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9 minute read
Summary
In this feature, the Collab Collective’s Craig Durr joins Nathan Coutinho, Global Head of Strategic Partner Relations and Market Insights at Logitech, for a tour of Logi Work on Wheels—a mobile showcase bringing Logitech’s latest collaboration technologies to customers and partners. As the setup travels to Zoom headquarters, Nathan highlights how the program builds on the global Logi Work series and demonstrates solutions designed for hybrid work, from meeting rooms to classrooms and personal workspaces.
Their discussion covers:
- Logi Work on Wheels: A mobile showcase bringing Logitech’s workplace innovations directly to customers and partners
- Zoom Collaboration: How Logitech is integrating Zoom-certified solutions across devices for seamless experiences
- New Products & Features: Insights on Logitech Spot, Rally Bar, Sight, and the Rally Board 65
- Hybrid Work Trends: Exploring analytics, IoT sensors, and workplace data with Sync and CollabOS
- Customer Experience: Creating interactive, hands-on environments to test Logitech’s latest tools
Transcript
Craig Durr: Welcome to Logitech headquarters. Logitech is the Swiss-based leader in computer peripherals, and here in San Jose, California is where we're located with Logitech for Businesses’ main campus. This is where a lot of the video conferencing, the personal workspace devices, are actually designed, implemented, and product managed.
I'm supposed to be meeting Nathan Coutinho here. Nathan works as the Global Head of Strategic Partner Relations and Market Insights, so with an analyst like myself, him and I often talk about what's going on in the market. Coffee has been promised. He told me there was something here that I have to see…
Nathan Coutinho: Dude, I'm right here.
Craig Durr: Nathan, how are you doing?
Nathan Coutinho: Good. How are you, man?
Craig Durr: I've been walking all over trying to find you. Hey, as promised…
Nathan Coutinho: Is that for me? Awesome.
Craig Durr: Blue Bottle Coffee
Nathan Coutinho: Fantastic. I don't think I've had Blue Bottle before.
Craig Durr: Slow-pour drip. Now here, I brought the coffee, but you promised me something big here. You're going to show me something, and I'm excited. We're going to go inside the headquarters. What are we going to do? What's here?
Nathan Coutinho: We're going to go right there.
Craig Durr: What? All right, let's go.
Nathan, what is this hidden way here?
Nathan Coutinho: Well, this is what we call Logi Work on Wheels.
Craig Durr: This is what I've been hearing about. Explain it to me, the whole mobile… you know.
Nathan Coutinho: So let's start with Logi Work. So Logi Work is a global event series. We've been using, basically events in our different office locations all over the world to basically bring our customers together with our partners and then talk about how work has actually changed. You know, since the pandemic and now, post pandemic.
Craig Durr: That's right, there was one in Dallas I attended. You guys had one here in San Jose just recently. But this is not what I saw in Dallas.
Nathan Coutinho: Nope. Probably not.
Craig Durr: So what do you have going on here?
Nathan Coutinho: So you're gonna find out eventually because we’re about to move the truck. So we're gonna move the truck right now to Zoom’s headquarters in San Jose, and you're gonna get a chance at actually watching how they set it all up. Then, you can see what's actually inside.
Craig Durr: All right, so this is perfect. Our job today is we're gonna help escort this truck over to the Zoom office and set it up. And then, we'll have a chance to maybe see some of this stuff inside? All right, this is gonna be a great cup of coffee.
Hey, Nathan, let's go. Come on, I got the vehicle. Okay, so this Logi Works… Is this one of your projects? You tend to do a lot of this emceeing for a lot of what's going on.
Nathan Coutinho: I do. I don't know how that happened, but I do do a lot of emceeing.
Craig Durr: Well, help remind the audience… Tell me about what Nathan does at Logitech. What is your role on campus right now?
Nathan Coutinho: So I'll tell you what the actual job is and go into all the extracurricular activities that I managed to get myself into. So I run analyst relations. That's pretty mad three years ago. So I do that for our business to business, our business unit globally. I also have channel marketing as well as alliance market.
Craig Durr: Okay, let's get this thing set up. I can't wait to see this.
Nathan Coutinho: What are you doing? We're supposed to be working here.
