Meeting room interoperability spent years inching forward one vendor deal at a time. Microsoft opened the door in 2022 when Direct Guest Join let Teams Rooms join Zoom meetings, and the pace has picked up sharply in 2026. At ISE in February, Google and Microsoft announced two-way interoperability between Google Meet hardware and Teams Rooms, and Microsoft has since begun rolling out SIP-based cross-platform join for Teams Rooms on Android.
For enterprises running Teams, Zoom, Google Meet and Webex side by side, with a mix of room hardware to match, that progress is welcome. It also changes the conversation. With basic cross-platform join becoming a standard feature, the pressing questions now concern how well a room joins, which features survive the connection, what governance the organisation needs to apply and, increasingly, whether users can bring their own data and AI tools with them.
Jordan Owens, CTO for the Americas at Pexip, sees the industry’s renewed focus on the issue as good news for customers and vendors alike. As he told UC Today:
“For a long time, we’ve believed strongly in interop. You should have the flexibility to choose what you want, I should have the flexibility to choose what I want, and it should just work.”
That expectation marks a real change in how organisations approach collaboration technology. During the pandemic rush to video, many businesses standardised on a single platform and designed their room estates around one vendor. Those environments are far less uniform today. Organisations meet more often with partners, customers and suppliers, divisions within the same business may have chosen different platforms, and mergers, acquisitions, regional requirements and legacy investments all add complexity. Owens said end users have stopped tolerating the friction that creates:
“End users no longer accept ‘I have to force you to dial into my meeting platform’ or ‘you have to force me to dial into yours.’ They just expect it to work.”
Native Meeting Interoperability Suits Single-Platform Organisations
That rising expectation is driving much of the current interop momentum, but it leaves IT leaders with a practical question: when is native interoperability enough? For organisations with a largely standardised estate that only occasionally joins meetings on another platform, Owens believes the answer is straightforward.
“If I’m a homogeneous organisation, let’s say a Microsoft Teams shop or a Zoom shop, and all of my rooms are Microsoft Teams Rooms, or Zoom Rooms if I’m a Zoom shop, and I only join third-party meetings as a guest on rare occasions, these native interop solutions are fantastic. There’s little reason for me to venture out into some of the more complex interop solutions.”
The expanded native options should suit a large number of organisations, particularly those that want to remove friction from occasional external meetings without adding another layer of technology to manage.
Where Native Interop Falls Short for Multi-Platform Enterprises
Large enterprises rarely stay homogeneous for long. A multinational may run several platforms across its business units, different room systems in different regions, regulated teams with data-residency obligations and specialist workflows that go well beyond placing a video call. At that point the discussion moves from basic access to the quality and control of the meeting experience.
Owens draws a clear line between being admitted to a meeting as a guest and joining it with a native-like experience. A business might want a Teams Room to join a Zoom meeting hosted by another internal division without users waiting in a lobby or losing the use of multiple displays.
“Where native interop starts to struggle is where I have more advanced requirements and more advanced features I need to take advantage of.”
That shift has also changed the nature of Pexip’s sales conversations. Customers no longer need persuading that interoperability matters, which leaves the company free to focus on the environments where specialist capability makes the biggest difference.
