Picture a mid-sized enterprise, a few years into its Microsoft Teams Rooms rollout. The certified hardware has been deployed across 80 locations. The meeting rooms work. Hybrid calls connect. The IT team has a configuration standard they can hand to any integrator in any city.
And yet, walk through the same office and the picture gets more complicated. The breakout space on the second floor has a screen, but it sits idle as digital signage rather than serving any real purpose. The open-plan collaboration areas have no visibility.
Each of these spaces, from informal breakout zones to the cafeterias and multi-purpose areas that could be transformed into something far more valuable, sit outside the scope of the organization’s Teams Rooms deployment. They are managed differently, supported differently, and thus create a lack of clarity across an organisation’s ecosystem.
This is the gap that most enterprises don’t see until they are already managing it.
Where Does the Buck Stop?
For most enterprises, the answer is: when the meeting works.
Microsoft Teams Rooms deployments are typically driven by a UC or IT brief with a clear scope: standardise the hybrid meeting, leverage certified for Teams hardware, give distributed teams a consistent experience when they dial in. That brief is well-defined, the procurement process is established, and the outcome is measurable. It gets done.
What doesn’t get done, at least not in the same deployment, is everything else. The communal areas. The collaboration zones that sit between formal meeting rooms. The larger spaces, boardrooms and training rooms and all-hands venues, that might support Teams calls but do not sit within the same management framework. According to Vic Bhagat, Senior Director of Alliances at Q-SYS:
“Enterprises solve for hybrid collaboration, but they don’t really extend the design to support the many other ways rooms and spaces are used.”
The result is an AV estate with two layers. One is standardised, certified for Teams, and centrally managed. The other is a patchwork of legacy equipment, one-off installations, and spaces that have never been properly addressed. Bhagat says:
“The high-impact spaces, the larger areas, the communal areas, have typically been left behind. The need to evolve those spaces through time is going to become increasingly important as organisations look to do more with their workplace technology.”
Watch: Vic Bhagat, Senior Director of Alliances at Q-SYS, on why enterprises need a platform approach to AV
The Reality of a Device-by-Device Estate
The way most AV estates have been built means this compounds over time. Room by room, device by device, each deployment solves a specific problem. Each device handles a specific function.
“When you look at it device-by-device, you can almost think of it function by function,” Bhagat explains.
“You deploy a device, it does a certain thing, and that room is now good for that thing. But what if you want that room to do more? You either have to rip and replace that device, or you have to add entirely new systems.”
At scale, across a global AV estate, this plays out in specific ways: inconsistent experiences from one site to the next, no central view of how spaces are performing, configuration drift as systems age and diverge, and a support burden that grows with every device added to the estate. IT teams end up managing a collection of isolated deployments rather than a unified infrastructure, spending most of their time reacting to reported issues rather than proactively managing performance.
What a Software-Defined Platform Changes in Practice
A platform-based approach changes the operational picture at each of these points. Bhagat says:
“The biggest change is that workplace leaders are moving from reacting to issues to proactively managing the entire workplace. A software-defined platform provides visibility into how spaces are performing, insights that can be automated and acted upon, and ultimately a much lower support burden.”
With the Q-SYS Full Stack AV Platform, traditional AV applications are expanded. Its network-first, software-defined architecture and open API bring traditional AV equipment such as cameras, microphones, and speakers as well as third-party devices such as shading, lighting, and environmental controls into a single connected system. A lobby extends its background audio into an adjacent cafeteria. That same cafeteria becomes an all-hands space by adding a camera and microphones, without installing anything new.
That connected layer also changes how IT, Facilities and HR manage their entire estate. Q-SYS Reflect gives teams a centralized view across every space type, letting them identify and resolve issues before users notice them rather than after a support ticket arrives.
Q-SYS offers a broad portfolio of devices certified for Teams giving deployment teams flexibility to purpose-build to the needs of each unique space, cutting the deployment variability that comes with device-by-device procurement across different vendors and integrators.
The Microsoft EC1 Deployment
The clearest large-scale example of this approach is Microsoft’s own Experience Center 1 (EC1) facility EC1 is Microsoft’s flagship customer engagement and innovation destination, located on the company’s Redmond, Washington campus. The center is built primarily for executives, decision‑makers, and enterprise customers who want to move from AI strategy to real business outcomes.
The Q-SYS deployment at EC1 covers more than 1,200 endpoints that spans every space type: meeting rooms, collaboration spaces, divisible spaces, open-plan areas, and common spaces.
The decision came down to one requirement above all others: the ability to move at the speed of innovation. “Microsoft needed a connected environment that could keep pace with innovation across hundreds of spaces and use cases, adapting to that almost on a daily basis,” Bhagat says.
“They chose Q-SYS because it can evolve continuously. You can add new capabilities because it’s software defined, reconfigure experiences quickly, and showcase what’s next without re-architecting the underlying solution.”
The facility exists to show what modern workplace technology can do. Updating and reconfiguring without replacing the underlying infrastructure was not a nice-to-have. It was a core requirement that a device-by-device approach could not meet.
Rethinking TCO Across the Estate
The financial case for platform-based AV is not always obvious if you evaluate it at room level alone. Bhagat argues the calculation changes when you look across the full estate and over time.
“Estate-level total cost of ownership is not just about what you spend today. It’s about how long that investment remains valuable,” he says.
“Platforms that can reuse the same application and spread it across different areas, add new capabilities without ripping out hardware, can help reduce duplication, simplify support, and create long-term savings. You’re not replicating individual systems in different areas of your business.”
In practical terms, consider a capability like background music, digital signage, or a room booking workflow. Once a team deploys it on the platform, they can extend it to any space that needs it, rather than buying it separately for each location. The unit of measure shifts from the room to the estate.
The Underlying Question for Enterprise IT Teams
For organisations that have committed to Microsoft Teams, the question isn’t whether to revisit that decision. It is what AV infrastructure to build beneath it. Does that infrastructure serve the full estate or just the meeting room? Bhagat says:
“The most important decision is whether they’re going to unlock insights from these deployed spaces, or leave that value on the table.”
Working alongside tools like Microsoft Copilot and Microsoft Places, a platform like Q-SYS extends the value of a Teams investment beyond the meeting room and into every space where work happens. The meeting room brief is solved. The workplace brief is still open.
