Partnership
Zen Becomes Authorized Distributor for Nearity
January 8, 2025
January 8, 2025
Zen is expanding its audio-visual portfolio through a new authorized distribution partnership with Nearity, a manufacturer of professional conferencing hardware built specifically for the hybrid workspaces that have become the default for most enterprises across the GCC. This announcement covers what the partnership means for Zen’s customers, what Nearity brings to the conferencing hardware category, and how to get a demo unit into your own meeting rooms.
The shift to hybrid work fundamentally changed what a meeting room needs to do. A conference room camera and speakerphone system is no longer serving a room full of people dialing a handful of remote colleagues occasionally; it is now expected to deliver an equitable meeting experience where remote participants can see and hear every person in the room as clearly as if they were sitting across the table, every single day.
Zen’s customers had increasingly been asking for conferencing hardware options beyond the small handful of brands already in the portfolio, specifically looking for equipment that could handle larger, non-standard meeting room shapes without requiring a custom AV integration project for every room. Nearity’s product line was selected after an evaluation process that included side-by-side testing in real meeting rooms of varying sizes across several customer sites, comparing video framing, audio pickup range, and ease of installation against the hardware Zen customers were already using.
Nearity’s conferencing hardware line spans all-in-one video bars for small and medium rooms up through modular camera and microphone systems designed for larger, non-rectangular meeting spaces, boardrooms, and training rooms. A common thread across the range is intelligent framing, where the camera automatically identifies and frames active speakers in the room, and adaptive audio pickup that adjusts based on room size and microphone placement rather than relying on a fixed, one-size-fits-all pickup pattern.
For IT teams, Nearity devices are built around standard USB and network connectivity that works with the major video conferencing platforms already in use across most enterprises, meaning a room can typically be equipped without requiring a proprietary software layer or being locked into a single conferencing vendor’s ecosystem.
Existing Zen customers evaluating a meeting room refresh, or equipping new office space, now have Nearity as an additional option alongside the AV brands already available, giving more flexibility to match hardware to a specific room’s size, shape, and budget rather than fitting every room into a single standardized package that may be oversized for a small huddle room or undersized for a large boardroom.
Nearity has built its product strategy specifically around the shift to hybrid collaboration, focusing engineering effort on the parts of a meeting room experience that most directly affect remote participants: consistent framing of whoever is speaking, audio pickup that reaches every corner of a room rather than just the seats closest to the microphone, and setup that a customer’s own IT team can complete without a specialized AV integrator for the more common room sizes.
That focus is reflected in the certification testing Nearity hardware goes through with major platform vendors, ensuring devices work reliably the first time they are plugged in rather than requiring extensive manual configuration to behave correctly with a given video conferencing service.
All Nearity hardware sold through Zen comes with manufacturer warranty coverage, and Zen provides first-line technical support for installation and configuration issues, escalating directly to Nearity’s engineering team for any hardware-level fault that requires manufacturer involvement. This mirrors the support model Zen already uses for its other AV and conferencing brands, so customers adding Nearity hardware do not need to learn a new support process.
Zen’s AV solutions team can assess a customer’s meeting room inventory and recommend the right Nearity configuration per room type, from single video bars for small huddle spaces up to multi-camera setups for large boardrooms. For customers who want to see the hardware in person before committing to a rollout, Zen can arrange a demo unit for a trial period in a real meeting room, using the customer’s own conferencing platform and network environment rather than a controlled showroom setting.
Pricing and configuration guidance is available directly through your Zen account contact, and existing service and support agreements can typically be extended to cover Nearity hardware alongside a customer’s existing AV equipment, so adding Nearity to a room does not necessarily mean adding a separate vendor support relationship to manage.
This partnership is the latest addition to Zen’s AV and unified communications portfolio, reflecting continued investment in giving customers more choice as meeting room requirements keep evolving alongside how hybrid teams actually work day to day. Zen expects to expand the range of Nearity products carried over time as new hardware becomes available, prioritized based on the room configurations Zen’s customers most frequently ask about.
“Meeting rooms aren’t one-size-fits-all anymore, and neither should the hardware be. Adding Nearity gives us a genuinely wider range to fit rooms we previously had to force into an existing product line.” — Zen AV Solutions Team