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9 minute read
Summary
On this episode of Direct from the Expo, the Collab Collective’s Craig Durr speaks with Olly Henderson, VP of Video Product at Jabra, live at ISE 2026. Their conversation centers on how collaboration spaces are evolving beyond return-to-office discussions toward smarter space utilization, equitable hybrid experiences, and scalable room design. Olly shares insights into Jabra’s expanding video portfolio, including newly announced large-room solutions, the evolution of the PanaCast platform, and how simplicity, manageability, and ecosystem partnerships are shaping enterprise collaboration strategies.
Their discussion covers:
- Scalability Across Room Sizes: Jabra’s strategy to support collaboration spaces for two to twenty-two people with a consistent, modular portfolio
- New Large Room Solutions: An overview of the newly announced PanaCast Room Kit and Room Kit Multi for larger meeting environments
- Partnership with Huddly: Why Jabra partnered with Huddly Crew cameras to extend video coverage without increasing complexity
- Plug-and-Play Simplicity: Leveraging PoE, category cabling, and redundancy to reduce installation time and support costs
- Portfolio Growth Beyond Rooms: Updates on Jabra Scheduler, Evolve3 headsets, and the company’s push toward becoming a full-room solutions provider
- Fleet Management Strategy: How investments in Jabra Plus aim to give IT teams and channel partners unified visibility across audio and video devices
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Transcript
Craig Durr: Hey, everyone. This is Craig Durr, Chief Analyst and Founder of the Collab Collective. And I want to welcome you to another edition of Direct from the Expo Live at ISE 2026.
It's an exciting show, huh?
Olly Henderson: It's a very exciting show. Glad to be here. Great to see you again.
Craig Durr: Well, I do want to introduce a good friend of mine, and this is truly a friend of mine, Olly Henderson.
How are you doing?
Olly Henderson: I'm doing very well. It's been a fun morning already. It's already got one product launch under our belt. So excited to talk to you.
Craig Durr: Well, I want to hear about the product, but let's go and take a step back, because I want to pick your brain. I think of you as an industry expert right now. Let's talk about workplace trends.
So you're talking to a lot of customers. What do you think are the right trends that they are talking about or what you see is taking place?
Olly Henderson: I think a few years ago, we were talking about return to the office. I think it’s pretty clear that it's now, “How is that space being utilized?”
So from a facilities management standpoint, real estate is expensive. It’s an expensive world that we live in, so we need to be able to help those decision makers make more enhanced and informed decisions on how that space is being used. Also, we need to be so much more mindful of the remote users still, making sure in a small meeting room, is there a difference to how a large meeting room reacts? All of the above.
Craig Durr: Yeah. You know, it’s still hybrid work. But at this point in time, it's as important for the people in the room as the people out of the room, right?
Olly Henderson: Without any shadow of a doubt. I don't think we've been at a place where it's been more critical to look after everyone's experience. You know, those in the room need to be able to signal a hand raise or unmute, those outside of the room need to be able to be seen clearly when they want to interject in the room meeting. It's equity all around.
Craig Durr: Let's see if we go even further. What is top of mind for customers when they're looking for these collaboration solutions?
Olly Henderson: I would suggest that it's scalability. Scalability is really key. They don't want 101 different solutions to solve all of their use cases from small and to medium rooms. They would like a core of products that allow you to scale up and down the spectrum.
Craig Durr: So the idea that they can find a solution that can meet them wherever they are in their different size room, that's great. Check. Got that? What else are they talking about?
Olly Henderson: Simplicity. Really, we're not in a complex world anymore. We've seen how the markets for consumer goods have had an impact on the commercial markets. People know how easy their tech is at home, and they need that simplicity in the workplace as well. People aren't going to spend a lot of time in setting up, in methodical queries, and things like that. They need to be able to get the kit in, get it working…
Craig Durr: Deployment, plug and play… that sounds great. There's got to be more.
