[MUSIC PLAYING] RANY NG: Hey, good
afternoon, everyone. SPEAKER: Good afternoon. RANY NG: Yes, good afternoon. Where is the energy? [CHEERING] All right. OK. Hello. My name is Rany Ng and I'm the
director of product for our G Suite meeting solutions. And I'm very excited to
be here to talk to you about Google's vision
for how we want to transform meetings and help
your teams collaborate smarter. And then later in
the session, we're going to be joined on stage
by two of our G Suite Meet customers, Salesforce
as well as Resuelve to talk through how they
adopted video meetings into their organization. So I always like to think about
our own personal experiences. And there's something
really magical about being able to talk to someone
face to face in real time through video. And when I think
about my nieces, ever since they were born
five and eight years ago, video chat was the default
way that they communicated with their grandparents. When they try to talk
to their grandparents through a phone, what they would
do is they would kind run over. They would look at the phone. They would say, hi,
[SPEAKING CHINESE] in Chinese. And then they would
run away and go play because they didn't
understand that phone. And when they started
to use video chat, as you can see in
the photo, as a way to talk to their grandparents,
they got it immediately. They automatically could
see their grandparents on the screen. They can engage with them. They can make jokes. And they were so
much more animated. There's this thing
about video that is so much more expressive,
interactive, and really allows you to build a
connection with people. And we've seen that by
enabling and communicating through video, it really
enhances communication. And we really want to bring
this video-first culture to the workplace. So I've been with Google
for about 10 years now. And I can't even
remember what it's like to have a meeting
without videoconferencing. I don't actually even
remember when they took the phone off my desk. And I also sort of
grumble a little bit when someone wants to call
my cell phone for a meeting. Now, over the years, my
teams have spanned over across New York, San Francisco,
London, Zurich, Stockholm, et cetera. And video meetings really have
enabled us to not only work better together as a
team, but it's actually been really critical for
building team culture, which ultimately leads to
highly effective teams. As you can see from
the photo-- and no, we do not wear black
and white striped shirts to work every day and drink
wine during the meeting. I'll keep you in suspense of
what the backstory is there. But we celebrate
launches and promotions and marriages and
birthdays together as a team across all of
these different offices as if we were in the same room. And these video
meetings really have been core for how we have been
able to build a strong team culture, build connections
amongst each other. And ultimately for me it's
been really one of the key ways that we've been
able to transform how we work at Google. So how did we actually get here? So Google's entry into providing
enterprise meeting solutions is a personal one. It's one that we've
been investing deeply in over the course of a decade. At Google, we grew very quickly. In the early 2000s, we had
3,000 people in our offices. If you fast forward
now to 2018, there are over 85,000 people in 70
offices across 50 countries. That's a lot. And what we realized
is that if we wanted to continue
to be successful and to be able to innovate
at a global scale, we really needed to do
something different. We needed to change the way
that our teams collaborated with each other. And we needed to change the
way that we communicated. So in 2003, we decided
to make a big bet and go all in with
videoconferencing. So one of the things
that we realized is that we couldn't really just
leverage traditional conference phone bridges in order to allow
our teams to communicate across all these different time zones. A phone call doesn't
really necessarily inspire creativity or engagement,
as my nieces discovered at a very early age. And so we decided to outsource
proprietary videoconferencing technology and outfit
all of our large rooms with videoconferencing
equipment. And while this
was revolutionary, it was pretty expensive to do. Each unit cost about $50,000. And that didn't even include
support, maintenance, license fees, et cetera. In addition, these
devices were on premise with complex
infrastructure and actually took a lot of support staff
in order to support it. But by 2007, we were
able to outsource about 2,400 conference rooms
with these different devices. But then we broke it. Videoconferencing became
so popular at Google that everyone wanted
to join these meetings. And we actually ended up
hitting the max capacity of this infrastructure. Plus, we realized
that a lot of people aren't working within the rooms. They're working from
home or on the go. And we really needed a much
more flexible solution in order to scale video meetings. And so it was at that point
that we decided to take matters into our own hands. And we wanted to build a
videoconferencing solution from the ground up that
