Brendan Ittelson: Thank you so much for having me today. I'm looking forward to the conversation and all the topics we have to dive into on this area.
Megan: Fantastic. Lovely to have you both here. And Sam, just to set some context, I wonder if we could start with the pandemic and the innovation that really was born out of necessity. I mean, when it became clear that we were all going to be virtual for the foreseeable future, I wonder what was the first technological mission for Shure?
Sam: Yeah, very good question. The pandemic really accelerated a lot of innovation around virtual communications and fundamentally how we perform our everyday jobs remotely. One of our first technological mission when the pandemic happened and everybody ended up going home and performing their functions remotely was to make sure that people could continue to communicate effectively, whether that's for business meetings, virtual events, or educational purposes. We focused on collaboration and enhancing collaboration tools. And ideally what we were aiming to do, or we focused on, was to basically improve the ease of use and configuration of audio tool sets.
Because unlike the office environment where it might be a lot more controlled, people are working from non-traditional areas like home offices or other makeshift solutions, we needed to make sure that people could still get pristine audio and that studio level audio even in uncontrolled environments that are not really made for that. We expedited development in our software solutions. We created tool sets that allowed for ease of deployment and remote configuration and management so we could enable people to continue doing the things they needed to do without having to worry about the underlying technology.
Megan: And Brendan, during that time, it seemed everyone became a Zoom user of some sort. I mean, what was the first mission at Zoom when virtual connection became this necessity for everyone?
Brendan: Well, our mission fundamentally didn't change. It's always been about delivering frictionless communications. What shifted was the urgency and the magnitude of what we were doing. Our focus shifted on how we do this reliably, securely, and to scale to ensure these millions of new users could connect instantly without friction. We really shifted our thinking of being just a business continuity tool to becoming a lifeline for so many individuals and industries. The stories that we heard across education, healthcare, and just general human connection, the number of those moments that matter to people that we were able to help facilitate just became so important. We really focused on how can we be there and make it frictionless so folks can focus on that human connection. And that accelerated our thinking in terms of innovation and reinforced the thought that we need to focus on the simplicity, accessibility, and trust in communication technology so that people could focus on that connection and not the technology that makes it possible.
Megan: That's so true. It did really just become an absolute lifeline for people, didn't it? And before we dive into the technologies beyond these emerging capabilities, I wonder if we could first talk about just the importance of clear audio. I mean, Sam, as much as we all worry over how we look on Zoom, is how we sound perhaps as or even more impactful?
Sam: Yeah, you're absolutely correct. I mean, clear audio is absolutely critical for effective communications. Video quality is very important absolutely, but poor audio can really hinder understanding and engagement. As a matter of fact, there's studies and research from areas such as Yale University that say that poor audio can make understanding somewhat more challenged and even affect retention of information. Especially in an educational type environment where there's a lot of background noise and very differing types of spaces like auditoriums and lecture halls, it really becomes a high priority that you have great audio quality. And during the pandemic, as you said, and as Brendan rightly said, it became one of our highest priorities to focus on technologies like beamforming mics and ways to focus on the speaker's voice and minimize that unwanted background noise so that we could ensure that the communication was efficient, was well understood, and that it removed the distraction so people could be able to actually communicate and retain the information that was being shared.