Picture a mid-sized enterprise, a few years into its Microsoft Teams Rooms rollout. The certified hardware has been deployed across 80 locations. The meeting rooms work. Hybrid calls connect. The IT team has a configuration standard they can hand to any integrator in any city.
And yet, walk through the same office and the picture gets more complicated. The breakout space on the second floor has a screen, but it sits idle as digital signage rather than serving any real purpose. The open-plan collaboration areas have no visibility.
Each of these spaces, from informal breakout zones to the cafeterias and multi-purpose areas that could be transformed into something far more valuable, sit outside the scope of the organization’s Teams Rooms deployment. They are managed differently, supported differently, and thus create a lack of clarity across an organisation's ecosystem.
This is the gap that most enterprises don't see until they are already managing it.
Where Does the Buck Stop?
For most enterprises, the answer is: when the meeting works.
Microsoft Teams Rooms deployments are typically driven by a UC or IT brief with a clear scope: standardise the hybrid meeting, leverage certified for Teams hardware, give distributed teams a consistent experience when they dial in. That brief is well-defined, the procurement process is established, and the outcome is measurable. It gets done.
What doesn't get done, at least not in the same deployment, is everything else. The communal areas. The collaboration zones that sit between formal meeting rooms. The larger spaces, boardrooms and training rooms and all-hands venues, that might support Teams calls but do not sit within the same management framework. According to Vic Bhagat, Senior Director of Alliances at Q-SYS:
"Enterprises solve for hybrid collaboration, but they don't really extend the design to support the many other ways rooms and spaces are used."
The result is an AV estate with two layers. One is standardised, certified for Teams, and centrally managed. The other is a patchwork of legacy equipment, one-off installations, and spaces that have never been properly addressed. Bhagat says:
"The high-impact spaces, the larger areas, the communal areas, have typically been left behind. The need to evolve those spaces through time is going to become increasingly important as organisations look to do more with their workplace technology."
Watch: Vic Bhagat, Senior Director of Alliances at Q-SYS, on why enterprises need a platform approach to AV
The Reality of a Device-by-Device Estate
The way most AV estates have been built means this compounds over time. Room by room, device by device, each deployment solves a specific problem. Each device handles a specific function.
"When you look at it device-by-device, you can almost think of it function by function," Bhagat explains.
"You deploy a device, it does a certain thing, and that room is now good for that thing. But what if you want that room to do more? You either have to rip and replace that device, or you have to add entirely new systems."
At scale, across a global AV estate, this plays out in specific ways: inconsistent experiences from one site to the next, no central view of how spaces are performing, configuration drift as systems age and diverge, and a support burden that grows with every device added to the estate. IT teams end up managing a collection of isolated deployments rather than a unified infrastructure, spending most of their time reacting to reported issues rather than proactively managing performance.
What a Software-Defined Platform Changes in Practice
A platform-based approach changes the operational picture at each of these points. Bhagat says:
"The biggest change is that workplace leaders are moving from reacting to issues to proactively managing the entire workplace. A software-defined platform provides visibility into how spaces are performing, insights that can be automated and acted upon, and ultimately a much lower support burden."
With the Q-SYS Full Stack AV Platform, traditional AV applications are expanded. Its network-first, software-defined architecture and open API bring traditional AV equipment such as cameras, microphones, and speakers as well as third-party devices such as shading, lighting, and environmental controls into a single connected system. A lobby extends its background audio into an adjacent cafeteria. That same cafeteria becomes an all-hands space by adding a camera and microphones, without installing anything new.