was built in the cloud and could help us scale as
we grew our organization. So in 2008, we launched
Gmail video chats where you can video chat
with your contacts in Gmail. And while this is a
really great start, you can't really scale
videoconferencing within Gmail itself. And so we decided to
continue investing in it by building our own
infrastructure with WebRTC. We started to build
out more access points, like mobile access
and things like that. And we recently also added
hardware into the meeting rooms with Hangouts Meet. So it's been over a
decade since we've built this first prototype. And video meetings are now part
of our entire company's DNA. Every single day, Googlers
connect to video calls 270,000 times. And that's across rooms,
across their laptops, and across mobile phones. And we currently
have over 20,000 video-enabled meeting rooms
within our organization, which is pretty amazing. Now, we believe that all
organizations, whether you're small or large, can have the
same video meeting culture. People are really at the heart
of healthy and successful organizations. And while you want everyone to
be able to collaborate together in person, it's not always
feasible or cost-effective given remote offices
and things like that. And so that's why
last year we announced our enterprise suite
of meeting solutions for G Suite customers. This is the same
videoconferencing technology that we use at Google. And our Meet
hardware kits are now the standard across all of
our rooms within Google. Our goal, really, with Meet
is to help you transform work the way we have
been able to do it within our organization. And we really want to
be able to provide you with a simple, smart,
scalable solution that allows your teams to be
able to knowledge-share, to be able to collaborate,
in any moment, at any point in time,
and on any technology platform of their choice. But we don't really
want to stop there. We really want to
work with our partners and really think about
how we can re-imagine how teams should be working. How should teams be
creating together, engaging with each other,
presenting, innovating, and not just within a confined
workspace, but across all connected work spaces, whether
you're in your home office, or whether you just want to have
a spontaneous virtual hallway conversation, or if you
just want to brainstorm at any point in time. We really believe that every
single touch point between team members can be
equally, if not better, than talking to
someone in person. And there are so many new
technologies out there now that enable us to actually
make collaboration a lot more intelligent and productive. So what I want to
talk about today is three main areas
that we're focused on as we think about
the future of meetings and the future of the G
Suite meeting solutions. The first is that
we want to make sure that there's simple access. We want everyone to
be able to easily hop into video-first meetings. The second thing is
we want to make sure that collaboration is smart. We want to continue to elevate
productivity, make it much more integrative and assistive. And then the third
thing is that we want to make sure
that administering this entire solution is
something that's scalable. We want to make sure that we're
helping administrators maximize ROI across rooms,
across their fleet, and also within
individual meetings. So simple access. So we've all been
in those meetings where someone can't join or
the audio quality is bad. And it sort of just disrupts
the entire flow of the meeting. The organizer's upset, the
attendees get a little antsy, and it just kind of makes
the meeting less productive. Our goal with Meet is to
make sure that we remove a lot of these headaches
so that you can actually focus on the substance
of the meeting versus all of the logistics. We want to make it very easy
for you to host and join from anywhere, anytime. And coming soon, we are going
to be doubling the enterprise support for the number of active
Meet participants in a meeting up to 100 so that
you can collaborate with a much broader team. Now, the other thing we know is
that we tend to be video-first, but we understand that
you need to give employees flexibility and choice
in terms of how they're accessing these video meetings. So every single Meet meeting now
comes with a one-click dial-in. And we support 21 countries. And we're continuing
to grow that. We also, smartly, are able
to put the right local phone number based on the
location of the employee. And then finally, we want to
make joining easy from rooms. As I mentioned, we launched
our Meet hardware last year. And we're continuing to grow
our hardware so that you can actually scale
this capability, not just in small rooms,
but it can actually grow into large
rooms, boardrooms, and even different classrooms. So one of the exciting
things that we've been seeing over the
course of the last year is that a lot of our
customers are increasingly leveraging the power
of Meet meetings with our award-winning
digital whiteboard, Jamboard. And the reason
they're doing this is to really allow remote
teams to be able to create, to brainstorm, to save
