Leading the Evolution of Video Conferencing from SIP to MS teams

Workplace collaboration has transformed over time, driven by the need to connect and communicate across different locations. In the past decade, video conferencing has steadily grown from a supplemental tool to a central layer of business productivity. Instead of the companies being much dependent on audio calls and face-to-face meetings, cloud systems have resulted to global cooperation that is not limited by geography or time zones. The process of upgrading the old SIP-based infrastructure towards the new cloud application, such as Microsoft Teams, is a change not only in technology, but also in the way individuals take part in the meeting and interact with each other. It was essential that, in adopting such changes, leaders were needed to unite the ecosystems together, and one such professional who made a noticeable contribution to the process is Ramesh Lakshmikanth.

In his time at LinkedIn, where employees were accustomed to using video collaboration in the workplace, with cameras left uncovered in nearly every meeting, Ramesh himself had to grapple with the pressures and the challenges of adopting video conferencing at a large scale. LinkedIn was one of the largest enterprise users of video platforms, with over three million minutes of usage per month. As LinkedIn became part of the Microsoft family, he led crucial initiatives as a Senior Staff Engineer, working closely with Microsoft Teams engineering to shape the development of Cloud Video Interop (CVI) and the Teams Room System, which initially carried the code names Rigel and Skype Room System.

Adapting to the fast-moving technology environment, the expert guided LinkedIn through transitions across several platforms. From being early adopters to scaling with MS teams  during the early stages of the pandemic, he managed complex enterprise needs without disruption. More importantly, he and his team worked on architecting a seamless migration of on-premises infrastructure to cloud environments.

This major project sent back the huge systems, such as the UCCM clusters, control servers, edge gateways, and voice infrastructure and constructed an innovative hybrid design modelled around cloud-based services. The combination was to gain the proactive insights, to view the endpoint activities, and the Pexip registrar and gateway to reroute the Teams securely. The most interesting thing was that this transition provided zero downtime to employees distributed around the world.

The impact of his projects was not limited to performance but extended to cost optimization. Migrating on-prem systems to the cloud saved LinkedIn nearly $750,000 annually by eliminating contract and support overheads. Shifting from third-party cloud bridging providers to native Teams services saved another $350,000 annually. At a time when enterprises faced growing spend on multiple conferencing providers, those numbers were critical. “Successful transformation is never only about cost or technology; it’s about ensuring people can collaborate without barriers or uncertainty.” Ramesh added.

His journey was not without challenges. On-premises licenses limited usage growth and often led to outages under unexpected load. Firewalls dynamically blocking video ports disrupted call quality. External bridging platforms struggled with reliability during high utilization periods. Yet, overcoming these hurdles strengthened the architecture and paved the way for resilient, flexible systems. Over time, these experiences not only shaped LinkedIn’s internal video strategy but also influenced Microsoft’s market-wide solutions.

The general implication is the re-creation of organizational culture through video-collaboration. Video meetings provide presence, action and human connection in distributed environments, unlike audio-only calls, which do not. The strategist reiterates that presenters will make use of the unspoken feedback of the body language of participants, and this will make the meetings more efficient and participative. As remote work and hybrid work continue in the present time, it will directly translate into enhanced productivity and team spirit. Video is likely to spread in the workplace in the future. The global collaboration will be achieved by video streaming of major events, more remote working, conferencing based on immersion and artificial intelligence-powered meeting assistants.

The industry is still developing at a fast pace, and there is an indication toward the hybrid models, in which the meeting rooms and the personal devices will integrate perfectly with each other. To those in the field who have been around through the entire evolution of SIP systems to Teams, it is a reminder of a crucial fact: collaboration is not about being physically the same, but about being equally present no matter where we go.