of well we'll put video in every room, not for video calls, but for taking minutes and ⁓ and sentiment analysis and all of the other stuff, right? But the problem is to me, well, yeah, although do you really want to put your phone in the middle of the table? Tim Banting (01:14:44) Yeah. Yeah. Tim Banting (01:15:07) done it before. ⁓ I've used Apple Voice transcript to write through chords or something like that. It's much better than any of the notes that I've got from Zoom or from Gemini. Simon J Dudley (01:15:08) Yeah, I know, but Simon J Dudley (01:15:17) Yes, y well, I do agree with you and I use Mac Whisper and it does it like does it locally and it's unbelievably good. That I do agree that's an issue, but I think the bigger problem with this is ⁓ if you've got a if you've got a device in the room that's recording everything, unless you know who all the individual people are, and the your AI can pick out who all the individual people are, it's not very much use, is it? Because if someone shouts, fire all the missiles. Well, if that's the president, it's pretty important. If it's just the T lady who's come in and she's got Tourette's, it's rather less useful. So you think, well, all right, well, that's fine. I'll have the AI identify everyone in the room. Right, but how comfortable are users gonna be that, yeah, the AI knows who everyone in the meeting room is, and I can do an analysis as to How enthusiastic were you when Mr Balmer threw the iPad across the room? I looked in disgust. ⁓ Well, he's on the choppy block then. Tim Banting (01:16:22) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. ⁓ And what's it going to do if some in an HR grievance? ⁓ How are you going to identify, you know, if you make all of that discoverable with GDPR, how are you then going to give all of that data up to an aggrieved employee that wants to take you to tribunal? ⁓ Or I think it was a constructive dismissal because on this day, ⁓ Cernso Cernso said this and I mean, just it's a whole, yeah. Simon J Dudley (01:16:49) It's the can of worms. I'm America solves that problem by not giving anyone any workers' rights. There you go. It's fixed it. But no, Europe is a disaster for that. Tim Banting (01:16:55) Yeah, yeah, works councils all over the place. In fact, I remember that on a Microsoft call saying when they turned around and said, ⁓ well, we're using AI to identify the speakers and what have you and this, that I said, have you run this past the German works councils and the French works councils? ⁓ And ⁓ it just went very, very quiet. And I did the same in Zoom. said with the Bright Hire stuff that they got for HR recruitment. ⁓ I said, ⁓ well, this is deemed as high risk. and actually banned in the EU. So what's your story for selling into Germany and France? I'm still waiting for them to get back to me. It's like, ⁓ it's amazing. Simon J Dudley (01:17:33) Well it wasn't that long ago. ⁓ I was doing trading floors with video on, ⁓ competing against people like Avatar. So was this fifteen years ago, twenty years ago now? ⁓ and you weren't allowed to put a webcam on a trading floor in a German organisation. There's just no no, you might see someone behind them. That's not acceptable. And we couldn't we couldn't fix that problem. ⁓ at the time I thought it was ridiculous. Now I think it was a bloody good idea. Tim Banting (01:17:40) Yeah, yeah. Tim Banting (01:17:54) Yeah. Tim Banting (01:18:02) Yeah, yeah. Simon J Dudley (01:18:03) ⁓ and it's also interesting to know ⁓ little I won't tell you who told me this, and I don't know how secret it's meant to be, but I will give you this bit of information because someone told me something quite amazed. I was amazed. Let's just go with this. ⁓ someone told me that the Canadian company that owns the life size brand is relaunching it. with new hardware running on Linux, ⁓ and they're gonna concentrate on the European market. Tim Banting (01:18:40) Ooh, okay. Simon J Dudley (01:18:42) Which actually, because of all you and I knew some of what you were talking about with the data integrity issues. If you got a French you know i it Microsoft and Zoom and others are all saying things like, well, it it's not a Microsoft server in France and it's all run by the the Congress could just say, Give it. If it's a French company working for the French government and they're running their own system, they've probably got a niche the EU's Tim Banting (01:18:48) Yeah. ⁓ Tim Banting (01:19:00) Yeah, exactly. Simon J Dudley (01:19:11) quite a big niche, that the EU could go and adopt these things. ⁓ Mark I I know that Mark Richer was was ⁓ was pointing out that Starleaf might actually have a chance if it was still in existence today, because there would be an open opportunity for companies that don't want anything to do with the US anymore, like you know, Canada, for example. Tim Banting (01:19:15) Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Tim Banting (01:19:26) Yeah, yeah. Tim Banting (01:19:32) Absolutely. ⁓ Yeah, yeah. ⁓ How is that like America? Simon J Dudley (01:19:38) Just I d I just I mean I I I went for my annual physical with my doctor yesterday and he said, Well how you feeling? I said, Well, you know, stressed. He said, what's stressing you? And I said to him, You have looked out the fucking window, haven't you? And he went, yeah, yeah, yeah, fair enough. He my I laughed, my doctor is he's like thirty five, so he's like a f I call him the fetus. So we're talking about skin tags and whatever, you know. Tim Banting (01:20:02) Right. Simon J Dudley (01:20:07) PSA levels and and ⁓ endoscop what do you call it colonoscopies. And I looked at him and he said, You have you haven't had any of this stuff letting. Yeah, have you no? I said, Well, I'll tell you about the colonoscopy. So col shoving a fiber optic cable up my ass is really no problem at all. It's that drink they give you the day before. ⁓ fuck off. So anyway. ⁓ it's just horrendous. Just am I gonna I better not cough loud. Tim Banting (01:20:13) Yeah, yeah, Tim Banting (01:20:26) ⁓ no, the world's falling out your backside. Yeah, my god. You should have stopped recording there Simon, you should have recording before... ⁓ Simon J Dudley (01:20:39) yeah.