David J.
Danto
Collaboration
Industry Consultant and Analyst
Covering AV / IoT / Mobility / Multimedia / Video / Unified Communications
Director of Emerging
Technology
Interactive
Multimedia & Collaborative Communications Alliance
eMail:
DDanto@imcca.org Follow Video &
Technology Industry News: @NJDavidD
(Read
David’s Bio) (See David’s CV) (Read David’s Other
Blogs & Articles)
A View From The Road Volume 11, Number 4
InfoComm
2017
In This Edition:
· A
Record For InfoComm
· Changing
The Format For This Report
· Emerging
Technology FellowsAnd Sessions
· Danto’s
Industry Themes
· Maldow’s
Exhibitor Details
This article is
also available on the Let's Do Video website here.
Greetings from Orlando,
where the 2017 InfoComm Conference and Expo just wrapped up. It was another record year for InfoComm –
with over forty four thousand attendees.
Without diving into the
annual controversy about where the conference should be held, Orlando had the
soggiest week I can remember – with frequent thunderstorms and extra high
humidity. It was impossible to not be
damp all week, but that didn’t dampen the excitement of the attendees. The exhibit floor and the sessions were
generally packed with communications professionals learning and networking.
As opposed to the usual
format of The View From The Road, this report will be
authored by two people. David Danto,
industry consultant and analyst, will cover the sessions and themes, focusing
on the big-picture, and David Maldow, analyst and
owner of Let’s Do Video, will provide a detailed report of the exhibitors and
offerings he saw.
This show has grown too big
for just one person to catch all of it, so hopefully, by combining
perspectives, we will manage to miss less of the important news.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
InfoComm and The IMCCA blew-up
and reimagined the day before the expo opened this year, with a new all-day
seminar on Emerging Trends. This was widely covered and
previewed by industry publications, in the hope that the session and format would prove
valuable. It didn’t disappoint.
Over 600 people attended
the session, with so many interested a few had to be turned away until more
seats were added. Nine industry experts presented
the latest changes in their specific spaces, including Audio, Displays, Digital
Signage, Control Systems, Unified Communications, Videoconferencing and Huddle
Rooms, Team Chat Applications, and more.
Attendees and presenters were also able to gather in a nearby lounge for
more in-depth one-on-one discussions after each presentation. Some of the key points covered include:
· The changing world of
microphones, with “Beam-forming Array” being the new buzzword, wireless
frequencies getting scarce and new standards for digital audio emerging.
· New high resolution display
standards (such as SMPTE 2084 EOTF) are coming that will drastically improve
images, but will require new and better connectivity.
· Digital signage is moving
toward creating IoT experiences to support
distributed commerce
· Custom programmed AV rooms
are giving way to simpler Huddle Rooms supported by cloud based infrastructure.
· Team Chat is the new UC
buzzword, with platforms like Slack, Cisco Spark, Microsoft Teams and others
trying to gain market share while trying to encourage users to join their
communities.
· APIs allow cloud
collaboration services to be integrated into existing workflows. The “X as a Service” model is growing rapidly
as a result.
The presenters were then
honored as the first group of InfoComm / IMCCA Emerging Technology Fellows at
an industry lunch the next day.
It is expected that
InfoComm and the IMCCA will continue to present this program next year, with a
new group of individuals being honored and presenting. For details on the presenters and the topics
covered you can take a look at the initial press release and you can also read
impressions from Fellow Irwin Lazar here.
The IMCCA also presented
the Unified Communications track at the conference, covering such topics as the
current state of wireless presenting, the explosion of Huddle Rooms, the
importance of security in designing collaboration rooms and systems, and
more. David Maldow
also presented an IMCCA session on how to embed collaboration APIs into your
workflow, explaining that APIs can actually be very easy to leverage and often
yield great results.
It was great to see that UC
/ Collaboration - which was only a minor interest at InfoComms
past - was clearly the most prominent theme covered at the 2017 conference.
All of the IMCCA
collaboration presentations (including Emerging Trends) are available for
download, and in addition, about half the sessions are available to watch as
video files, all here, for free, courtesy of a
new service company called AnyHows. (Anyhows.com
is marketplace for professionals to share their knowledge and expertise, with a
focus on helping firms and individuals share professional assets such as
documents, spreadsheets, presentations and plans.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
There were a number of
important industry themes that emerged from the conference. In no particular order, these included:
· Partnerships are hot. Whether you’re talking about Dolby audio in BlueJeans conferencing, Polycom and Crestron adding a Zoom
button, or Logitech dancing with everybody, the players in the collaboration
space are partnering-up for better experiences – and to help grow their marketshare.
Partnerships in the integrator world are happening as well, but in this
case, despite all the cheering, it represents the inevitable shrinking of the
AV Integration market. Many more small
providers will close and/or sell themselves to big providers before the
shakeout is over.
