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4 minute read
Summary
On this New Product Alert, the Collab Collective’s Craig Durr speaks with Anna Bieber, Senior Product Manager at Cisco. Recorded live at ISE 2026, the discussion focuses on the new Cisco Room Kit Pro G2, highlighting expanded I/O, increased processing power through Cisco’s partnership with NVIDIA, and MDEP certification with Microsoft.
Their discussion covers:
- Room Kit Pro G2 Refresh: What’s new in processing, power, and installation simplicity
- Multi-Camera and Audio Scale: Supporting up to five IP cameras and eight Ceiling Microphone Pros in a single deployment
- IP-First Design: One-cable connectivity, networked peripherals, and Cisco switching with U-PoE
- AI-Ready Collaboration: How RoomOS 26 enables advanced AI features and consistent experiences across room sizes
- Enterprise Deployment and Management: Partner-certified setups, simplified wiring, and centralized management through Control Hub
Transcript
Craig Durr: Hey, everybody. This is Craig Durr, Chief Analyst of the Collab Collective. I tell you, when I come to these things like ISE 2026, one of my favorite things to do is to share with you new products. We've got a winner here right now. Our friends at Cisco are actually doing some refresh within their product portfolio, but they're adding a lot of power, I/O, and what have you.
To walk me through this, I want to introduce you to an old friend, Anna Bieber. Anna is a Senior Product Manager here with the video team.
You've got some new products that we want to talk about, right?
Anne Bieber: Yes, I do. Actually, we have it right here. This is the brand new Cisco Room Kit Pro G2 with a whole lot of new inputs.
Craig Durr: This is beautiful. So I was talking to Rich about this earlier, and one of the great things you guys did was that this is not only a refresh in terms of some I/O—you even have a refresh within the NVIDIA processor taking place here as well.
Anne Bieber: Yes. We have the latest and greatest. We are continuing our amazing partnership with NVIDIA… Really bringing all this power with a lighter version, which is quite cool. It has more power and is easier to install.
Craig Durr: Another one of the cool things I was really excited about is that this is the first NVIDIA chip set that's MDEP certified, right? So all of a sudden you got this powerhouse of Cisco, NVIDIA, and Microsoft all together within this solution, right?
Anne Bieber: Yes
Craig Durr: This is geared towards a large room like this, right? You've added a lot of new I/O, so what would be a use case? Tell me how some of this would work.
Anne Bieber: One of the typical use cases we see quite a lot is the really long and narrow rooms where it's a bit hard to maybe capture everybody from one angle at the front of the room. So then, it's good to add microphones, and it's good to add cameras. Then, you want to be able to connect them all.
Craig Durr: So we've got some examples here. I see the new PTZ camera. Tell me about this. How many cameras like this could go into the solution?
Anne Bieber: You can do five over IP.
Craig Durr: That's incredible. These are beautiful network-connected cameras. We're talking about a single cable to them.
Anne Bieber: Yes, so it's one cable. We are really continuing this IP story and journey that we've been on for the past few years.
Craig Durr: This is another one that I saw with you guys before. This is the Ceiling Microphone Pro.
Anne Bieber: Yes, and we can do up to eight of them.
Craig Durr: So you get eight of these Ceiling Mic Pro, a combination of five of these cameras as well?
Anne Bieber: Exactly
Craig Durr: You also have this camera here, too, right?
Anne Bieber: Yes, and that can run on HDMI, straight into the codec. So we can all mix it together, and it just works out of the box.
Craig Durr: So you get a quadcam experience with this as well. It's all built in it. This is all running on the new RoomOS 26 that you guys announced at WebexOne, right? So this brings in all the AI functionality. This brings in all the readiness—we're talking about simplicity, the ability to power…
Anne Bieber: As well as scalability, which is super important. We're kind of bringing the simpleness of the smaller rooms and scaling that into the larger rooms.
Craig Durr: And then the management piece, of course, tying in the Control Hub, too. This is a beautiful system here as well. What do you have here?
Anne Bieber: Well, here we have an Ashton Bentley setup. It's a partner certified setup. And what's really cool here is it's super easy to take off here, this little credenza. Then, here, you can see all of these pieces connected. So here is the Room Kits Pro G2 with all of its connections. We have the screens connected, and we also have all our peripherals connected.
They're not connected straight into the codec. They're actually, of course, connected through a Cisco Switch. We can't not mention them with our IP story going. So you can either connect everything in the I/O connections here. We have about 120 watts of power.
Craig Durr: These are like, PoE plus plus plus plus. How many pluses can you put behind that there?
Anne Bieber: I think we stop at two, and then it goes U-PoE, which is a Cisco standard, I guess.
Craig Durr: This is fantastic. This is a powerful system. When do you guys expect this to come to market?
Anne Bieber: We're looking at the next couple of months. It has kind of come out, and we're starting to ship. We're super excited for everybody to start trying it.
Craig Durr: That's great. I had a chance to talk to Olivier. He told me that the Desk Pro G2 is also available. So you've got it; you've got a high bar standard, and I'm looking forward to this one coming.
Anna, thank you so much.
Anne Bieber: Thank you for your time.
Craig Durr: I appreciate it.
Everyone, this is Craig Durr, Chief Analyst of the Collab Collective. We're going to bring you some more new product announcements here at ISE 2026. Stay tuned.