Olly Henderson: Definitely manageability. If you've got a large fleet, you know, we're lucky enough at Jabra that a lot of our customers are global accounts. They're into hundreds and thousands of rooms. If you have to deploy boots on the ground to those rooms, Craig, it's eye watering sums of money, right?
So you need a guy to be able to sit in London, New York, Paris or wherever and be able to really reach out and touch as a state and be able to see the state of that, where the firmware is, what the settings are, and be able to troubleshoot if an issue arises.
Craig Durr: Okay, I got it. Scalability. Simplicity. Management. I think those are all great.
But that's a great segue to what I think you guys just announced downstairs a little while ago, right? So I'm excited to have a chance to talk to me about a new solution.
Pause one second on that because it was only here last year, we were talking about another solution you guys brought together—the PanaCast 40 VBS.
How's that doing, and how are we doing into this new, literally bigger solution?
Olly Henderson: Yeah, PanaCast 40 VBS… I mean, we're delighted with it. It's a solution for the huddle and small rooms, ideally two to six people. It's beating the budget internally. That makes my finance guys very happy. But more importantly, it's making customers happy and delighted.
It's become the global standard for a lot of our accounts as we're seeing this big migration, especially from Windows-based systems into Android-based systems. And that choice is proving very good, which will come on to a little bit more later.
Craig Durr: Great, so 40 VBS is doing fantastic. But then tell me, again, you are going bigger—literally. What do you want to share?
Olly Henderson: So, today we were delighted to announce our large room solution. And you'll keep hearing this number that's become a bit of a buzzword. I stumbled on that once and that the company is really taking it. So we want to look after two people to twenty-two people.
Craig Durr: Wow. That's a big broad set.
Olly Henderson: Because I think it's important to put guardrails around what you do. We've got some great competitors here who get into complex rooms, 40s, 50s, 60s auditoriums. We're not going there yet… Just two people to twenty-two people. So it's a huddle room to what we would class as a large meeting room.
And today, we've announced the Room Kit and the Room Kit Multi, which has got constituent parts to it that will allow us to definitely go from, say, the 10 to 22 people in different stages with that scalable concept we were talking about before.
Craig Durr: Okay, and then core to this though is an update. It's the PanaCast 55 VBS. Tell me about this video bar.
Olly Henderson: We took our PanaCast 50 VBS, which was really designed for the medium room, and we wanted to make that scalable and modular. So, we had to do a minor bit of surgery to it to give it some extra horsepower and some more connectivity in the back. Same footprint, same great features, but now you can really add on to it. That is your core for your meeting room. So if you've got a six to twelve person room, you deploy the PanaCast 55.
If you are now getting into, say, fourteen to sixteen people, you would add the PanaCast SpeakerMic. This is a very powerful speaker microphone that works in harmony with the PanaCast 55 at the front of it. I mean, we've got that heritage of Speaks that we kind of created in the market. This one specifically designed to work in conjunction with the bar.
Craig Durr: So we've covered this mid-range for eight to 14 with the PanaCast 55 VBS and the SpeakerMic. Now tell me how you're going to go to these larger elements.
Olly Henderson: I think at that point, when you start to get to twelve, fourteen, the optics in the PanaCast 55 will tap out. It's becoming a little strain to see clearly, so we needed to get the video further into the room as well.
And that's where we're delighted to have entered into a partnership with Huddly, their Crew system. Why reinvent the wheel? We get on great with the guys at Huddly. Scandinavian companies, Scandinavian values, great design, all of the above, so it made perfect sense.
What you can do is you can either add a single L1 camera, or three Crew camera systems. So that's three of those cameras up to five. And you're really getting excellent video coverage into the room.
Craig Durr: You just checked one of those boxes we talked about before. This is a scalability story starting with the 40 VBS, and then moving all the way through to the 55 VBS, plus the PanaCast Room Kits, right?
