Most large enterprises don’t run one meeting platform. They run several, across an estate of rooms kitted out at different times, by different teams, with hardware chosen to match whatever the dominant platform was that year. For IT, the result is a support and management headache that’s only grown as AI features have started to differentiate meaningfully between room setups.
Cisco Devices for Zoom Rooms, announced at InfoComm 2026, is designed to address one significant part of that problem. For organisations that have standardised on Zoom but want Cisco hardware to match, it’s a certified, native answer: Zoom home screen, Zoom Rooms workflow, Zoom Rooms licence, running on Cisco’s device portfolio from the Desk Pro G2 to the Room Kit EQ.
It’s also more than a product launch. It says something about where the room hardware market is heading, and how the companies that dominate it are choosing to compete.
The Market These Companies Are Actually Fighting Over
Cisco says the Webex Suite reaches 650 million monthly meeting participants across 8 billion calls. Webex Calling hit 18 million users in October 2025. Those aren’t the numbers of a company that’s given up on its software platform. Webex remains a serious enterprise product, particularly in regulated industries and government, where its security and compliance credentials carry weight that neither Zoom nor Teams can always match.
What Cisco has also understood is that Webex’s software footprint isn’t the same as its hardware footprint, and that the two don’t need to be tied together. The room hardware market is a separate competition, and one where Cisco’s position is considerably stronger. According to Frost & Sullivan, Cisco is the market share leader in conference room devices. That position is built on hardware quality and portfolio depth, but also on the management and network infrastructure that most large enterprises already run. The devices sit inside a Cisco environment whether or not the meeting platform running on them is Webex.
That’s the distinction driving Cisco’s device strategy: hardware as infrastructure, not as a Webex delivery mechanism. It’s not a retreat from software. It’s a recognition that the room is a stronger position than the platform.
What Came Before, and Why It Matters
The Zoom for Cisco Rooms launch at ISE 2026 was the first serious step. It brought a native Zoom Meetings experience to devices running the Cisco Rooms software stack, replacing the SIP-based interoperability that had existed before. In practice, SIP interop meant a stripped-back interface, limited AI features, and management that sat outside the Cisco environment. It worked technically. It didn’t work well.
Cisco Devices for Zoom Rooms has a different emphasis. Where Zoom for Cisco Rooms puts Cisco at the centre with Zoom as one available experience, this puts Zoom at the centre. An organisation that’s standardised on Zoom deploys these rooms as Zoom Rooms, with a Zoom home screen and Zoom-centric workflow. Cisco sits underneath, providing what Zoom alone can’t: the Agentic Director camera intelligence system built on a decade of NVIDIA edge AI development, ThousandEyes network diagnostics running directly on the device, and Workspace Advisor generating a digital twin of each room in Collaboration Control Hub.
Jeff Smith, Head of Product, Workplace at Zoom, says the direction was clear from their shared customer base long before the announcement:
“What we saw was a lot of customer demand for a solution where we could have a full Zoom Meetings experience on Cisco devices. They wanted us to take the next step and really deliver that full Zoom Rooms experience on the highest quality hardware that we could provide.”
Espen Løberg, VP and GM for the Collaboration Devices business at Cisco, makes the same point about what the partnership unlocks beyond the room itself:
“It also goes beyond what they can do now in their meeting rooms. It’s about what they can now do across their workplace, the other outcomes they can unlock with Cisco devices, built on top of the Cisco network, the Cisco Assurance capabilities, Cisco Spaces, Cisco Cloud Control. We bring all of that now to workplaces that are using the Zoom platform.”
Where the Broader Competition Is Going
Cisco and Zoom aren’t the only companies having this conversation. At InfoComm 2026, Microsoft announced three new partners joining its Microsoft Device Ecosystem Platform: Q-SYS and Biamp among them. MDEP, which Cisco has also built on for its Microsoft Teams Rooms deployments, is Microsoft’s effort to bring consistent management, security, and AI capability to Android-based Teams Rooms devices across manufacturers. Q-SYS and Biamp are both serious AV infrastructure vendors. Their presence on MDEP signals that the platform-device relationship is shifting across the industry, not just at Cisco.
No organisation runs a single meeting platform, and the real challenges appear once meetings move from individual screens to shared spaces. That’s been true for a while. What’s different in 2026 is that hardware vendors are building product strategies explicitly around it, rather than patching over it with interoperability workarounds.
For enterprises managing mixed-platform room estates, the practical consequence is that room hardware is increasingly decoupled from the meeting platform. Cisco hardware now runs Webex, Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet from the same device portfolio, under the same management layer. Logitech makes a similar multi-platform argument. The room hardware decision is becoming an infrastructure decision, not a platform decision.
What the Partnership Does Not Resolve
Worth being precise about what Cisco Devices for Zoom Rooms actually solves, because it doesn’t solve everything.
The management integration between Cisco’s Collaboration Control Hub and Zoom’s own admin tooling is additive rather than unified. IT teams get additional workspace-level visibility and telemetry through Cisco’s environment, but they’re still operating two separate admin toolsets. For organisations already running Zoom Rooms at scale through Zoom’s own management infrastructure, the Cisco layer is a supplement, not a replacement.
The AI capabilities are similarly layered. The Agentic Director and Workspace Advisor are Cisco features, travelling with the hardware. Zoom’s AI Companion, My Notes, and Smart Name Tags are Zoom features, available through the platform. Both work. They don’t yet work together in any particularly deep sense. Løberg points to where this goes:
“From my perspective, it’s really about moving outside of the meeting room and orchestrating this agentic workplace experience, with the meeting experience as the baseline. I’m also excited about extending the capabilities of interoperability across different platforms.”
What that looks like in practice, and when, isn’t something either company has committed to. The public beta opens this month. General availability is September 2026.
