What are potential use cases for meeting room software?

Software is taking over the world -- and meeting rooms. The line between hardware- and software-based meeting rooms is blurring, as hardware-based meeting rooms are often implemented using software.

In most cases, a meeting room with a hardware device installed can be seen as a hardware-based meeting room. At the same time, the vendor selling that hardware device will likely offer meeting room software clients that can run on various operating systems and web browsers using WebRTC.

The distinction between hardware- and software-based meeting rooms is what gets installed -- prepackaged and branded hardware or off-the-shelf, general-purpose hardware, with meeting room software installed independent of the vendor.

huddle rooms are a prime use case for software-based meeting rooms. These are smaller meeting rooms that can usually seat around four people and have many use cases. Huddle rooms have become popular, as they take up less office space and foster collaboration and workflow in the meeting room.

In these rooms, the quality requirements are lower. The camera can be of lower resolution, and it doesn't require a pan, tilt or zoom capability. Additionally, the room lighting is less important, the size of the display can be smaller and the microphone can be less sensitive.

That said, many vendors today offer support for hardware-based huddle rooms and at lower price points. In these huddle room setups, users can connect their laptops directly to the display in the room and conduct meetings from their laptops without any fixed communication software or hardware deployed in the room in advance.

This deployment type can also be seen in a software-based meeting room. The meeting room software here is more mobile in its nature, as users bring their own software to the room.

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