Why hardware-agnostic collaboration is now a critical CIO mandate across APAC

Globally, we see that rapid mergers and acquisitions are creating a chaotic operational reality for enterprise CIOs. Rather than standardising on a single collaboration tool, multinational organisations increasingly find themselves running Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet simultaneously inside the same corporate footprint. Attempting to force a single platform consolidation often backfires due to varying regulatory constraints, market preferences, and legacy contracts across fragmented jurisdictions. At the same time, traditional meeting room hardware, tightly locked to specific native software suites, is buckling under the weight of intensive edge-computing workloads like real-time translation and automated transcription bots.

To break this operational bottleneck, technology leaders are moving away from proprietary, software-locked appliances towards open, hardware-agnostic collaboration hubs. Pioneering this architectural shift is Neat, an enterprise video technology innovator that is decoupling physical infrastructure from the software layer. Through innovations like Neat Open and a dedicated single USB-C BYOD hub experience, the company is enabling IT teams to transform static meeting rooms into flexible, intelligent spaces. By incorporating collaborative security standards such as Microsoft’s Device Ecosystem Platform (MDEP) and building processing headroom into Neat OS, organisations can maintain strict perimeter security and future-proof their physical spaces against an era of agentic AI management tools like Neat Pulse MCP.

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We speak with Niko Walraven, Area VP – APAC at Neat, about how open hardware ecosystems are solving APAC’s multi-platform paradox. In this discussion, we explore why separating hardware from software is essential for navigating fragmented data sovereignty laws, how to deploy flexible meeting room workflows, and why programmable room environments are becoming the cornerstone of the modern hybrid enterprise.

With M&A activity forcing Teams, Meet, and Zoom to co-exist inside the same organisation, how can CIOs effectively eliminate the operational friction sitting between these siloed communication ecosystems?

You cannot eliminate the platforms, so you have to eliminate the dependency on them at a hardware layer. M&A reality in APAC means most enterprise organisations are running two or three collaboration platforms at once, often permanently. Trying to consolidate to a single platform creates its own friction, and for some organisations, this is not feasible given regulatory, cultural, or even contractual differences across markets.

To resolve this, CIOs must look to a dedicated BYOD hub experience rather than expecting users to constantly factory-reset and reinstall different native UC platform applications on their hardware. This is precisely why we developed Neat Open. Neat Open transforms these fragmented spaces into intelligent collaboration hubs. Instead of wrestling with a room locked to a single platform deployment, a user plugs in their laptop via a single USB-C cable to access premium video, audio, and AI tools. The room stops being a bottleneck, and the IT team avoids managing separate, siloed hardware estates for every separate platform.

How are advanced AI meeting features, such as real-time localised translation and automated transcription bots, exposing the physical infrastructure limits of single-platform room hardware?

Platforms like Microsoft Teams and Zoom are continually rolling out incredible AI innovations, but these rapid advancements mean that hardware requirements are changing just as fast. Traditional architectures optimised purely for a single native application can face bottlenecks when handling intensive edge-computing workloads like real-time translation or transcription bots simultaneously. Enterprise IT aims to complement these platforms by supporting the user’s choice of daily workflow, rather than restricting them to a static feature set.

This is where traditional BYOD rooms typically fail, offering a limited experience that has given the technology a bad name. By leveraging an agnostic ecosystem architecture such as Neat Open, organisations can bring their preferred business applications and AI tools directly into the room via Neat Open Apps. This lets teams layer in modern AI workloads, multi-user wireless sharing, and customised workflows as they mature, without being held back by a single platform’s development pace.

Why are these tightening compliance and legal pressures accelerating a structural move away from proprietary, software-locked communication suites toward open, agnostic collaboration hardware?

It is making flexibility a business requirement instead of a nice-to-have. Across APAC, the regulatory landscape is fragmented with data sovereignty laws, privacy requirements and even sector-specific mandates varying from market to market. And this is continuing to evolve. When your room infrastructure is locked to a single vendor’s software decisions, your ability to respond to those changes is constrained by their timeline, not yours.

IT and legal teams are asking harder questions at procurement time about what a platform change would mean for their existing room infrastructure. Open hardware removes that exposure, and the room does not end up becoming a liability every time the software layer changes.

How does shifting to an open, hardware-agnostic setup allow a multinational firm to maintain total perimeter security and strict data auditability across wildly different legal jurisdictions?

I would reframe this slightly, because the hardware is one critical piece of a much broader enterprise security architecture. An open, agnostic setup like Neat Open allows IT teams to extend their existing security and compliance frameworks directly to the meeting room. Rather than relying on separate security protocols for every distinct application, they can connect open infrastructure to the cloud-managed dashboards and tools they already standardise on.

For multinationals operating across jurisdictions with vastly different legal requirements, that flexibility is vital. By embracing collaborative ecosystem standards like Microsoft’s Device Ecosystem Platform (MDEP), we are ensuring that open, hardware-agnostic flexibility goes hand-in-hand with enterprise-grade security. You are not asking a single communication software vendor to solve a compliance problem that spans multiple complex regulatory environments. You are keeping the hardware layer secure, standard, and highly integrable, pioneering secure standards like MDEP, and letting your corporate security architecture do the heavy lifting it was designed to do.

As enterprise workspace technology advances further into human-AI agent collaboration, how can technology leaders design their hardware investments to ensure physical video rooms remain future-proof?

The core principle is to separate the physical infrastructure from the software layer completely. Technology leaders need to maximise the lifecycle of their physical assets. At Neat, we solve this longevity problem through an aggressive software support strategy: our latest generation of hardware runs on Neat OS, built on Android, and our hardware architecture is built with the processing headroom required to support evolving standards and software iterations for years to come.

We see this playing out right now with Neat Pulse MCP, which is currently in beta and already getting significant attention. It lets IT leaders manage their room fleets via an AI agent, either through direct prompts, orchestrated workflows, or autonomous routines, which can then query devices, diagnose issues, and resolve them directly. It is a meaningful shift from passive hardware management to something much more active and autonomous. The organisations in the strongest position will be those that are already thinking of the room as a programmable environment rather than a fixed appliance, because that is exactly the foundation you need to make agentic tools like this work.