Teams Insider

What Cisco Rooms bring to Microsoft Teams Rooms

Tom Richards, Senior Director of Strategy and Planning at Cisco and a 25-year Cisco veteran, explains how the Cisco–Microsoft partnership came together and how RoomOS devices deliver full Microsoft Teams Rooms experiences. The conversation covers containerised Android inside RoomOS, dual management

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Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners, UC and AV architects running mixed Cisco/Microsoft estates, and anyone evaluating RoomOS-based Teams Rooms, multi-platform meeting join or workplace occupancy data alongside room deployments.

Guest: Tom Richards — Senior Director, Strategy and Planning, Cisco

Many thanks to Cisco, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

The partnership only worked once both sides drew their red lines: Cisco would not ship a cut-down MTR experience (it had to be full and continuously updated), and Microsoft insisted RoomOS capabilities — management at scale, edge AI, sensor data — were not dumbed down. Agreement on that took a while given years of Webex-versus-Teams sales competition, but engineering moved quickly afterwards. ▶ 6:08
Scale is real, not pilot-sized: Cisco has customers with more than 2,000 registered MTR devices on Cisco hardware, and one of its largest customers deployed roughly 800 MTR devices in a single quarter. ▶ 7:39
Cisco is Linux-based RoomOS, not native Android, so Android and the MTR application are containerised inside RoomOS. The hardest engineering problem was the management architecture — it now ships latest MTR, latest RoomOS and latest Android as one validated software load, so customers have no version-control work to do. ▶ 8:39
Richards estimates 85–90% of Cisco's MTR customers run the combined model — Teams admin tooling for the MTR application plus Control Hub for device and workspace management — because of the scale and manageability benefits. ▶ 10:44
RoomOS UI mode versus native MTR mode is a configuration choice on the same SKU, reversible at any time. Mixed-platform organisations (consultancies with heavy external meeting loads across Teams, Zoom, Webex and Google) tend to pick RoomOS UI for the per-platform join buttons; others start in RoomOS UI and flip to MTR mode once their estate and Teams readiness catch up. ▶ 12:16
Zoom interop today is WebRTC (described as a fairly basic experience, often used for guest access) plus a tighter integration via Zoom's CRC SIP-based interop and APIs, which Cisco wraps in a near-Zoom UI. That CRC path works in MTR mode by calling the RoomOS-level integration underneath the container; a fully native in-meeting Zoom experience is coming to RoomOS mode, returning to the RoomOS UI when the meeting ends. ▶ 16:22
'Distance Zero' edge AI replaces brittle preconfigured camera presets. Instead of mapping a hot microphone to a fixed camera view of specific chairs, microphones beamform to locate speakers and suppress noise while cameras feed what they see back to the codec, which composes the view for remote participants in real time — no reconfiguration, and no relying on in-room users to change the view. ▶ 20:26
The commercial pitch is shifting from AV to workplace: occupancy, temperature, humidity and air-quality data typically sit in separate sensor, management and aggregation stacks owned by facilities and building management. Consolidating that into the collaboration device estate lets organisations redirect sensor budget into scaling room deployments and answer questions like 'which room is free right now'. ▶ 25:07
On MDEP, Cisco's priority was preserving the containerised single-package software model, and it believes it has an answer — the architecture stays the same but sits on MDEP Android. A future Android update will switch devices from current Android to MDEP Android, with more detail expected in roughly three to four months; MDEP is front and centre for new Cisco devices. ▶ 31:18