Craig Durr: I'm calibrating the corn hole.
Let's try the other way again.
Nathan Coutinho: Now the camera's on the top.
Craig Durr: I see. I'm sorry. Let's try one more time. Wait, let me see this. I'll be sitting, right?
Nathan Coutinho: All right, welcome to Logi Work on wheels.
Craig Durr: Nathan, this is incredible. Watching this thing come together… that's pretty exciting, right?
Nathan Coutinho: Yep, that's a lot of fun.
Craig Durr: All right, do I get the official tour now?
Nathan Coutinho: Yes, you may enter.
So I’ll cover everything, but I'll just kind of give you the highlights.
Craig Durr: Now, the first thing I would start off… being a Zoom event, I'm told that everything in here is Zoom certified.
Nathan Coutinho: Everything is Zoom certified. Pretty much everything's also running Zoom, so when customers come through, the Zoomies come through, we give them the full Zoom experience.
Craig Durr: That's awesome. All right, so we're starting off here?
Nathan Coutinho: Yeah, so I'll just give a quick tour, right? This is basically running Zoom digital signage. How we enable that is we have a Roommate–Logitech Roommate compute that's sitting on the backside. It logs into Zoom, and then you can basically get all the Zoom Workplace experience.
Craig Durr: This is one of the great features. I love that these guys were brought out five years ago, which is beautiful. Oh, this is one of my favorite cameras.
Nathan Coutinho: That's a Reach. So obviously, this is just a standard desk setup. You got our webcams, our Slim Combo keyboard… you've got the Logitech Wave Keys. But yeah, Reach is that desktop camera, which lets you get directly to the device in whatever angle you want. And teachers love this. We built it for teachers, but for people that share a lot of products at their desk–it's a no brainer.
Craig Durr: So all of a sudden you got this great content camera that you can go ahead and just go and do this. As a matter of fact, you shot some of your video series with this, right?
Nathan Coutinho: That's true, yeah, Shape Your Story. Lisa used a camera like that… it’s the same camera.
Craig Durr: And of course, with the personal workspace, this is kind of the task worker level. It's so beautiful. I love that.
Nathan Coutinho: So we'll skip this one for now. This is Logitech Spot. This is our new super sensor.
Craig Durr: You and I spoke about this at… was it ISE?
Nathan Coutinho: I think it was either ISE or InfoComm. I don’t remember.
Craig Durr: We did. But now this is actually in market now, right?
Nathan Coutinho: No, November.
Craig Durr: Okay, coming out in November, so it's coming soon. but this is the room sensor. It's got how many different monitors and sensors in it?
Nathan Coutinho: I can't remember, but it's a lot. So the whole idea is—there's so many spaces that have video, right? And some spaces don't have video, right? So how do you understand occupancy? How do you know what the CO₂ levels are? How do you know if you need more of those rooms or less of those rooms? So this can go literally across every single room in your organization.
And by the way, how it gets up the internet, it just Bluetooth pairs to Tap Scheduler or to the Video Bar in the room. And if you don't have our systems, you can still use it, but make a gateway that can do thousands of sensors in one building.
Craig Durr: This IoT, it's got a battery life that lasts four years. Also, what it works with is Sync, right? So now you're saying that we're taking a lot of additional data and just making that Sync data set?
Nathan Coutinho: And because our APIs are integrated with Zoom, we got to take all that data and put it into Zoom Workplace.
Craig Durr: Oh, that's awesome.
Nathan Coutinho: So here we have another desk. This could be home, but this is all our pro line stuff. You got MX Keys Gen 2, we got the MX Master Mouse, Zone Wireless 2, our awesome 4K camera…
Craig Durr: I love that. It's comfy. Meet Up 2 up there as well.
Nathan Coutinho: The last thing in here is our awesome headset wall. On the right hand side, we've got all our wired headsets all the way to our most advanced wireless. And the last four are all native Bluetooth.
Craig Durr: And people can come in here, work with these iPads, and actually just listen.
Nathan Coutinho: You can, yeah. You can listen to the sound quality. I mean, all of them sound fantastic, obviously, but you can hear all the differences, right? And it’s native Bluetooth now, so we have certified with Intel and now, with Zoom too. So you don't have to use a dongle. That's why we've been talking about dongle lists headsets.