unstructured thoughts together so you can come back to it. And having this arena
to be able to ideate is really what ultimately
sparks innovation. So we're excited
to talk about how we want to continue to extend
virtual white boarding even more. So coming soon, we
will be supporting Meet full-screen
videoconferencing within the Jamboard device,
so that you can take advantage of whiteboarding and a
full screen video solution all in the same place,
which is ideal for things like small rooms
where you may not have as much wall real estate. Now, we also recognize that
not everyone in your meeting may have access to
a Jamboard device. So we want to make sure that
everyone can participate. Now, we already
support full editing within iPads, tablets,
and Chromebooks. But we're excited to announce
that we have recently just launched full
editing and full drawing within the Jamboard
mobile app that you can download in the Apple
or Play Store right now and test it out. And so this really
enables a way for anyone, whether they're
on the go or not, to be able to participate
in Jamboard collaboration. And we'll give a demo a little
bit later on how this works. So now while we have our own
hardware within the meeting rooms, at Google we
do believe in openness and compatible ecosystems. We want to make sure that
it is easy for anyone to connect to Meet. And we recognize that
many of our customers have made existing investments
in videoconferencing systems. So that's why last month
we announced a partnership with Pexip, which basically
makes Meet compatible with traditional
videoconferencing equipment such as
Cisco and Polycom, as well as Skype for Business. So with interoperability,
you can now be able to run your Meet
meetings on the existing investments that you already
have in your conference rooms and be able to
continue to leverage a lot of the meeting innovations
that we are continuing to launch as part of G Suite. Now, in addition to
our Pexip partnership, we also have added a peripheral
qualification program. So if there are third party
devices, cameras, speaker mics, et cetera that
you want to use, we will actually
make sure that they go through our
qualification program so that you can get
the same quality experience that you would
expect from a Meet meeting. And then finally,
we want to make sure that you are able to leverage
these video meetings to expand to a broader audience and really
allow your entire distributed workforce to be able to
participate in Meet meetings, whether that's an
all-hands or a town hall or even something
like the keynote this morning for Cloud Next. And so I'm excited to announce
that in the coming weeks, we are going to be supporting
live streaming directly in Meet. Live streaming in Meet is
meant to be easy to use and easy to set up. So you don't have to reach
out to your IT department to get it enabled. Directly within
Calendar now, you can enable any meeting to
be a live streaming meeting and invite your audiences. Now, the live
streaming technology is unique because it
is backed by YouTube's worldwide infrastructure. And what this enables
us to do is to actually deliver very high-quality
media to over 100,000 concurrent viewers at
once, while making sure that your content is secure
and accessible only to those within your organizations. So now everyone in your
company can actually tune in at the exact same time to
be able to hear leaders share their strategy, to be
able to hear updates, celebrate moments, and more. So we're really excited
about launching this. Now, getting into the meeting
is really just the first step. But what we really want
to do is to make sure that we are elevating
productivity and making sure that your teams can
collaborate a lot smarter. So as most of you know,
our deep integration with G Suite and
Google Machine Learning enables users to have a very
integrated, collaborative experience and enable meetings
to be much more productive. And what I want to do is to
share some examples of how we are increasingly
incorporating intelligence into meetings to assist you
as you prepare, as you engage, and as you create with your
different team members. So first we want to make
sure that all the logistics of scheduling a meeting and
quickly getting into a meeting is as effective as possible. For your schedule
meetings, I know that sometimes booking
conference rooms can be a bit of a headache. You don't really know where all
the participants are located. You don't really know
all the information about the conference rooms. And if you get it wrong,
then the whole meeting is disrupted because people are
running to meetings and things like that. Well, we want to make
this easy within calendar. We have recently launched
automatic room suggestions that will intelligently
select the best conference rooms for you based on
the location of the people in your meetings, based
on your preferred meeting rooms from previous meetings,
the number of people that are required and the
minimum room size, as well as the
required equipment, so if it needs to VC enabled,
or if you need a Jamboard. And we really want to do this
so that your meetings can really start seamlessly in the
