Recorded live at InfoComm 2025, this episode features Craig Durr exploring the latest Cisco innovations with Tom Richards, Morten Gunnerud, and Jon Fanebust of Cisco Systems and Devices. They discuss the Cisco Room Vision PTZ Camera, seamless Zoom integration, and AI-driven AV over IP solutions designed to enhance collaboration and simplify deployments for modern workspaces.
Craig Durr: Tom Richards, how are you doing?
Tom Richards: Good? How are you?
Craig Durr: Good. Hey everyone, this is Craig Durr, Chief Analyst and Founder of the Collab Collective, and we are here live at InfoComm. I want to introduce my good friend, Tom.
How's it going so far?
Tom Richards: It's going really well. We're having a really fun session.
Craig Durr: Tom and I had a chance to work on a panel today, and when we were talking about AI in the conference rooms and beyond, in the office space, it was a pretty good draw we had, right? We had a good audience. But you, at that point in time, you promised me something else. You were telling me that Cisco is bringing some new products to market, some new announcements, and I want you to walk me through them.
Tom Richards: Yeah, the first thing we're going to look at… actually, all the things we look at, it's all about scale. So let's go talk about how we're getting into every room and bringing AI into every space.
Craig Durr: And I know this gentleman. Morten, how are you doing?
Morten Gunnerud: Good to see you.
Craig Durr: Good to see you again. Morten, help me with the last name again. Gunnerud... I swear my Norwegian is gonna get better. I promise you, I am trying. But you actually are the person that's bringing to market this new and more in-depth relationship with Zoom, right?
Morten Gunnerud: Yeah, we're a huge team that's been bringing this to market with Zoom. It's not launched yet; it's gonna be ready by the end of this year, but we're super excited to bring full-featured Zoom meetings to Cisco rooms.
Craig Durr: Now, you guys just announced this today, so tell me more about what that means because you already are doing some work with Zoom. But what do you mean by full-featured?
Morten Gunnerud: So I mean all, all of our devices have always… like the most important thing that we do is to make sure that they have the best possible experience for all meeting platforms. So we've done a lot of work with Microsoft, Zoom, and Google over the years in addition to what we do with the Webex platform, but what we have announced today is a big leap forward in basically bringing the full-featured Zoom meeting experience that you get on any Zoom Room to a Cisco room device. That means that from basically this home screen, you can just seamlessly, with a single push of a button, join a Zoom meeting. And that's the best possible Zoom meeting experience that you get.
Craig Durr: So let me do this the other way. So the current experience you have right now is probably the equivalent of their conference room connecting experience, right? So I go off, it's probably a little bit more of a SIP-based experience in some ways, and that way, it's not as feature rich. But what you're talking about is from your native room OS experience. I touch a button, and I'm going to be in a Zoom call like this, and it's going to be a full-featured Zoom experience as well? That's fantastic!
Morten Gunnerud: A hundred percent, and the great thing about this is that this will continue to evolve as well. So as Zoom releases new features to Zoom rooms, those will also contain Cisco room experience in the Zoom meetings on your Cisco room devices.
Craig Durr: And then, when I exit that call, I am back to room OS and all the full-featured…
Morten Gunnerud: So you can do back to back full-features, Zoom meetings, Webex meetings… you have CVI for Teams, and you have WebRTC.
Craig Durr: And the best part I love is I still get all that great audio and video AI that you guys built. That's the winner, right? So everything that you guys have done market leading around your video analytics, what you're doing with your audio and acoustic improvements, winds up being brought to that Zoom experience, right?
Tom Richards: Scale manageability, AI-based features, all of this stuff bringing the best AI capabilities now and soon, with the AI capabilities of the device.
Craig Durr: So everything from Control Hub, all that scalability is fantastic. It's a pretty powerful story. So when is this gonna be ready in market?
Morten Gunnerud: So we're targeting beta for September this year, and it will be GA by the end of this calendar year.
Craig Durr: I wanna be on that beta. How about that? Can I do that for you?
Morten Gunnerud: For sure, we'll make that happen.
Craig Durr: Morten, it's great meeting you.
But Tom, this isn't all. There's some more you want to show me.
Tom Richards: Yeah, there's more that I want to show you. So along the lines of what we said about bringing all of the capabilities of the room and the hardware that we develop and the intelligence we develop in those rooms into every meeting, let's go and see the latest technology.
Craig Durr: All right, come on, people. Follow us over here.
All right, Tom, what have you got here now?
Tom Richards: Okay, so next on the menu is the latest innovations around, AV over IP. So I think previously, sitting microphones introduced one of the first steps down our AV over IP strategy. The next thing Jon is going to talk about is what we're doing in the video side of that environment.
Craig Durr: Jon, how are you doing?
Jon Fanebust: Great
Craig Durr: That's great to hear. I heard you're the person talking about bringing video over IP to market. Tell me what you're doing now.
Jon Fanebust: That is right. So what we have been doing now is we brought out the brand new Cisco Room Vision PTZ Camera. You can see it right here, behind me. There is one here, there is one over there, and there is also one in the ceiling.
Craig Durr: Okay, fantastic. So what we're talking about right now is taking video content, bringing over IP, back to the main platform, but at the same time, you're doing the same thing, over audio over IP, connecting all this, and then you get to leverage this within the cinematic meeting experience, right?
Jon Fanebust: That's right, this is where the eyes, ears, and brain come together. This is our AI metaphor, right? Where the camera signal and the audio signal from the microphone are all coming in and feeding it to the codec, building that collective intelligence of the room.
Craig Durr: Got it. So tell me about a use case. Where might I be able to use this where we're gonna have so many different cameras pointing different ways right now?
Jon Fanebust: This is really nice for a boardroom. It's nice for a horseshoe room… any room where you want the best possible image capture of people.
Craig Durr: Fantastic. With all this taking place right now, that's a lot of information going on, but this is all still visible within Control Hub. So I get to see all these devices, manage all these devices... I have that same level of IT context and sophistication available to me, right?
Tom Richards: Yeah, there's a fundamental part to this that I think is simplification. So this room environment, you've got a lot of pieces here–you've got three pan-tilt-zoom cameras, you've got a quad cam behind me, you've got a ceiling mic pro. The simplicity of the architecture that sits behind this; you have no wiring close, you have no rack mounts–it's all in this room together and all visible through one single pane of glass.
Craig Durr: And these devices, POE power, we're talking about simplification in terms of the wiring and the setup as well, right? It's a powerful story. I like it.
Tom Richards: And then Jon, I think the deployment simplicity is a really important one, too.
Jon Fanebust: That's some big deal. Yeah, that’s a really big deal. But I think before, we used to run different cables to the cameras, and when they are high up and in the back of the room, that's a bit of a nuisance. But now, with Power over Ethernet and AV over IP, it's a single ethernet cable. A single click to enable the whole experience.
Craig Durr: I love that. Well, this is a really powerful story. Jon, thank you so much for walking us through it.
Tom, you're right. You have a lot to be proud of here. I appreciate it.
Tom Richards: Yeah, super excited. And you know the stuff that Jon, and team, and Morten, and everybody's doing now… it's all about scale.
Craig Durr: That's fantastic. Hey everyone, this is Craig Durr with the Collab Collective. We are here live at InfoComm 2025 bringing you these great new product introductions. Stay tuned for some more updates. Take care.