Craig Durr, The Collab Collective: Why the Device Market Forecast Dropped From 6% to 3%

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Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners, UC and AV managers planning multi-year room refresh budgets, and channel partners and OEM strategists who need a data-backed view of where device spend is heading to 2030.

Guest: Craig Durr — Chief Analyst and Founder, The Collab Collective

Craig Durr, Chief Analyst and Founder at The Collab Collective and a former group video product lead at Polycom/Poly, walks through his annual five-year video conferencing device forecast and explains why he has cut the compound annual growth rate from around 6% to just under 3%. The conversation covers the four device categories he tracks, the "triple replacement wave" driving refreshes, DRAM-driven budget compression, regional shifts, and a new security-spending variable that could reshape next year's numbers.

Many thanks to Nuwave, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

• The device market came in at roughly $3.66bn of OEM channel-in revenue for 2025 against a $3.65bn forecast, with unit counts at 97% of forecast — the gap explained by higher average selling prices on Android appliance devices. ▶ 9:13
• Durr tracks four categories: appliance-based (largely Android, MTR on Android), PC-based (MTR on Windows), personal appliance devices such as the Neat Board 32 that end up in huddle and totem rooms, and room BYOD where the camera, mics and speakers are permanent but the compute walks in with the user. ▶ 10:16
• The "triple replacement wave" — Windows 10 to 11 end of life, Android 10 to 12 (with Microsoft granting last-minute certification extensions), and five-year-old unmanaged BYOD kit like the original Logitech MeetUp — sets refresh priority order rather than triggering wholesale estate replacement. ▶ 13:22
• Most large enterprises target a 15–20% annual refresh of their video estate, so a five-year cycle. Rising DRAM costs mean a device that was $5,000 may now be $5,500–$6,000, so the same budget refreshes about 85 rooms instead of 100 — that budget compression is the core reason the CAGR fell to just under 3%. ▶ 28:09
• AI in the room is a genuine tailwind but feature velocity is running well ahead of adoption velocity — facilitator, note takers and in-room capture are compelling, yet deployment lags, and Durr does not expect AI alone to trigger a wholesale refresh. ▶ 18:56
• Arbuthnot's framing of platform bets: quality Windows MTR hardware keeps inheriting features for years, but multi-camera and on-device AI create hardware breakpoints needing NPU, RAM and power — some capability only arrives with the next refresh. ▶ 19:58
• A new variable since the report: the Mythos model's ability to chain multiple vulnerabilities prompted Cisco to review and rewrite over a billion lines of code, and network refresh spend to remediate ageing switches and routers is likely to be borrowed from collaboration device budgets. ▶ 36:48
• Regionally, EMEA was strong in 2025 and will soften but still grow, North America stays highly competitive as the default launch market, and Asia Pacific — depressed in 2025 — is the big rebound variable with India, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore worth watching; China remains a data black hole with a China-first policy. ▶ 31:42
• With more OEMs and ODMs going direct in a slower-growing market, buyers should assess software support, patch cadence and management/observability platforms as much as unit price — both to be AI-ready and as a security defence posture. ▶ 41:51

Insights summarised by AI from the episode transcript, reviewed by the Empowering.Cloud team.

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