rewrite this title Why The New Meeting Room War Is Interoperability – UC Today

The meeting room used to be built around an assumption: the organisation had a preferred platform, and the room would follow it. The data shows how rarely that holds. Cisco research suggests up to 85% of enterprise IT teams support two or more meeting platforms. They do so to cover separate business units, specific use cases or business continuity. Even businesses that standardise internally on Teams, Zoom, Webex or Google Meet still work with customers, partners and guests who bring other platforms into the calendar every day.

That fragmentation runs deep. Industry estimates put the global total at roughly 44 million meeting rooms, with about a quarter relying on bring-your-own-device setups. Fewer than 8% are standardised spaces such as Microsoft Teams Rooms or Zoom Rooms. Most rooms stay inconsistent and platform-locked. What changed at InfoComm was the expectation attached to the rooms that do get equipped. The question has moved from whether a call can technically connect to whether the experience feels native enough that users stop noticing the platform divide.

Why customer demand is forcing meeting room ecosystems open

Cisco and Zoom used the show to launch Cisco Devices for Zoom Rooms, extending full Zoom Rooms modality across Cisco’s device portfolio from the Desk Pro G2 to the Room Kit EQ. It moves past the SIP-based guest-join approach that came before. That older method delivered a stripped-back interface, limited AI and management outside the Cisco environment. The new offer puts a native Zoom home screen, workflow and licence on Cisco hardware, with a public beta now open and general availability due in September.

Espen Løberg of Cisco said the move followed a year of customer feedback, and that buyers, not vendors, drove the decision.

It’s really been our joint customers that have brought us together and enabled us to do this.

Those customers are living with mixed environments and do not want to choose between the hardware they prefer, the platform their users prefer and the management layer IT needs. Cisco sits underneath the Zoom experience, supplying device intelligence, network diagnostics and workspace analytics that the platform alone cannot. The company has not retreated from Webex, which it says reaches 650 million monthly meeting participants, and is treating room hardware as a separate contest from the platform that runs on it.

The tie-up is one move in a broader scramble. At ISE 2026 earlier in the year, Google and Microsoft introduced their own interoperability. Chrome OS-based Google Meet rooms can now join Teams meetings, and Windows-based Teams Rooms can join Meet meetings, on by default. Cisco’s own RoomOS now positions itself as platform-agnostic across Webex, Teams, Google Meet and Zoom. The market has narrowed to the firms that can offer any-to-any connectivity. No vendor is trying to collapse the platforms into one. They are addressing the same problem: rooms that must join whichever link lands on the calendar, without IT deploying parallel systems for each platform.

How expectations moved from connection to native experience

Logitech has lived with this longer than most. Henry Lavek says the company has always sold into multi-platform environments, starting with USB interoperability that let customers plug a camera into any laptop and use almost any service. That need has not gone away, but expectations have risen sharply.

“People want to see more of it, they want it to be simpler, and they want more native experiences when switching between different applications and services.”

The bar has moved from “does it connect?” to “does it feel like this room was designed for the meeting I am trying to have”. Neil Fluester of Logitech highlights how far the market has come:

“Traditionally, back 10 years ago, everything was about SIP and H.323 and everything was a walled garden.”

Fluester says the market has since consolidated around a handful of leading platforms, naming Microsoft, Zoom, Google and Cisco Webex, and points to something now taken for granted: sending someone a link, having them click it, and moving between a Zoom and a Teams or a Google call. A few years ago, he says, that was unheard of. What matters to those customers, he adds, is the experience rather than the technology.

“When the technology can blend away, people can come into a meeting and concentrate on their meeting, that’s when it works.”

For the people running the estate, that is the whole point. If the first five minutes of a meeting go on working out how to join or share content, people stop trusting the room. They drag the meeting back to a laptop instead. The best interoperability is invisible. A room that supports every platform but still makes people think like AV technicians has not solved anything.

The winning room will be platform-aware, not platform-limited

The vendor claiming support for the longest list of platforms will not win the next meeting room battle. The ecosystems that make those platforms feel natural in the room will. For enterprises, that changes the buying question. It is no longer enough to ask whether a room supports Teams, Zoom, Webex or Google Meet. Buyers need to ask what level of experience each platform gets, and what features survive across environments. They should also ask how IT manages the estate, and whether the technology disappears once the meeting begins.

The future of meeting room interoperability will not be defined by whether a room can technically join another platform’s call. It will be defined by whether users can walk in, start work, and never have to think about the platform at all.