Today’s blog was written by Robert Haley, Director of Marketing in the Communications Systems Division.
Orlando in June can sometimes be a little warm, but last week it was practically on FIRE! And not because of the weather.
The Orlando Orange County Convention Center last week played host to InfoComm 2017, the world’s largest commercial AV trade show. This annual show always draws a big crowd to attend it’s educational sessions, training for technical certifications, and most importantly, see what new tech is on the exhibit floor. This year did not disappoint.
By most accounts, this year’s event broke records for attendance, and if conversations with exhibitors is any measure, it was a very successful exposition.
I was fortunate enough to be asked to fill-in for our senior VP, Gerard Pompa, as the moderator for a very interesting speaker panel on mobility entitled, “Anywhere, Anytime, Any Device: How Mobility and Consumerization has Forever Changed Communications.” This interesting topic, sponsored by our friends at the IMCCA, was discussed and debated with industry experts from Crestron, Cisco, Videxio, BlueJeans Networks and Department 60. As moderator, I had the easier job of setting the stage and introducing some mobility questions on aspects such as the explosion of Unified Communication and Conferencing (UCC) mobile tools and clients, personalization of services, recent changes in the mobile landscape and what the future holds. Even at the early hour of 9:30 AM, and competing with the opening of the widely anticipated exhibit hall, our session was heavily attended and generated great conversations and follow-up questions.
I carried those ideas with me into a second IMCCA event at InfoComm 2017 – their annual State of the Industry Lunch and Learn. This luncheon was for registered IMCCA members and included both awards for outstanding UCC Fellows within the industry, and also an extended industry panel talking about changes we can all expect over the next 5 years.
Unfortunately, that agenda only left me a few hours to try and cover the actual exhibit floor, so I tended to keep focused on the UCC vendors and the Audio equipment providers. The two primary trends that I noticed were AV over IP technologies and Huddle Room solutions. It seems that AV over IP was much on the minds of the audio equipment vendors, always trying to squeeze out latency and provide a better audio experience. And it was hard to turn around on the floor without seeing a huddle room solution demo.