With travel to meet clients and colleagues a less viable option and many organizations moving to a work from home/hybrid model, we are seeing an increased reliance on high quality sound technologies that enable effective collaboration and communication.
A lot of attention has focused on the platforms and services that are powering our virtual meetings. Names like Zoom that were once niche products of the startup world have become verbs used by your kid’s teacher or grandparents.
Without these innovative platforms and the high speed infrastructure that they sit on top of, we would be in a much bleaker economic situation. Perhaps we should count ourselves lucky that it’s COVID-19 and not COVID-95.
But one area that has received less attention has been the actual hardware that we use to facilitate our business conferencing. The nuts and bolts, or in our case, microphones and speakers.
Hoping to get a better sense of how the industry needs are changing to meet the current challenges, UC Today caught up with Stuart Davidson, the Technical Director at Kinly. His previous company AVMI was recently acquired by the Amsterdam-based Kinly that provides a wide range of collaboration technology solutions.
He shared his experience as an integrator of audio visual technologies on the recent shifts in the UC space, and how his work with hardware providers like Shure are altering their approach to serving their customers.
Spaces Change but the Mission Stays the Same
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Stuart Davidson[/caption]
Increasingly, Davidson says that a lot of their work is shifting from the large halls and auditoriums to providing meeting room integrations.
“Our customer base is really anyone that uses technology to collaborate as a group,” he tells UC Today, adding that many of their customers are now coming from commercial and financial verticals, as well as education and the military. Within these verticals, he is seeing changes in demand.
While much of the buzz has been on how people are setting up home working solutions, Davidson’s team has found a fair amount of their work moving to enabling better communication from offices. As the months have dragged on, in areas where the conditions have permitted it, many organizations have moved to a hybrid working arrangement. This is where not everyone comes to the office all at once, but in capsules or for specific working groups a few times a week.
However, the continued dispersal of people collaborating on projects has meant that offices have had to adapt and adopt better sound configurations so as to ensure clearer communication with those in remote locations.
“We’ve gone from the integration business to the collaboration business,” says Davidson, explaining that many of their recent projects have been in helping organizations set in place a kind of continuity for communication, and less on large scale installations.
