If you grew up in Pro AV, you grew up on “best in breed.” The craft was picking the right display, switcher, DSP, mics, and camera, then knitting it together with equal parts engineering and stubbornness. Integrators built their reputations on knowing what played nicely together—and how to make mixed gear act like it came from one factory.
But the room didn’t really exist until a control system made it behave. Companies like Crestron and AMX weren’t accessories. They were the glue that turned a pile of parts into a single experience by handling power, switching, macros, UI, timing, and edge cases. That’s where bundling enters the story, because the old way came with a ritual we all treated as normal: staging.
From Custom to Repeatable SKUs
In the classic model, you staged the first room somewhere just to prove it actually worked. You confirmed that “Start Meeting” woke everything up in the right order, switched correctly, unmuted, and behaved predictably. Then you tweaked timing and logic, chased interop weirdness, and only after it was stable did you clone it across multiple locations.
This is something bundling is meant to replace. A modern bundle, done well, removes much of that burden. It is essentially staging performed in advance by the manufacturer(s), with interop testing, firmware alignment, and support playbooks sorted out before the kit ever hits a quote.
Bundles don’t eliminate commissioning, acoustics, mounting constraints, or network policy. But they can remove a big chunk of the “will these pieces behave together at all?” anxiety that used to consume days of staging time.
First came “good enough” off the shelf. Meeting rooms that once justified racks and touchpanels became a videobar, display, and cable. Standards improved. USB got easier. Customers got less tolerant of custom complexity.
Then, the market leaned hard into “single throat to choke.” One manufacturer, one stack, one support path. At scale, the appeal is obvious: fewer variables, fewer escalations, fewer finger-pointing calls.
Now, we’re in the next phase: bundling. And bundling has two distinct flavors that are easy to mix up.
Single Manufacturer Options
Bundling is not always a multi-vendor handshake. Sometimes a single manufacturer “bundles” its own products by creating a named room kit built from its own catalog or “room builder” software. It becomes a SKU, a recipe, and a supportable configuration. That brings genuine value, because it reduces decision fatigue and creates repeatable deployments.
There’s also a legitimate argument for choosing suppliers with a complete breadth of solutions. If you’re standardizing across dozens or hundreds of rooms, fewer vendors usually mean a shorter blame chain when something breaks.
When yesterday’s partner becomes today’s competitor, relationships can fracture over account control, deal registration, channel incentives, certification priority, roadmap alignment, and who gets top billing.
A concrete example is Cisco’s direction in room systems. Cisco has increasingly connected codecs, cameras, microphones, and other room peripherals over Cat6, so the same cable can carry PoE, data, and control. When a design leans into an end-to-end ecosystem like that, cabling and integration can get dramatically simpler. You avoid piles of interface boxes that convert one thing into another, and every converter is a potential point of failure and a troubleshooting dead end.
Multi-Vendor Acceleration
The more nuanced flavor of bundling is multi-vendor: two (or more) manufacturers packaging a mixed solution and getting it validated, certified, and marketed as a cohesive kit. That’s the “rivals to roommates” story, because it forces competitors into something that looks a lot like cooperation. Multi-vendor bundles are the alternative path to single suppliers, as they try to deliver some of the single supplier benefits without forcing a single vendor stack.
This type of bundling is a response to pressure from multiple directions. Portfolio gaps are real. Certification has become a gate, especially in the Teams Rooms world, where a known configuration can reduce perceived risk and simplify procurement.
Support costs are a hidden driver, too: More permutations create more tickets, and bundles reduce the matrix. Bundles also help revenue and channel mechanics by cleaning up SKUs, simplifying quoting, and reducing competitive leakage.
Multi-vendor bundling is like best in breed wearing a safety helmet. Traditional best in breed puts validation burden on the integrator. Bundles shift some of that burden upstream. It’s the vendor saying, “We tested these together, we’ll stand behind the combination.”
There’s a clear uptick in multi-vendor collaboration bundles compared to even the recent past.
One example is Barco pairing ClickShare Hub with Sennheiser videobars as a Microsoft Teams Rooms certified bundle. A critical detail: This is Barco’s first certified videobar partner bundle for ClickShare Hub, not the end of the road. Barco has already signaled it’s working with additional videobar manufacturers on other partner bundles expected to become certified as well.
Another recent example is Jabra extending the multi-camera capabilities on its Android videobars by bundling with the Huddly Crew system. It’s not just a bundle for procurement. It’s a path for videobar-centric rooms to grow up into larger, more dynamic spaces without forcing a full rip-and-replace into traditional codec architectures.
Even display manufacturers have been getting into the bundling game, with LG packaging its displays with Jabra videobars as Teams certified “Express Install” kits.
Frenemies Break Bundles
Sometimes, however, multi-vendor bundles can work against the companies putting them together. A familiar pattern goes like this: A vendor has an incomplete room story, so it bundles with a partner to fill a gap. The kit gets marketed and pitched as stable. Then the vendor releases a product that directly competes with the partner’s contribution.
That’s when the customer asks: “So, what does that say about the bundle you sold me last year?”
There are many current examples of this pattern. Neat bundled its videobars with Shure ceiling microphones to modularly scale into larger-space designs. That partnership made sense. But now that Shure has introduced its own videobar that competes more directly with Neat in overlapping room categories, it’s fair to wonder how long the Shure–Neat bundle will last.
For any bundle, the question to ask is whether it survives new competition between the partners. Technically, probably. Whether such bundles survive commercially and politically is the real question.
When yesterday’s partner becomes today’s competitor, relationships can fracture over account control, deal registration, channel incentives, certification priority, roadmap alignment, and who gets top billing. That’s the real risk behind any bundled solution.
Bundles are often born out of necessity. They can be undone by strategy. And when a partnership breaks, the collateral damage isn’t just a discontinued SKU. It’s confusion in the field, uncertainty for integrators, and customers wondering whether they standardized on something that will become “legacy” sooner than planned.
Don't Bungle Your Bundle
For the foreseeable future, you should expect more bundling, not less. Not just videobar plus display kits, but room outcomes packaged as repeatable SKUs: small room, medium room, training room, divisible room, BYOD room. But all bundles are not created equal.
The first thing to watch is whether bundling keeps shifting from one-off marketing announcements into ongoing certification programs. If vendors can turn these into repeatable, validated combinations, the “bundle” stops being a kit and starts looking more like a platform strategy.
Second, take note how quickly bundles change as product roadmaps shift. Today’s perfect pairing can get awkward the moment one partner releases a product that overlaps with the other partner’s “role” in the bundle. Even if the technology still works, the go-to-market math can change overnight.
Next, watch which bundles become defaults in the channel. When distributors, resellers, and integrators start quoting the same combinations over and over, those pairings become market signals—about demand, portfolio gaps, and sometimes which companies are getting unusually comfortable living together.
Finally, keep an eye on the breakups. The most revealing moments in this trend may not be the bundle announcements, but the quiet disappearance of a bundle that used to be featured, certified, and promoted. In a world of frenemies, the roommate arrangement can work beautifully, until one of them decides the apartment would be better without the other.
