Networking News
Logitech Unveils Three New Products To Power Leading Videoconferencing Apps
Gina Narcisi
The channel-first video hardware provider is introducing three new products for home offices, small meeting spaces, and large conference rooms.
Many companies and employees in 2020 picked their video services to keep productive and stay in communication while working from home, and then turned to the hardware they’d need to power their home offices or small meeting rooms to make the meeting experience better. That’s where Logitech came in.
Logitech today equips about half of meeting rooms globally with its videoconferencing products. Anywhere from 30-70 percent of all employees will be working from home in a post-pandemic world, so nearly every meeting will still have remote participants moving forward, according to Simon Dudley, Logitech’s head of analyst relations and sales enablement.
Now, channel-first Logitech is introducing three new products that can boost the meeting experience and work with a variety of industry-leading video solutions, Dudley said.
“We give [the user] lots of options as to what applications you want to run on these devices,” he said. “I think the opportunity for the new platforms is enormous … there’s a lot of money in those hills for video, and it’s not just a specialist’s application anymore.”
[Related: Confronting Covid-19: How Partners Made Zoom, Microsoft Teams And Cisco Webex Essential Viewing]
The new Logitech Rally Bar Mini was designed for home offices or small meeting rooms. The wide-angle, digital camera displays attendees on either side of the table and an AI-powered secondary camera that searches for human shapes and frames this camera around the people in the room as they move around the room. Pricing starts at $2,999 for the Rally Bar Mini, which will be available in the Spring, Dudley said.
Logitech is introducing the Logitech Rally Bar for mid-sized rooms, which have slightly different requirements than small meeting spaces. The Rally Bar, which is about three feet across, has a built-in optical, pan-tilt zoom camera that can more sharply frame meeting attendees. Like the Mini, Rally Bar also features Logitech RightSense technology and a second camera that includes AI Viewfinder, the company said. The Rally Bar starts at $3,999 and will be available later this quarter, Logitech said.
The Logitech RoomMate for large meeting spaces is an appliance that lets users run videoconferencing services on Logitech conference cameras without a PC or Mac. RoomMate simplifies the setup, management, and use of videoconferencing equipment for improved meetings in today’s hybrid work environments, Logitech said. The RoomMate will be available in summer 2021 and pricing will start at $999.
The Logitech Rally Bar, Mini, or the RoomMate won’t be replacing any existing Logitech products, Dudley said.
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, demand for Logitech’s video products have been “through the roof,” Dudley said. “Sales have more than doubled over the last nine months.”