best conference room possible for your attendees. The other area that we're
introducing smart scheduling is within chat. So we know that
increasingly teams are leveraging Hangouts
Chat as a prime way to communicate so that you don't
always have to be in a meeting. But sometimes, the group threads
that you have on Hangouts Chat can be a little bit unwieldy,
gets a little too complicated. And everyone on the
thread knows that you just have to meet but no one
wants to actually be the one to set up the meeting. So we've recently introduced
the Meet scheduling assisted within Hangouts Chat. So what you can now do is you
can go into your chat window, call the @meetbot and actually
tell it to schedule a follow-up meeting. And the @meetbot
will automatically find availability for all
of the participants that are in your chat, find
the available rooms, and get it set up
right away for you without anyone needing
to do anything, which is pretty great. [APPLAUSE] Yes. So the next thing
we want to do is to make sure that we are
assisting you to make your meetings more effective. And you've seen from research
that when you have an agenda it's really highly
beneficial for creating high-quality meetings. So we are launching
quick meeting notes, which allows you
to automatically create a meeting template
directly within Calendar. And what this does is
that it will help you and your meetings
become more productive and accountable by always
having a central place for you to track not just your agendas,
but meeting notes, as well as action items. The other area that
we're investing in is really thinking about
the personal assistant. We know that in our
day-to-day lives, users are increasingly
leveraging personal assistants to help them with
their day-to-day. So we're excited to announce
that we will be bringing voice commands into the conference
rooms with Hangouts Meet hardware. And with this
capability, we really want to think about how we
can tailor it to the workplace and enable you to automate
meeting processes, like starting a meeting
and things like that. This is still early
days, and we really want to be thoughtful
about how we include this into the meeting room. So we will be rolling
this out to select Meet hardware customers
later on this year, so definitely stay tuned for more. So now that you've told
Google to start your meeting, we want to make sure that
you are part of the action and feel really engaged and
immersed in the meeting. And so coming soon we
are going to be launching adaptive layouts within Meets. And what adaptive
layouts will do is to automatically and
intelligently understand the context of the
meeting so that you have the best and most immersive
experience when you're part of the entire meeting context. For example, if you are in a
meeting with multiple people active in discussion, we can
create a Brady Bunch view so that you can see the three
or four people really clearly on the screen. If someone is presenting,
we can make sure that you're automatically seeing
the person who's presenting and all those people that are
active in the conversation, those that are asking
questions or making comments and things like that. Or if it's just you in a
room with your colleagues, then we will make sure
that we show by default your presentation or your
shared screen in full screen so that you can always see
all the information in detail without any sidebars. And then finally,
we want to make sure that we're always helping you
to create with each other. We know that not
everyone is an artist or not everyone has the
greatest handwriting. But sometimes when
you're in a meeting, just jotting down your
thoughts or drawing out what you're trying
to communicate is actually the easiest way
to get your thoughts out. So what we've done is we've
leveraged machine learning within Jamboard to actually
automatically detect what you're trying to write
or what you're trying to say. And we will automatically give
you a more attractive version of that. And so with that,
I want to introduce Noah Greene, our master
Jammer, to the stage to show you this in action. Noah? [APPLAUSE] NOAH GREENE: Thank you, Rany. Hey, everybody. My name is Noah and
I'm here to showcase some of the fun functions and
features available to Jamboard today. So if you don't know, this is,
in fact, the Google Jamboard. It's resting on its optional
accessory, which is the stand. We have here the passive
stylus, marker, and eraser. Now, passive stylus is a
huge thing here with Jamboard because it really allows the
familiarity of interaction between the end
user and the product to be extraordinarily
familiar, as compared to using an
actual white board. The benefit of
these being passive is, one, that you can pick
these up and start using them. But you can also erase with
your finger on the board just like a regular white board. You never have to worry about
the stylus and eraser not being charged because they
are, in fact, passive. When I place this
right here on the tray, there is only a magnet
linking them together so you never have to worry
about them charging, paring, or syncing. Now, if I write something
on the Google Jamboard here, just while using my
own handwriting-- let's just use Google as