· Huddle Rooms are where the money is. Just about all of the collaboration
manufacturers and service providers are targeting this smaller, simpler,
non-customized space with gusto – just a few years since many said it would
never catch-on. Cameras with wider
fields of view, automatic zooming and tracking cameras, speaker format
microphone/speaker/camera units and more are now being planned and delivered to
the market. Many firms – established and
start-ups – are working on products to simplify controlling these smaller
spaces. That Taps you heard was played
for the integrated room touch panel (just as I predicted years ago.) Even the new systems will struggle when
secure voice control comes to the enterprise – within the next 18-24
months.
· Everybody has an interactive whiteboard. You couldn’t spit without hitting one. Even the food cart vendors seemed to be
selling an interactive solution. As I
predicted in my whitepaper on the space we’re now firmly strapped
into the hype-cycle roller coaster heading up the mountain. At next year’s InfoComm there may still be a
flood of devices, but by the following year this niche product will likely take
its rightful place – considering it is useful in less than 15% of enterprise
applications - leaving many of the new entrants currently riding the wave
dealing with a “wipe-out.” Expect the
survivors in this sector to de-emphasize the touch screen part of what they do
and focus on the fact that they have all-in-one collaboration solutions – a
trend that actually has the legs to continue.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Visiting the exhibitors on
the floor, there were a number of exciting announcements, products and services
on display. While it was impossible to
cover everyone, David Maldow tried to visit as many
of the key players in our industry as he could, and reports on them below:
I’ve been a
fan of the PanaCast solution since it was conceptual. When it
first hit the market, it was one of very few alternatives to the traditional
pan/tilt/zoom camera. Today there a consensus in the industry that users do not
like remote controls and we need an automated way to properly frame speakers
during video meetings. Not only that, but it appears that the PanaCast approach in particular is being adapted (and
thereby validated) by market competitors. The approach is to capture the entire
room in high (4K) definition, then digitally crop the image to provide the best
experience for remote viewers based on what is happening in the room. This
allows the solution to not only frame speaking participants, but follow them as
they move around the room. The solution is so smart, it can now even detect if there is a whiteboard in the room, and pop its
image into a new window during a video meeting. This allows remote participants
to put video meeting on one monitor, and the close up of the whiteboard on
another. This was just one of the futuristic applications being developed by
President and CEO Aurangzeb Khan, who also showed me an augmented reality
application for the PanaCast at the booth. Expect
more to come from this innovative crew.
The
integration giant had a big announcement about an alliance with Asia-based Vega, to solidify their global
lead in the market. I also caught a demo of the latest version of their Symphony
Management Platform. AVI-SPL needs to keep this platform cutting edge to
manage all the new technologies in today’s increasingly complicated AV
environments.
Until
recently, videoconferencing solutions were almost exclusively marketed to, and
sold through, the IT teams. While a quality experience for the users has always
been part of the pitch, the real deal-closers were the enterprise IT capabilities
and features like security and manageability. Today, we have actual growth and
adoption stemming from the users themselves. Popular products are going viral
among users within enterprises before IT steps in and manages the deployment.
This means a cutting edge, user friendly, UI is more crucial than ever. Mark
Strassman (CPO), gave me a sneak peak of their new user experience and my
first impression was that it was very clean and easy. I think the future of UIs
is minimalist. I want to feel like I am looking through a window at someone and
that is the approach BlueJeans is going for here.
The BlueJeans team also pointed out to me that recent market
events have somewhat validated their interop cloud approach, and their BlueJeans Relay solution in particular, which allows users
to “touch-to-join” BlueJeans meetings from
traditional H.323 endpoints. While certain competitors have recently created
this capability through partnerships and API sharing with certain endpoint
vendors, BlueJeans has been supporting this for some
time now. While there was a lot to see and demo at the booth, I think their integration of Dolby Audio is particularly significant
because of the importance of quality audio in video meetings.
No new big
news for Cisco at this show, although they are continuing to get new awards for their most recent Spark products. There was
certainly a lot of traffic around their Spark Board and Spark Room Kits at the
booth as I saw when Angie
Mistretta (Sr. Director of Collaboration
Solutions Marketing) walked me through the booth and caught me up on the latest
developments and roadmap plans. The key is a meeting centric focus. They have a
vision for how meetings should work, and they are designing a virtual
experience around that with the Spark brand of products and services.
Jason Ambion (National Sales Director) game me a close look
at ClearOne’s new Versa 150 solution which includes the new UNITE 150. The solution comes with a convenient USB hub,
allowing you to connect all your in room peripherals (camera, mics, displays,
keyboards, mice, etc) so you can simply plug in your
laptop and control the room. The bundle is priced at $1,999 while the camera
alone is $1,199. This puts it with the budget for more spaces and is
significantly more affordable than some similarly specified competitor options.