Olly Henderson: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's it. It makes the customer journey so much simpler, right? They know that for a small room, two to six people, it’s PanaCast 40 VBS. For a medium room, six to ten people, you're talking PanaCast 50 with a little bit extra audio, add the SpeakerMic… a little bit extra on the video side, add the cameras.
Craig Durr: Talk to me about the simplicity story within this portfolio.
Olly Henderson: I think what's interesting is a lot of these large room solutions, no matter how much people say it's not, they are complex. You know, you've got two zones of interest programs where cameras are going. This is truly plug and play. So all the cameras are over category cable. The SpeakerMic is over category cable. So low cabling costs. Every installer has those on their truck, and you're up and running.
The cameras are interdependent on each other. So one drops off, another one will pick up. It's all super straightforward.
Craig Durr: That's fantastic. This is the PoE story that they have, right? It also plays into the MDEP story as well, that you've already been a partner for a very long time.
Olly Henderson: MDEP’s been a real win for us. Looks like those guys are gaining more and more momentum. A lot of our OEM partners in the industry are moving to MDEP as well. But what was exciting, I think the Jabra story with MDEP was very appealing to the guys at Huddly as well, because we know they've got a few partnerships in the market on Zoom or Team rooms on Windows, but this is the first time they're getting into the Android space, and especially with the backup.
Craig Durr: That is fantastic. I love the fact that this also works for those other ecosystems as well, right? Not just Microsoft.
Olly Henderson: It also works with Zoom, and, you know, we've certainly got plans to add other partners into the ecosystem as well moving forward.
Craig Durr: Okay, fantastic. You got a lot going on. But I have to tell you, this is not even the tip of the iceberg. In the last six months, your company has just launched the Jabra Scheduler, for example, and then one thing that I'm really excited to see in person is the Evolve3 headsets.
Olly Henderson: Yeah, Scheduler is another good success story for us. Starting to own more parts of the room, what's outside the room. It's a great segue into the video story, but it's also very comfortable for our heritage headset sellers who are maybe not as comfortable selling video. To start getting their foot into the video story as well.
But yeah, the Evolve3 are our brothers in arms over the headset business unit. What a great new product that's just launched… boomless, really kind of consumer look and feel. And I was lucky enough to be on the plane yesterday with Starlink on it. So I thought I'd have a go with the Teams meeting. Might have annoyed the whole plane, but had a great meeting. I heard everything, and everyone heard me clearly. So, you know, it really is the ultimate in hybrid tools.
Craig Durr: I love this, and you know what you just said also, this is a great story for your integration partners as well, right? Because now you're talking about Jabra being a one stop shop. It has medium rooms, small rooms, large rooms, and a scheduler as well.
Olly Henderson: Well, I think that comes back to the management play. We’ve made some huge changes inside the business, really investing heavily in 2026 on our Jabra Plus management platform. We've got a new team involved with some industry expert product managers in there. And what that allows is stickiness. So, not only will the end customers be able to look at the whole fleet, but our channel partners will be able to manage the fleet and value all the important things that they need to do. And that's going to be an audio and video. So across the whole portfolio, they’ll come into a single platform.
Craig Durr: That is fantastic. You got a lot here. If the audience wants to learn more if they're here, what should they do?
Olly Henderson: Yeah, they should always come to Jabra.com, have a look around on the website, and reach out to any of the sales team. We've got loads of events going on all the time as well. And, the good news is, when we see each other in the summer again, hopefully, we've got more launches during the course of this year. So more products are coming.
Craig Durr: I'm going to make sure that that's a date on the calendar. That is good.
All right, Olly, I appreciate your time.
Hey, everyone. This has been another great update Direct from the Expo at ISE 2026. It's great information you shared. I appreciate it.
Olly Henderson: Thanks, Craig. Thanks for the time.
Craig Durr: All right, you guys, tune in. We're gonna have some more information here. Take care.
