Teams Insider

Neat and Shure’s Integration: What is the Benefit to Customers?

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Who should listen: M365 service owners and UC/AV professionals standardising Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android who need to cover larger, acoustically difficult or education spaces without reverting to Windows MTR, and anyone building a room evaluation or proof-of-concept process.

Guest: Sherri Pipala and Tyler Troutman — Senior Director Global Alliances (Neat); Strategic Market Development (Shure), Neat / Shure

Sherri Pipala, Senior Director of Global Alliances at Neat, and Tyler Troutman of Shure's strategic market development team join Tom Arbuthnot on location at Shure's London office to explain how the two vendors' co-engineering work lets Shure microphone and DSP systems plug into Neat's Android-based Teams Rooms bars. They cover the technical integration, mute sync, which Shure arrays suit which room sizes, and how customers should actually evaluate kit.

Many thanks to Neat, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

Mute sync was the hardest and most requested part of the co-engineering work. Muting from a Neat Pad or an MXA310 now flips the LED on the Shure ceiling array and propagates the mute state through the whole signal chain so it also shows on the room display. ▶ 3:34
The physical integration is deliberately minimal: a Shure firmware update plus a single USB-C cable from the Shure DSP (P300, ANIUSB Matrix or MXW neXt 2 base) into the Neat Bar Pro. ▶ 5:36
Neat's 24.3 firmware, released in early June, extended mute sync beyond the P300 to the ANIUSB Matrix and the MXW neXt 2 wireless platform, opening up single-array rooms and classroom/wireless-mic use cases. ▶ 5:36
The practical effect is scope: teams that could use Neat for roughly 90% of rooms but had to drop to Windows MTR for the complex 10% can now keep one Android-based estate and one support model. ▶ 13:13
Two retrofit directions are common — add an MXA902 ceiling array to an existing Neat Bar Pro where glass-heavy 'fishbowl' acoustics let the bar down, or swap a three-year-old Windows/Android endpoint for Neat while keeping the existing Shure audio the customer is already happy with. ▶ 11:42
Shure's room line-up maps to size: MXA310 for tables, MXA901 and MXA902 (mic and speaker in one device) for 20x20 ft coverage, MXA920 as the flagship for difficult acoustics or directional table-plus-lectern coverage, with MXN5 PoE ceiling speakers where extra output is needed. ▶ 14:14
Evaluate the far-end experience, not the in-room one. One customer ran a vendor assessment where the fully remote team held the majority of the vote, on the basis that the remote participant is what you are optimising for — a corrective to facilities-led decisions based on how a room looks. ▶ 17:18
Neat's PEP proof-of-concept programme ships gear for around 60 days and converts straight to a purchase through a partner rather than requiring a return; Neat's PoC team is now working with Shure so customers can trial both together in their own building rather than a tuned demo centre. ▶ 20:21
Portable devices create new audio problems: with the Neat Board 50 being wheeled between floors and into open 'neighbourhood' areas, users still expect the same experience they get in a properly treated meeting room. ▶ 18:19