the example here. And I want to erase. Just as I mentioned like
this, I can erase it on the board with my finger. Benefit of this
is that you don't go home with any
chalk on your finger and spread it onto your face. If that was the case, it
would be truly remarkable. Maybe that's on the roadmap. Let's go back to this. So this is a general frame here
to sort of plan out a meal. Show of hands, does
anybody have a meal planned for later on this evening? Show of hands? Most of you do. If you don't, I'm
pretty worried. You should go eat. So what we're doing here
is a preloaded Jam here. And I've got one of my
coworkers remotely connected to the Jam board. And he's going to publish
a couple more sticky notes to allow me to know
what type of meal I need to be planning
actively here on the Jamboard. Once those pop up, we'll
explore what we need to do. But first off,
before we do that, I'm going to blow
this guy up here. This is a schedule and it was
created in Google Documents. I am able, through Google Drive
and the remote application of Jamboard-- available for
download in iOS or Android-- is to import a Google Doc,
Sheet, or a Slide, or anything that effectively lives
inside your Drive I'm able to import
directly into the session. Perfect. Pritan has told me that
Sarah has a seafood allergy, so going to a seafood
restaurant may or may not be the best idea. Depends on how much
you like Sarah. So schedule here,
I can see that I've got a team dinner at 7 o'clock. So I can annotate on
top of a Google document actively right here
on the Jamboard using the passive stylus. And if I want to move
these two things together, simply use the Lasso tool
and bring it right up there. So now I know that I'm
talking about a team dinner at 7 o'clock. So let's jump in over here
and we'll go into the internet here. And I'm going to pull
content directly from the web into the session and
annotate on top of it so my coworkers can
know specifically where it is that we're
trying to go have a meal. So I'm going to press
crop right here. You can make it as
pretty as you want to by dragging in the corner
edges down along the side. We'll keep the phone
number in there. I'll press Enter. And now I have the map
here inside my Jam session. Also, Jono loves kale. That's a very good
thing to note. I'll put this guy
right over there. And if I would
like to, as well, I can double click any one
of these sticky notes, change the color, and/or
change the note itself. If I want to get rid
of it, like this one, I'm going to throw it down using
two-finger touch to the trash can, which is at the
bottom of the display. But let's get into some of
those good ooh-aah functions, those machine learning tools. I like to refer to them
as the "ooh-aah" tool. So when I do something here,
I encourage you all to go, "ooh, aaah." This here is
handwriting recognition. This is shape recognition. And this is auto draw. So I will show you my
terrible handwriting and we'll see what
we can get done. So let's write team dinner
here up on the board. And watch the magic of
machine learning convert this. Ooooh. [AUDIENCE OOOHS] Now you're getting
the hang of it. Fantastic. So two finger-touch this
object, just like the map here, and I can move it
around the display. I can copy it if
I would like to. But I have some fun editing
capabilities, as well. I do not have to get rid of
this if I have misspelled or anything or if I want an
uppercase or lowercase letter. I can, in fact, come right
over here and strike that t-- oooh-- or do a lowercase t and
a small carrot and it's going to throw that t right
back up here so I don't-- [LAUGHTER] Very good,
ladies and gentlemen. I'm loving it. OK, great. So this is our team dinner. I know that they've got
some live jazz Friday night, which I'm super into. So I'm going to make sure that
I annotate on top of that. This is, in fact,
our team dinner. And we'll get into one more here
before I jump off the stage. This function is brand new. The Jamboard gets over there
updates every six to eight weeks, just like Chrome does. So you can expect
brand new functions to circulate to the board when
they're published and pushed. This one is called auto draw. So if I'm a terrible
artist or, like I have terrible handwriting, I
can draw something on the board and have it recognize
what I've drawn and digitally convert
it right in front of me. So for this instance,
I want to make sure that everybody knows that I
am, in fact, in San Francisco. One of the best things about San
Fran is the Golden Gate Bridge. This may or may not
look like a bridge. Here it is. Bridge right there. And it has converted. Ooooh. Very good. Excellent. Now, if I wanted
to save my content or jump back into a jam session,
I'm more than welcome to do so. Click this guy right there and
I can add remote participants directly here on
the Jam session. They can be in domain or
out of domain, no problemo. I can send a copy
as a PDF or a PNG. And I have a slew of
other options, as well. The connecting to a
meeting is extraordinarily powerful because not only can
you ideate inside of a Jamboard session just like you would
in a regular white board, but you're able to do so within
