Huddle room collaboration is a hot topic these days. The hype surrounding this trend has produced many misconceptions, making it difficult to grasp what huddle room collaboration entails. As organizations design smarter meeting spaces to foster collaboration, it’s time to take a closer look at huddle rooms and the growth opportunities in this market.

How and where people meet is changing at a fast pace. Meetings are becoming more frequent, less structured, and less formal. As a result, rich audio, video and content collaboration is moving beyond the four walls of a conference room. The tectonic shifts in meetings have led to an exponential growth in huddle rooms and small meeting spaces. Huddle rooms are small work spaces and conference areas accommodating up to four to six people. Equipped with audio, video and display system technologies, they are informal spaces for ad-hoc and agile collaboration characterizing today's digital workplace. Huddle rooms are all about providing a productive and efficient environment for workers to come together for instant interactive collaboration with a clear purpose. The trend toward open floor plans and open work spaces has created a strong demand for small meeting rooms where workers can meet in a disruption-free setting. Moreover, a strong rise in the number of remote workers has led to more meetings with remote participants making it unnecessary for businesses to continue investing in large conference rooms.

An increasing number of huddle rooms and open spaces will be video enabled for ad-hoc collaboration. We estimate that globally there are 32.4 million huddle rooms and less than 2 percent are video enabled. Huddle rooms support the evolution of the modern workplace and the new ways in which people are collaborating. The market is seeing significant technology evolution. A broad range of options exist today for huddle rooms. Key aspects of huddle room collaboration are centered on – robust audio, intuitive wireless content sharing, engaging video conferencing, and flexible white boards; all while accommodating BYOD so users can bring their choice of devices and cloud services into the room.

Given the buzz around huddle rooms, major device and cloud vendors have entered the market with a wide range of solutions. As user experience gains prominence, there are tremendous growth opportunities for vendors that can differentiate on better quality devices, robust cloud services, and managed services and support to ensure an optimal meeting room experience. This market insight covers huddle room definition and the main technology components that are required for seamless audio-video collaboration. It also assesses the associated growth opportunities available to collaboration vendors in this space.