Supply Chain Woes

It’s no secret that electronic manufacturers are being hit hard by supply chain shortages all over the world. Organizations looking to purchase new systems and conferencing technology are hard-pressed to find vendors with stock.

At the same time, Return to Office (RTO) efforts of many organizations have shined a grim light on the state of aging conference room technology (or lack thereof) and their rooms’ ability to enable effective hybrid collaboration. Interesting tidbit I heard in a recent Crestron webinar: only around 10% of conference rooms are outfitted with video conferencing capabilities. I found that fascinating. Considering how integral video is to enabling effective hybrid collaboration, there are a lot of spaces that will be behind the eight ball.

Undoubtedly, organizations looking to retrofit aging conference room technologies with Microsoft Teams Room systems may be feeling this impact as well, with massive delays in their ability to procure these systems. My organization is being quoted with lead times of 18 weeks. Ouch.

A Glimmer of Hope (via a different approach)

What I have found however is that a lot of these chip shortages appear to be for x86-based chipsets and supply appears to have been bit better (relatively speaking) for ARM-based processors.

A number of advanced cameras (i.e. - Logitech Rally Bar, Poly Studio X30 and Yealink MeetingBar A20 for example) not only enable auto-framing, advanced beam forming microphones and active speaker tracking, but also have onboard compute capabilities; specifically the Android operating system.

Previously known as “Collaboration Bars”, these devices run Microsoft Teams Room on Android (MTRoA). MTRoA was developed to provide companies with an all-in-one solution (with microphone, video and compute all within a single device) for small- to medium-sized conference spaces.

Reference: Microsoft Teams Rooms vs Microsoft Teams Collaboration Bars, Important Differences – Tom Talks

While the thought of running Android may spook some enterprise IT organizations since it’s [admittedly] not as hardened as a Windows system, the short-term risk associated with embracing MTRoA may be worth the reward in the longer-term. These all-in-one solutions provide supply-chained-constrained organizations who want to embrace the native, Teams Room experience with a unique opportunity.

So long as the organization can risk accept a deployment of Android-based meeting room devices, they can use capital funds now (before the end of many companies’ fiscal year) to invest in these interim, all-in-one solutions for their conference / collaboration rooms and then later, disable onboard compute and use the camera as a peripheral to the more desired Windows-based Teams Room configuration.

While it’s understood that each collaboration space would likely have unique requirements, the short-term “win” with being able to implement a Teams-native experience via an all-in-one device could well be worth the “risk” of having a standardized (non-unique) camera in all of these spaces once you are able to properly “upgrade” each room to an MTRoW configuration.

It’s an idea that I thought worth sharing. Here’s to hoping an organization may benefit!