Anyone visiting ISE this year could not fail to be struck by the presence of brands delivering technologies in the hybrid work space. It’s a growth market on a global scale and where there is huge potential, innovation and investment follow.

No longer just the fancy stuff in the boardroom, AV has gone mainstream with the prospect of virtually every organisation having to deliver an effective hybrid communications and collaboration platform for all their employees.

Few would disagree with Sudeep Trivedi, head of alliances and go-to-market for Logitech when he calls it the biggest change since the industrial revolution.

Re-engineering enterprise technology infrastructures to enable and support this collaboration-anywhere, new-normal is a global trend that will demand significant investment for many years come.

The sheer size and scale of the opportunity is a mouth-watering prospect for brands not only from AV, but many other technology sectors.

A walk around ISE brought this picture into sharp focus, with brands familiar and new, vying for a share of this already lucrative market, fuelled by a combination of disruptive technology, digital transformation and a new era of employee freedom and autonomy.

Microsoft and Zoom have already staked their claims. Google is working hard in this area, not to mention the plethora of other available conferencing platforms.

Logitech is already well-entrenched thanks to products such as Rally which has given it impressive revenue growth. Expectations remain high, although it has cut its 2023 sales outlook, and it expects hybrid to deliver sales growth across home and office.

There are plenty nipping at its heels, Norwegian newcomer Neat among them. Set up by a group of ex-Tandbergers including serial entrepreneur, CEO Simen Teigre, who previously co-founded Pexip, the company’s hybrid meeting space solutions pulled the crowds and won it a Europe-wide distribution deal with Maverick.

The lockdown headset demand spike has flagged the opportunity – and dramatically. We now have brands such as Jabra, best known for headsets, joining high-end audio brands in the hybrid space and branching out into video communications.

As well as improving the sound we hear, there is a lot of technology appearing to block out the sounds we don’t, such as that from EPOS which has roots in healthcare hearing technology and Nureva’s WhisperTek technology, developed initially for education.

Partner up and play nice
It is a time of many alliances and partnerships as brands team up to provide easy-to-use integrated solutions that deliver the essential and seamless interoperability end-user demand, whether they are working remote or in the room. Brands need to “play nice” as Nureva president and CEO Nancy Knowlton puts it, and work together.

“Google is investing heavily,” group product manager Mark Ewing explains and has teamed up with Avocor to deliver a range of Google Meet solutions.

Everyone now understands the mix of in and out of the room, says Ewing, and is working out how best to bridge the gap and achieve ‘meeting equity’ – perhaps one of the most-used expressions of 2022.

Growth markets fuel innovation and this is true in the hybrid sector, with a host of technologies and brands emerging to answer needs and solve problems, which are also being charted by research from Jabra and others.

We also know that this is just the start of the hybrid era. Communications and collaboration technology will continue to be transformed, as will workplace design, the very role of the office, and the culture of every organisation.

The real transformation requires we focus on people first, not technology, in Jabra SVP Holger Reisinger’s view. Products should make life look and sound better but also keep the tech flexible so it can be however and wherever needed: “Perhaps everything should now be on wheels,” he suggests.

Stimulus for innovation
The new way of working is certainly stimulating lots of innovation, including around the issue of BYOM (Bring Your Own Meeting) where users can choose their own VC platform rather than being forced to use the platform provided in the room.

Airtame’s solution enables ‘walk-in and use’ wireless screen sharing and collaboration for instance, and Alleo’s customisable, browser-based visual collaboration canvas enables any source or mix of sources to be shared, including any conferencing platform.

The growth opportunity in hybrid is also a magnet for investment. Zoom has invested over $40m in Neat, while Danish brand Airtame recently received €4.9m from the Danish state investment fund for its internal expansion.

An injection of funding is also changing the fortunes of two pro-AV signal management brands: Hall Technologies and Kramer.

Both are providers of integration glue products and both are working to get closer to the end user. In the case of Hall it is moving to complete solutions and expanding internationally, funded by Gun Lake Investments, a non-gaming investment fund owned by the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians.

In the case of Kramer, the purchase of a controlling stake by Israeli investment firm Fortissimo has triggered a major overhaul of the business led by new CEO Gilad Yron – its strategy, structure, products, product design and approach to innovation, which is intended to triple revenue in three years.

Fortissimo has previously achieved some handsome returns on its investments in disruptive technology companies. Back in 2005 it invested $12m in NUR Macroprinters, which makes large-format printers for OOH, and the business was sold to HP for $117.5m just two years later, while HP was busy building its digital printing division largely through acquisition.

Yron, who co-incidentally worked for NUR at the time, says Fortissimo understands the scale of the work to be done to reimagine Kramer and isn’t looking for a quick win. The company understands that it will take time to unlock and monetise Kramer’s potential and is both bold and supportive.

With so many brands pitching for their share of the global hybrid bonanza, we can expect M&A activity to become standard as innovators are acquired for their IP, niche brands are acquired to fill gaps or extend product portfolios, and mid-sized brands merge to strengthen.

Who will the big buyers be? Who knows, but perhaps Microsoft is worth a bet.

Microsoft has survived and thrived through many waves of disruptive technology to become the de facto standard, time and time again. Microsoft understood why the OS was more important than the computer it lived on and came to own the desktop. It made Office the most widely-used workplace software toolset.

Despite underestimating the importance of the Web initially, the company moved swiftly in the web browser space to challenge Netscape, the runaway dominant browser at the time, buying a tiny start-up Vermeer with a FrontPage browser-html editor, which only ever sold in hundreds of units, and turning it into Internet Explorer, which soon became the world’s most widely used browser.

‘Zoom’ may lead the VC sector and has become the generic term for video calls, but who would bet against Microsoft doing all it can to own video communication and collaboration in the new hybrid world, and acquisition is so often the quickest way.