Cisco built its empire on keeping everyone out. Now it’s building Microsoft Teams Rooms — what changed?

Of every brand covered in this series, Cisco carries the longest history and the most expensive reputation. For close to two decades, that reputation also came with a closed-door policy: build the room, build the codec, build the network it all runs on, and keep the customer inside Cisco’s own walls. The fact that Cisco now builds certified Microsoft Teams Rooms hardware — by its own account, the first company to do it with full platform-switching built in — is one of the bigger strategic reversals in this entire unified communications and collaboration industry, and it deserves a proper breakdown.

How far back does Cisco’s video conferencing story actually go?

Video conferencing itself predates Cisco by decades — AT&T previewed the concept at the 1964 World’s Fair, Compression Labs shipped the first commercial group system in 1982 at roughly $250,000 plus $1,000 an hour in line costs, and PictureTel undercut that price dramatically in 1986. By the mid-1990s, the H.320 and H.261 standards had given the category real interoperability for the first time.

Cisco’s own entry came later and arrived with a very specific pitch. In October 2006, Cisco launched the Cisco TelePresence Meeting solution, built from the ground up on 25 of its own patents, with the explicit goal of making a meeting feel like everyone was physically in the same room rather than simply seeing a video feed of them. The flagship CTS-3000 used three 65-inch screens and life-sized video to recreate a shared table, while the CTS-1000 brought the same audio and video quality into smaller rooms built for two participants. This was Cisco’s first dedicated meeting room camera and hardware system, and it set the tone for everything that followed: premium positioning, managed deployment, and a price tag to match — the CTS-3000’s successor, the IX5000, still carried a $300,000 list price a decade later.

How did Webex actually become part of Cisco?

Webex has a completely separate origin story that only merged with Cisco’s hardware ambitions years later. It was founded in 1996 under the name ActiveTouch by Subrah Iyar and Min Zhu, rebranded as WebEx shortly after, and went public on NASDAQ in July 2000. By the time Cisco came calling in March 2007, WebEx was already a market leader in on-demand web collaboration with roughly $380 million in annual revenue. Cisco’s $3.2 billion acquisition closed in May 2007, and the company initially ran WebEx as a fairly independent subsidiary before folding it more directly into Cisco’s collaboration strategy — first as an effort called Project Squared in 2014, rebranded Cisco Spark in 2015, before everything eventually consolidated back under the Webex name. The platform’s scale became impossible to ignore during the pandemic: Cisco reported 500 million Webex meeting attendees and 25 billion meeting minutes in April 2020 alone.

From the CTS-3000 to the Room Kit to the Board — the hardware timeline

The next major turning point came in 2009, when Cisco acquired Norwegian video conferencing pioneer Tandberg for roughly $3.4 billion, bringing decades of codec and camera engineering directly into Cisco’s hardware lineage. That acquisition is the same one that, years later, produced the founding team behind Neat, covered earlier in this series. Cisco’s TelePresence hardware evolved through the EX, MX, SX, and C-series codec systems before the brand shifted toward the Webex-branded Room Series familiar today: the Room Kit and Room Kit Plus for standard meeting rooms, the Room Kit Pro and Room Kit EQ/EQX for larger spaces, the Webex Board and later Board Pro combining an interactive whiteboard with a full video bar, the Desk Pro for personal workstations, and the simpler all-in-one Room Bar and Room Bar Pro. The Room Navigator handles scheduling and room control, and the current flagship, the Room Kit Pro G2, runs NVIDIA-powered AI processing for multi-camera intelligence and automatic note-taking in large rooms and boardrooms.

Why was Cisco known for being closed off?

For most of that timeline, Cisco’s collaboration hardware ran on Cisco’s own terms. The TelePresence and early Webex Room ecosystem was built around Cisco’s own codecs, Cisco’s own management tools, and Cisco’s own meeting platform, with little appetite for letting a Cisco room run someone else’s video platform natively. That positioning made sense for the customers Cisco was chasing — governments, defence contractors, and large regulated enterprises that wanted one vendor responsible for the entire security perimeter — but it also meant any organization that had standardized on Microsoft Teams instead of Webex faced a real choice: buy Cisco’s hardware and accept friction joining Teams meetings, or buy somebody else’s hardware — a Yealink MeetingBar, a Neat board, or an MAXHUB bar — that played natively with Teams from day one.