the context of videoconference. So I can hear, communicate,
and see with you while also sharing my
exploration and ideation inside of a digital
whiteboarding session. It's truly powerful, and
really quite awesome. That's my time. Rany? [APPLAUSE] RANY NG: Thank you, Noah. So if you like what
you saw with Noah, I actually want to share
a pretty exciting offer that we have today. I used to work in
ads, so of course I'm going to put an ad
into the presentation. But for one time only
during this week, all Next participants
will get a $1,600 discount off of Jamboards. You can get a flier at
the end of the session or you can go visit the BenQ
station right on this floor to find out information and
try it out for yourself. But it's pretty cool. And we use it pretty
regularly within Google. [APPLAUSE] So we've shared a lot of
pretty exciting things that we've introduced to
meetings and our meeting solution. And I'm sure the
natural question for some of you in the
room is, how do we actually manage this thing? We believe that
all organizations can have secure
videoconferencing at scale with low maintenance costs. As we were building
out our solution, we really wanted to keep
the IT administrator facilities, managers,
and AV teams in mind to make sure that we were
helping you maximize your ROI. And as many of you know,
Google was born in the cloud. So we understand a lot of
the security implications of powering a
business in the cloud. And because G Suite
is built within Google and the same infrastructure,
if you adopt our meeting solutions, you automatically
get the same protections that you would across the board. Now with Meet, we
enable IT administrators to be able to manage all of
their resources in one place. And we did leverage
some of the learnings from our Google IT
department to make sure that we are helping you
scale your investment. And we are also really
excited about bringing much more intelligent and
machine learning capabilities into our administrative
tools because we want to make sure that you can
always optimize your meeting room space. We want to make
sure that you can scale your fleet
of hardware devices and have it take care of itself. And we also want to make sure
that we are providing you with actionable insights
so that you can determine how to create the best
experience for your users for all of their meetings. So we know that real estate and
rooms are very, very expensive and scarce resources. And as facilities
managers, you always want to make sure that your
conference rooms are being utilized most effectively. Now, did you know that,
on average, 30% to 40% of booked meeting rooms
are actually not used. 30% to 40%, that's
actually a lot of rooms. People either decide
to join from their desk or they are working from
home or they're traveling or you just decided not
to have the meeting. And this is a problem. So in the coming
weeks, we are going to be launching a
couple of things to help you manage
your room utilization. The first thing that
we will be launching is automatic room release,
which automatically frees up your rooms if
participants decline or if the meeting room is not
used 10 minutes after start. We've been running
this at Google for a little bit of time. And we actually have seen
that we get 60,000 meeting hours released per month. That's about 300 rooms. And we actually see
that 60% of these rooms actually get re-booked. So it's a very optimized
way to make sure that your rooms are
being used appropriately and that there's
accountability for it. The other thing that
we are providing is a room insights dashboard
where we can provide you with different insights about
your rooms-- what's popular, what's not, what's
being used, what's not. And what are the
common equipment that people are looking for
in order to operate the room? And we really feel that these
metrics are super important, because it gives you a
better understanding of how the rooms are being used. And it also allows
you to predict some of the needs
of the organization. And as you think about
facilities expansion and things like that, this is
key metrics for you to actually make those
future investment plans. Now earlier I
mentioned that we have 20,000 video-enabled
meeting rooms at Google. That's a lot of hardware to
keep secure and up to date. With Meet, our
hardware, we really strive to build hardware
that takes care of itself to help you scale
your IT department and a lot of your
maintenance needs. So our hardware and
peripherals are always secure and up to date. We automatically will provide
over-the-air firmware updates so that you don't have
to go into every room to administer the devices. The other thing is that
our hardware is smart. And it will actually
self-remediate. So it's always
checking for anomalies that it finds in the system. And if it actually finds some
sort of error or inconsistency, it will automatically
trigger a self-reboot before the next meeting so
that you can minimize downtime for your meetings just down
to the seconds, which is a great thing for many users. But we also recognize
that sometimes you can't automatically fix yourself. And so we also want to provide
