A Cisco room installed 5 or 10 years ago doesn't natively speak to Teams, Zoom, or Google Meet. Faced with this, IT teams have long had to choose between two bad options: replacing hardware that still works perfectly well, or cobbling together workarounds held together with duct tape.
And more recently, a second problem has been added to the first, one that's more political than technical. Being "on Teams" no longer guarantees you can collaborate with just anyone. With the rise of sovereign clouds (Bleu in France, Delos Cloud in Germany), borders are appearing between environments, even when everyone uses the same platform. The question is no longer "which protocol to speak," it has become "which path is authorized."
Plusieurs approches existent pour répondre au premier problème, avec des compromis différents. Le CVI de Microsoft, porté par Pexip ou par Cisco via VIMT, fait le pont côté plateforme, mais reste pensé pour rester dans l'écosystème Microsoft plutôt que pour une interopérabilité large. Les clients WebRTC embarqués directement sur les salles évitent d'ajouter une brique, au prix d'une perte de fonctionnalités et de qualité par rapport à un client natif. Le BYOD, apporter son propre PC dans la salle, contourne le problème plutôt que de le résoudre, et reste rarement simple au quotidien pour les utilisateurs.
Several approaches exist to address the first problem, each with different trade-offs. Microsoft's CVI, supported by Pexip or by Cisco via VIMT, bridges the platform side, but it's still designed to keep you within the Microsoft ecosystem rather than provide broad interoperability. WebRTC clients built directly into the rooms avoid adding an extra component, at the cost of losing features and quality compared to a native client. BYOD, bringing your own PC into the room, works around the problem rather than solving it, and rarely stays simple for users on a day-to-day basis.
Synergy SKY Connect addresses both problems at once, interoperability and sovereignty, without the trade-offs described above. On the interoperability side: SIP endpoints (Cisco, Poly) join cloud platforms without any hardware migration, with "One Button to Push" functionality even without native compatibility, preserved screen sharing, and single-use virtual rooms for security. A technology patented in 2023 lets a SIP endpoint join a web meeting through a server-side virtual participant. On the sovereignty side, deployment adapts to the client's existing setup rather than imposing a single model: pure SaaS for fast rollout, hybrid when certain sensitive data (a calendar, for example) needs to stay within the client's environment, or full on premise when the entire flow needs to be controlled end to end. This choice matters all the more because an organization never just has rooms to manage, it also has infrastructure, a calendar, messaging, and the consistency across all of that matters as much as the video component itself. In practical terms, a Cisco room can join a Teams meeting without anything routing through Azure US, whatever deployment mode is chosen.
And on the specific limits of Microsoft's CVI, the approach is different: rather than working around Microsoft's security rules, Synergy SKY relies on Teams' native web client and the standard behavior of an external participant. It works within the framework rather than forcing its way around it.
A certified Cisco partner, but not dependent on Cisco: the solution also runs on Poly and on generic SIP systems. This is genuine multi-brand interoperability, not just a marketing label.