The big switch — Cisco now builds Microsoft Teams Rooms

That changed fast, and recently. Cisco and Microsoft announced a partnership to bring native Microsoft Teams Rooms support to Cisco hardware at Microsoft Ignite in October 2022. By March 2023, the Cisco Board Pro became the first Cisco device certified to run Microsoft Teams Rooms natively — and Cisco was explicit about the framing, describing itself as the first vendor in the industry to offer devices that run Microsoft Teams Rooms as the default experience while still supporting fully-featured Webex meetings on the same hardware, with no reboot or reconfiguration required to switch between them. Certification rolled out across the rest of the lineup through 2023 — Room Bar, Room Kit Pro, Room Kit EQ, Desk Pro, and Room Navigator all followed. The whole thing runs on RoomOS, Cisco’s own operating system, which now gives customers the option to run either Cisco Rooms or Microsoft Teams Rooms on the same physical device depending on what the organization actually uses. The current Room Kit Pro G2 takes that further still as the first large-room solution to support Microsoft’s Device Ecosystem Platform (MDEP) — the same Android-based security framework Jabra was first to market with, covered in this series’ Lenovo piece. Two decades of walled-garden positioning, reversed inside about a year.

So why do people still pay Cisco’s premium when it’s this expensive?

The honest answer is that Cisco isn’t selling a meeting room device to most of its biggest customers — it’s selling one more certified component inside a security perimeter the customer already trusts Cisco to run. Cisco carries one of the deepest government and regulated-industry certification stacks of any vendor in this category: FedRAMP authorization across multiple collaboration and security products, Common Criteria certification recognised across more than 30 countries, FIPS 140-2 validated cryptography, and active work toward CMMC and StateRAMP for U.S. defense and state-level contracts. For a government agency, a bank, a hospital network, or a defence contractor, buying collaboration hardware from a vendor that’s already passed that level of scrutiny removes a procurement headache that buying from a smaller, less-certified brand would create from scratch. Layer on top of that the fact that most large enterprises already run Cisco’s networking backbone — routers, switches, and security appliances — and the collaboration hardware becomes one more line item inside a vendor relationship and support contract that already exists, rather than a new vendor to vet, onboard, and trust independently. That’s the premium people are actually paying for: not just a camera and a microphone, but the assurance that comes with buying it from the same company already responsible for everything else on the network. For a full picture of where Cisco’s room hardware fits alongside every other category in this market, see our complete meeting room hardware guide.

Sources & references

1. Cisco Telepresence Blog, “Cisco Telepresence: Evolution of Video Communications” — cisco-telepresence.blogspot.com
2. Wikipedia, “Cisco TelePresence” — en.wikipedia.org
3. Cisco Blogs, “Immersive Telepresence Still Enthralls on Tenth Anniversary” — blogs.cisco.com
4. Cisco Innovation Timeline — newsroom.cisco.com
5. Cisco Newsroom, “Cisco Announces Agreement to Acquire WebEx” — newsroom.cisco.com
6. Cisco Newsroom, “Cisco Completes Acquisition of WebEx” — newsroom.cisco.com
7. Wikipedia, “Webex” — en.wikipedia.org
8. Wikipedia, “Subrah Iyar” — en.wikipedia.org
9. Cisco Newsroom, “Cisco and Microsoft Advance Interoperability with Microsoft Teams Certifications for Cisco Board Pro and Webex Contact Center” — newsroom.cisco.com
10. Webex Blog, “More choice and flexibility: Cisco Board Pro Certified for Microsoft Teams Rooms” — blog.webex.com
11. Webex Blog, “More choice and flexibility: Microsoft Teams Rooms for Cisco devices, now available in beta” — blog.webex.com
12. My TechDecisions, “You Can Now Natively Run Microsoft Teams Rooms on the Cisco Board Pro” — mytechdecisions.com
13. UC Today, “Cisco Shows Off Webex Interoperability for Microsoft Teams” — uctoday.com
14. Webex, “Cisco Room Kit Pro G2: Large Room Video Conferencing System” — webex.com
15. Webex, “Cisco Devices for Microsoft Teams Rooms” — webex.com
16. Cisco, “Global Government Certifications” — cisco.com
17. Cisco, “Common Criteria” — cisco.com
18. Cisco, “What is FedRAMP?” — cisco.com
19. Cisco Blogs, “Delivering Modernized Security for Government Agencies: The Vital Role of FedRAMP” — blogs.cisco.com