In an exclusive interview with Inavate, Xilica CEO James Knight outlines the thinking behind the launch of Pleneo, a new collaboration technology company focused on simplifying medium and large meeting rooms.
Pleneo was launched by audio brand Xilica in response to growing frustration with how larger spaces are still delivered and managed compared with today’s increasingly standardised small-room IT environments.
While small meeting rooms are increasingly deployed as standard IT endpoints, larger spaces are still delivered room by room, a model that makes them harder to deploy, more complex to operate, and increasingly difficult to manage consistently as organisations scale.
Built by the team behind Xilica, a 25-year professional audio brand with thousands of large rooms deployed globally, Pleneo combines experience in complex spaces with a new operating model designed for modern IT and UC environments. Rather than treating each room as a bespoke project, Pleneo focuses on enabling rooms to behave and be managed as a single system, enabling simple deployment for IT teams and clearer, more repeatable delivery for UC and AV channel partners.
At the heart of Pleneo is Room OS, a software-driven operating layer that defines how medium and large meeting rooms are deployed and operated. Room OS combines secure, on-device intelligence with cloud-based orchestration via Pleneo Cloud, enabling zero-touch provisioning of component-based room systems. Audio, video, and room peripherals are brought together into a single, manageable environment, delivering consistent, high-quality deployments, without manual intervention or adjustment of room settings.
This approach is anchored by RoomHub, the physical heart of the Pleneo room. Originally developed within Xilica and now forming a core part of the Pleneo platform, RoomHub brings secure, localised edge intelligence into the room while remaining tightly integrated with Pleneo Cloud. By processing audio and video at the edge, RoomHub enables advanced capabilities such as AI-driven AutoDeploy, NoiseSense, ML-based de-reverberation, video intelligence, and IQ Voice Enhancement, ensuring consistent, high-quality room inputs while keeping latency low and sensitive data local.
Launching Pleneo as a standalone company, rather than extending the existing Xilica brand, was a deliberate decision. Knight explained that while Xilica has a strong and established reputation in professional audio and complex AV systems, Pleneo is intended to address a different problem with a different operating model, one that aligns more closely with how IT and UC teams design, deploy, and manage collaboration spaces today.
Xilica continues to focus on specialist audio excellence, while Pleneo has been positioned around simplicity, scalability, and predictable system behaviour in modern collaboration environments.
In a market where many solutions still approach meeting rooms as collections of individual devices configured room by room, Pleneo is designed around defining how rooms behave as systems. By shifting complexity into software, the aim is to make medium and large spaces deployable, predictable, and manageable at scale, in much the same way small rooms have become IT endpoints.
As meeting rooms are increasingly expected to support intelligent collaboration features such as transcription, attribution, and post-meeting insight, the consistency of room inputs becomes critical. Those capabilities depend on reliable, high-quality audio and video, particularly in larger spaces where variability has traditionally undermined outcomes.
Pleneo is designed to be IT-native from the start. Room OS is built with enterprise security, scalability, and operational ownership at its core, supporting local data sovereignty and aligning with recognised standards including SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001. This enables organisations and their partners to deploy medium and large rooms with the same governance and confidence expected of modern enterprise systems.
“As collaboration platforms become more intelligent, the expectations placed on meeting rooms have changed,” said Craig Durr, chief analyst at The Collab Collective. “Consistent, high-quality room inputs are now critical, particularly in medium and large spaces where variability has traditionally undermined outcomes. Pleneo is approaching this challenge at the system level, which is exactly what the market needs as organisations try to scale intelligent collaboration beyond small rooms.”
Pleneo launches with immediate product availability through a global distribution network spanning more than 60 countries, supported by customer success teams across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, India, and Asia.
Pleneo will exhibit at ISE 2026, booth 2-R500.