Last week I had the opportunity to attend InfoComm 2017 in Orlando and was really glad I did. With so much going on in the AV industry with new products, technologies, vendors etc. these days it seems to be increasingly more difficult to keep up. But we have to try! On Day #1 of InfoComm I got the opportunity to meet with Lindsey Adler who is my editor from System Contractor News(where I am a guest columnist) Lindsey and I had a great discussion about a variety of topics including recruiting millennials into the AV industry as well as noting the significant number of mergers and acquisitions occurring over the past few years. The AV industry is definitely not boring these days!
On Day #1 we looked at a number of interesting products that included a 196” Diagonal LED Touch Screen Display from Planar that was extremely impressive and created a lot of buzz with conference attendees For me it looked like an exciting new product with some niche possibilities for ISI. After that we went by the Vyopta booth and discussed remote monitoring and advanced analytics for enterprise videoconferencing clients. The Vyopta software seems to be an ideal fit for a customer with a large video network and can provide critical information on utilization, service downtime issues, OPX and CAPX system performance etc. Looks like an up and comer to me!
On day #2 we got a chance to visit with the folks from Harman and see their “Connected Retail Experience” which was very interesting. Not sure how many opportunities that ISI might have with that application but it was definitely thought provoking. While in the Harman booth we also got a chance to see the latest products from AMX which was really beneficial for ISI design planning purposes. Our next stop was Crestron where we were able to see a wide array of new products including room schedulers, DSP’s, Alexa integration as well as the Mercury product which is an all new tabletop conferencing system that integrates with SKYPE for Business, Cisco WEBEX, Go to Meeting and Zoom. Really cool product that has a lot of potential in the marketplace!
I wrapped up my InfoComm 2017 experience with a visit to Cisco(who is ISI’s biggest supplier) to discuss their new CMS product(Cisco Meeting Server) as well as Spark and Spark Boards which are gaining a lot of interest with ISI clients and prospects. After visiting the booth I also got a chance to speak to Cisco management about future products and strategies which was very enlightening. Cisco appears to be dead serious about growing their video business and with their significant financial resources they could very well be the dominant company in the AV industry for a long time.
All in all I am really glad we attended InfoComm this year and feel the knowledge we acquired will be useful to ISI in the future. Looking forward to InfoComm 2018 in Vegas next summer!