After having spent over 10 years in the AV, Communications and Collaboration space, I frustratingly continue to feel the need for several systematic changes in the way we think in our industry.
So what is this griping all about then?
Are we boxing ourselves in?
I’ve attended a few panels and discussions revolving around the subject of The Future of AV in the Enterprise. You may have noticed the sponsors or equipment manufacturers are often on the panel. No disrespect to anyone and they are well within their right to lead industry conversations, and I don’t doubt their merit.
However, these conversations time and again revolve around statements such as, “This camera or this device is the future”. These conversations are inadvertently changing focus of the discourse towards ‘products’, away from the end-user experience.
Bear with me on this one – If I ask you “what’s the future of computing”, would you say, “Oh, these keyboards will be the future, or this graphics card, etc.”? No, you’d likely say, computers synthetically built into us will help us defy the limits of our human abilities, maybe?
And that’s what we should be thinking about when asked the future of AV in the enterprise.
That’s what we do very well because we take this line of thought very seriously. In fact, there’s:
- Formally enshrined nomenclature: ‘Systems-Thinking: the sum of all parts”, which entirely dictates how designers, engineers, project managers, account managers and marketing/PR are encouraged to think.
Solutions are a ‘system, in-principle’ designed to solve a problem. The best-in-class equipment being the parts that make up the system and work together in tandem. Why aren’t we all thinking on the same lines?
And these parts aren’t necessarily hardware either. You have an app that works with standardised equipment in a room, a communications hub in the room that allows secure communication to the mobile app using the internet as the common and secure network.
The hub is also cloud connected so hardware isn’t frozen in time at the day of install, and can be remotely monitored and administered.
Sidetracked by the Smartphone
Here’s our internal memo:
“No, the isn’t going to be at the centre of the AV universe”
This is because we perceive the OTT glorification of the smartphone, vastly misplaced. No doubt they will continue to play a very critical role, but we might be losing sight of ground realities.
We love our smartphones! Can you imagine your day without them?
But honestly, how many people do I know who’ve afforded this centrality to the smartphone in their daily work routine? They’re not using them to get work done, or to store files, edit or annotate presentations like we hear so often. One may argue about the use of VM and access to files. Point is, these things on the smartphone are not commonplace, and certainly not second nature to us.
I just want to get on with it
Why am I saying this? The reality is that people are still walking into rooms, talking, and sharing a power point from their PC or MAC until they finish.
Take for example, when we use drivers to connect your PC/smartphone to the video conferencing system. The Codec is on the PC/phone and you bridge the audio/video from the device to the room. This gets very problematic as we’ve noted in our POC testing, largely due to the PC not routing audio to the room system. Typical users did not understand how to tell the PC to use a different audio source over USB.
Chris Liebrand[/caption]