Craig Durr: Let's see what else you want to show me here.
Nathan Coutinho: So let's step over here. I kind of skipped over this before because to understand this, you also have to see this. So our awesome camera, Sight, and it's a tabletop. And now we can do Dual Sights, right? We shifted a couple months ago. So now, with the 1.15 CollabOS, you can do two Sights, Dual Sights in a row.
Craig Durr: That's one of the beautiful things I like within CollabOS—that you guys are constantly improving the existing hardware, right? And it's just part of the features that's improving. You guys do some great stuff. And actually you’re doing this great video about the audio improvements?
Nathan Coutinho: Oh, yeah, the audio improvement. I mean, every single step, it's between the camera, the optics, how we process video, the audio reproduction... They all kind of build off each other.
Craig Durr: Nice. So Sight right now is working with the Rally Bar Mini?
Nathan Coutinho: Correct, so our AI is basically trying to figure out if you're sitting around the table… our AI is kind of watching where you're looking, and if you're looking at the camera or across, it will frame you from the camera. Nice. And we'll go back and forth to the most active speakers. So we'll frame the four most active speakers. And as I like to say, if four people are actively talking, you're probably not having a great meeting at the same time. But you know, that's why we only frame four people.
Craig Durr: Yeah, I've got twins. Obviously you haven't sat at my dinner table because that's all we get.
Nathan Coutinho: This is awesome. So we have one more thing that's outside the truck.
Craig Durr: This is one of my favorites.
Nathan Coutinho: This is the one you made us flip over and over.
Craig Durr: That's right. The Rally Board 65, right? I love this. I should wind up just doing a recent project for you guys, helping you with an ebook. There's a lot of great value in this area, and the versatility I really like.
Nathan Coutinho: So, you know, there's a couple things that are unique about this board. Number one, the camera system is built from the ground up. We designed the sensor ourselves, and that's why the clarity on this camera… when you look at the clarity of this camera, it's mind blowing because you don't expect it from a video board, right? So it's almost like DSLR optics. It's really, really clear.
Craig Durr: I saw some of the testing you did and posted online. I was surprised when I looked at it. I was like, “Wow, this is crazy.”
Nathan Coutinho: So one of the biggest challenges you have with a board this size, when you put it into a room, the camera is too high, right? That's why we built the whole flipping mechanism, so that we could basically flip it, depending if you have low tables or high tables.
Craig Durr: Now, the other thing I think that's a really big value of this, not to undersell, because this is a touch-enabled board, but the ease of install. This is a single device that I've seen a lot of IT administrators just love as is—put it on a wall, even pair it with the Tap, and so they're still bringing the control to the table.
Nathan Coutinho: And by the way, we actually have a Tap Scheduler on the back. You have these in these open environments. You can literally book the room, or this device right at the board if you want to. And it's powered by the board itself, so it's got PoE built into the board. It can also be mounted on the wall, and a lot of customers prefer that because their whole concept is, “Why buy a screen? Why buy a video bar? It takes so much time.”
Craig Durr: Nathan, you guys have an incredible thing here. Logic Work on Wheels—this is touring around the country now, right?
Nathan Coutinho: Touring around the country, yes.
Craig Durr: Well, I appreciate you showing me a preview of what's taking place right now, and I'll be happy to travel along if you want. We can do a road show.
Nathan Coutinho: We could do a road show
Craig Durr: You know, I'm a really good roadie. You can, you know… okay, I'll stick with the research reports and what have you. All right, I'm gonna say goodbye to the audience. You guys have a great time. We'll talk to you later.
Nathan Coutinho: Thank you so much.
Craig Durr: All right, everyone, look at this. The crowd is starting now. This is pretty exciting. Well, I want to thank Nathan for giving me a tour of Logi Work on Wheels. You guys have a great experience here.
Oh, I got a gift to go? Thank you so much. I appreciate that.
Everyone, this is Craig Durr coming to you from San Jose. We are with Logitech, visiting Zoom, and I hope you enjoyed this preview of Logi Work on Wheels. Until next time, take care.
