Deploying 1,000 Microsoft Teams Rooms globally at AstraZeneca with Stephen McClellan

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Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners, UC and AV leads planning a large-scale migration from Cisco or other legacy video estates to Microsoft Teams Rooms, and anyone building device standards, support models and vendor evaluation processes at enterprise scale.

Guest: Stephen McClellan — Associate Director, Solutions Engineering (Conferencing), AstraZeneca

Stephen McClellan leads conferencing solutions engineering at AstraZeneca, where he has spent a decade taking the business from two separate Cisco estates and on-premises Lync through to Microsoft Teams and more than 1,000 Teams Rooms. He walks through the vendor evaluation, the standards chosen, where Microsoft still lags Cisco, and what happens to the remaining Cisco estate.

Many thanks to Ribbon, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

• AstraZeneca's starting point in 2014 was two separate Cisco estates, two on-premises Lync deployments and a pocket of HP Halo telepresence rooms across roughly 75,000 users and 580 rooms — consolidated using Acano for Lync/Skype interop plus browser-based external guest joining. ▶ 1:33
• Making room booking and joining fully self-service, with a deliberately standard (non-customised) Cisco UI, drove year-on-year growth of around 250 endpoints a year and turned video from a white-glove, scheduled service into a commodity. ▶ 4:06
• When COVID hit, AstraZeneca moved from a 5,000-user Teams pilot to 77,000 users in a single week rather than risk testing whether the on-premises Skype for Business estate could handle everyone working from home. ▶ 5:09
• Cisco CVI was not ready when AstraZeneca needed interop, so they deployed Pexip as an interim solution just before lockdown and only migrated to Cisco CVI around September 2020 — where the same interop friction between the two big vendors persisted. ▶ 6:42
• The decision to move to Microsoft Teams Rooms was crystallised when the CEO met the CEO of a recently acquired, all-Zoom Rooms company and said he could not justify replacing their experience with AstraZeneca's Cisco/Teams interop setup. ▶ 10:17
• After an 8–9 month lab and 14-room global pilot across Dubai, Asia, the Americas and Europe, they settled on Windows-based MTRs for feature parity, with Lenovo compute and touch panels, NEC displays chosen for warranty, HP Poly video bars for huddle rooms, Logitech Rally Bar for standard rooms and QSC for complex integrated rooms. ▶ 13:21
• The biggest gaps versus Cisco were remote monitoring/management depth and technical support quality; Microsoft support has improved markedly since 2022 but still isn't at the level of Cisco, HP Poly or Extron, and remote screen view/control for MTRs only lit up in the tenant recently. ▶ 14:52
• Cisco is being displaced by lifecycle replacement plus new builds rather than a big-bang refresh — from about 1,650 Cisco rooms to over 1,000 MTRs in roughly 15 months, with the estate expected to settle around 2,500–2,600 rooms. ▶ 18:26
• Standardising on Ethernet-connected displays and network-capable PDUs so any device in the room can be power-cycled remotely was a deliberate hedge against managing a third-party hardware mesh — though the payoff hasn't materialised yet. ▶ 22:30

Insights summarised by AI from the episode transcript, reviewed by the Empowering.Cloud team.

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