you with a meeting room health dashboard. And what this will do is it
will surface you and proactively alert you to issues that
it sees in the room, whether there are peripherals
that are disconnected or there's loss of connectivity
so that you can actually be proactive about
taking care of issues to prevent meetings
from being unproductive. And then finally, we
are also providing you with rich meeting analytics. We want to make sure that you
have all of the information to be able to analyze
your meeting usage trends, participants. We want to make sure that
you have the insights to be able to monitor
your network connections, as well as all the
various endpoints, and to be able to troubleshoot
technical issues for all of your individual meetings. And this data can be also
exported to BigQuery and Data Studio so that you can
do further analysis or integrate it with
other information that you may have in
your organization. So as you can see, we're
really excited about bringing much more assistive and
data-driven decisioning tools to administrators because
we want to make sure that you, like us, can be able
to manage videoconferencing at scale. So in summary, this is
just really the beginning. We want to continue to bring
innovation and intelligence to all of you to help you
transform your workplace so that you can leverage this new
culture of being video first. And we're enabling you
to have simple access so that you can have pervasive
video conferencing at scale. We want to make sure that
collaboration continues to be smart by building in
more intelligence and machine learning capabilities
across our entire G Suite system for meetings. And we want to make sure that
administration is scalable and bring in all the
tools and analytics that you need to be able to
operate your meeting solutions. Now, I know I went through
the last section pretty fast. But tomorrow we
actually will have a deep dive section,
CP138, on how you can maximize ROI
of your meeting rooms and your
videoconferencing systems where you'll talk to
the product managers as well as our Google
IT groups and teams to actually learn a lot more
about how we're doing this. So with that, I would now like
to welcome Jordi from Resuelve and Dan from Salesforce, who are
two of our G Suite customers, to talk a little bit more
about their experience with Meet and videoconferencing. Welcome. [APPLAUSE] All right. So to get started, why don't
you tell us a little bit about yourself, your roles, and
a little bit about your company and how distributed it is. DAN LIMOR: Hey, everyone. I'm Dan from Salesforce and
I've been with Salesforce for about six years. I've been working a
lot in the G Suite. Our team oversees, essentially,
G Suite for Salesforce. So yeah. JORDI ADAME: Hi, I'm Jordi from
Resuelve, a Mexican company. We've been using G Suite
for the last two years. And our mission is to help
people pay their debts all over the world. RANY NG: Great. JORDI ADAME: All right. RANY NG: So earlier I talked
about this whole journey that Google took to become
all-in on videoconferencing. Can you guys tell
us or share with us what motivated you to adopt
a meeting-first culture within your organizations? How did you go about
finding a solution and what were some
of the challenges that you had to overcome? DAN LIMOR: I think
we decided back in, maybe a little late
to the game, 2013, 2014 that what we were doing
with phone and voice only was just sort of
not very engaging. Personally, I found myself just
not very present on meetings when I wasn't in a
room with people. And so we sort of decided
that video-first was going to be very important for us. And I really loved the
story of your nieces where that was essentially
me on a phone call, where I'd say, OK, hi, go on mute, and
just walk away from a meeting. JORDI ADAME: When I joined
the company two years ago, I found out that there was
a big communication problem. Even though we already had
offices in two countries, we couldn't communicate
with each other. We had a mix of Skype and phone
calls, but it didn't work out. So as you can see, my natural
language is not English. So I rely a lot on my
hands and my expression when I need to communicate. So video makes sense for this. So if I want to
communicate with somebody that doesn't speak my
language, even if it's Spanish, there's some different
types of Spanish. You rely on your expressions. And there's no way you can
do this over the phone. RANY NG: And did you have to go
through any change, management process with your teams
in order to get them to adopt videoconferencing? I know sometimes people want
to turn off their cameras and things like that. But how did you go
about introducing that to your organizations? JORDI ADAME: Really, that
was kind of complicated at the beginning because people,
especially engineers, are really shy. And they don't want
to show on camera. So at the beginning, you have to
actually not make them but push them to open the camera. And tell them, hey, if
you open the camera, we're going to be able to
communicate a lot better. One thing we did is every two
weeks in the developer team, they showcase their work. And we used to do this
in physical meetings. And the rooms were always
packed at the office. So we started to do this by
video meetings, just to train. Because we knew that if we were
to expand to the whole world, we needed to have
video conferences. So this was one way to train
people to have video meetings. So we have video meetings, even
if we are in the same table. This way, people get used to
it, and they start training. DAN LIMOR: Yeah
I think that that resonates with me, as well. The challenge that we had
to overcome was cultural. I mean, as engineers we
don't like showing our faces. But we're also really lazy. So if video is just
kind of on and there and it's more steps
to turn it off, people might turn it on even
by accident, give it a try, and see how engaging it is. RANY NG: So what were some
of the productivity benefits that you've seen within
your organization with video meetings? JORDI ADAME: Oh, it's amazing. For example, before G Suite,
if you wanted to book a room, they were always full. Always, always, always. And after we started
doing video meets, they're always empty now. If you walk around the meeting
rooms, you can always book one. That's something that happened
without us expecting it with G Suite. One other thing that happened
is meetings are way faster now. The showcase we did
with the engineers used to last about 30 minutes. And now every showcase lasts
from five to seven minutes. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's because if you
have your headphones on, you have to be in the meeting. There's no way you
can get distracted. So if you're paying
attention, you're not going to ask
something that has already been addressed at the meeting. That's my guess. DAN LIMOR: We haven't
seen quite as big a migration away from rooms,
actually quite the opposite. I think people love video
so much that they're trying to get into rooms and
see everyone on the big screen. I think for us
psychologically, it's what gets done in a meeting,
what you can actually do, how you can contribute,
rather than just feeling like you're not part
of the conversation because you're not in a room. Now even the people in a room
can directly look at the camera as people are talking. And people feel that
they're being looked at and feel like they're
being engaged and being more willing to offer up
their valuable opinion, even though they're
not in the room. RANY NG: So Dan, you
mentioned that rooms are something that people
have been gravitating toward. How has Salesforce been
thinking about video within the conference rooms? I know you have some
of our Meet hardware. What has that experience
been like to deploy? And how are you thinking about
investing in that over time? DAN LIMOR: So from an
administration scalability perspective, to sort
of focus on what works really well
is the idea that we can distribute that model. We can put our hardware
kits in the hands of anyone around the world and have them
enroll units, deploy units, and get units up
and off the ground relatively very
quickly, compared to our previous
solutions, as well as the idea that, well, people
just get in a room and use it. We have been talking a lot about
what training looks like, what instruction looks like. And even in rooms
that we haven't really deployed a lot of
documentation or instruction or just a lot of guidance,
people just get in a room, hit a button, join their call. RANY NG: So one of
the things that I think we're hearing a lot
about in the industry is about bringing more intelligence
to meetings or administration, things like voice commands,
facial recognition, et cetera. What is your perspective
of the future of meetings, of intelligence kind
of coming into play? And what are things
that you think can really shape productivity? JORDI ADAME: Something I
would really like to see is this last couple
of weeks that I've been meeting with
a lot of Googlers, I do not know their
names, obviously. I just met them. And when you get
to the video meet, you're hoping to see their name. I just see the room name. It's like, what
am I going to do? I don't his name or
her name or whatever. So if video had some
face recognition, it would be nice to see
my name, Jordi, here, to see who I'm talking to. That would be nice. DAN LIMOR: So for us, it's
been a lot about rooms and room occupancy, even before you
get into a meeting, just the ability to find open
rooms, whether that's in Calendar or just doing
more to expose what rooms are available or doing more to
understand how to free up rooms for meetings that
aren't being used, whether that's time-based
release or facial detection or anything intelligent
around knowing when meetings and rooms are not
happening and that room can be freed up for the
next people who need it. RANY NG: And what
are your thoughts on some of these
capabilities that we're bringing into administration,
some of the insights? I know you've been
vocal about making sure that we are continuing to invest
in scaling those capabilities. DAN LIMOR: Vocal's
the right word. I'm very happy to see
progress in this space. And it's just great to see
things like the insights dashboard and room release and
features just hitting release and getting going. [MUSIC PLAYING]