I caught up
with Mitchell
Hershkowitz (Vice President, Customer Experience
& Digital Workplace), who briefed me on their new endpoint lifecycle managed services. Managing corporate
apps on personal iOS devices is a particular challenge that many organizations
are starting to face. This new program includes a dedicated Apple practice, to
meet this challenge. We also discussed today’s holistic approach to
collaboration environment design and the improved results that Dimension Data’s
customers are seeing as a result.
Eric Murphy
(General Manager, Americas), showed me how HRT’s unique approach to meeting room videoconferencing
works. Each person in the room wirelessly connects their personal device
(laptop, tablet, mobile), to the Huddle Hub One device. Their video signals are
then merged into a single signal which connects to your cloud video service of
choice. Remote participants see the active speaker in the room, or a gallery view
of everyone in the room. Those in the meeting room can all view the remote
video participants on their own personal device. If everyone is looking down at
their screens during a meeting anyway, we might as well put the meeting there.
It will be interesting to see how much the appeal of using our own devices will
make this an attractive option.
Bobby
Beckmann (CTO) took me through the new Lifesize UI. This is a significant improvement over
their old UI, which, while functional, was not leading in terms of user
experience. As stated above, I think enterprise video is becoming as much a
direct user play, as an IT play. With this in mind, it is wise of Lifesize to be focusing on the UI.
I’ve been
wanting to get my hands on the Nureva Span for a long time. Rob
Abbott (Director, Product Management), and Dan Oleskevich (Product Manager) were kind enough to give
me the grand tour. The entire concept of a massive virtual workspace allowing
your entire team to share files and work simultaneously in person, or remotely,
is extremely compelling. Nureva’s implementation, and
the product’s workflow have made this product an analyst favorite and has
supported some really cool customer use cases.
Always one
of the coolest demos at any show they attend, I obviously enjoyed my time at
the Oblong booth. Steve DeSisto (Director of Channel Sales) let me check out the
controls for the Mezzanine and shared its new features, and explained their new product series. The power of this solution and the
visual impact of a well done Mezzanine presentation are hard to put into words.
It is just an extremely smooth and feature rich implementation of wireless
share and control.
“Did you see
anything cool and different?” This is the question I am most frequently asked
at InfoComm. This year I had an answer.
The Owl is very cool, and very different. CEO and
Co-Founder Max
Makeev (former iRobot engineer and product
manager), took the Owl through it’s
paces with me in a whisper room at the show. It uses the methodology I
described above, of capturing the entire room in high resolution and then
digitally framing active speakers, but with a unique twist. The camera on the
Owl is a fish-eye lens, and it points directly up. That allows it to truly
capture an entire room from the center of the meeting room table. It then
digitally removes the fish-eye effect and crops the active speakers for the
remote display. It connects to your laptop via USB like any other meeting room
camera, and can use your video app of choice. It is so different that it is a
little hard to explain, so this
video may help.
I caught up
with Jordan
Owens (VP, Americas) of Pexip. Although not exhibiting this year, Pexip is a big part of any videoconferencing conversation.
More and more services are being built off the Pexip
platform as they continue to make new deals and partnerships. I also had a very
interesting conversation with John Vitale (Sr VP, Product
Management at Yorktel), who gave me an in depth
explanation of how Pexip’s API’s allowed Yorktel to build its Univago
offering using Pexip, in ways that he believes would
not be possible with any other platform.
The Phoenix
dev team seems to have something new every year for us from these audio
experts. This year, Jonathan
Boaz (VP of Sales and Marketing) showed me the new Stingray. Significantly
more affordable, and easier to configure, than the competition, this device
mixes up to 60 microphones. I also learned their Condor microphone array, and
Spider speakerphone are continuing to see nice traction in the market.
The big
attraction at the Polycom booth was their new Pano wireless share solution. Andy
Cuneo (Senior Manager, Corporate Communications) helped me participate in a
demo. I was particularly pleased to see that this was not another “me too”
offering in this increasingly crowded space. In fact, the Pano
offers a someone unique experience in that users don’t
have to take turns sharing the screen. Up to four users can share at once, with
a four way split on the monitor. I can think of a lot
of collaborative use applications where this will be handy.
StarLeaf
Hellene Garcia
(Director, Business Development) gave me a 45 second demo in which she took a
new Huawei endpoint of the box, physically connected it,
powered it up, selected StarLeaf from the start-up
menu, and a few seconds later made a video call using her StarLeaf
directory. It is suddenly very easy for Huawei hardware customers (and there
are a lot of them) to use the StarLeaf cloud. I was
even more interested in checking out the new StarLeaf
App. The new app embraces the persistent team messaging workflow, which I
believe is the future of UC. What makes the StarLeaf
App particularly noteworthy is where it’s coming from. Many team messaging apps
start with chat, and then bolt on audio or video, which can result in a less
than seamless experience. The Starleaf App appears to
have started with their mature video cloud experience, and wrapped the new team
workflow around it.
Tolga Sakman (Managing
Director, Collaboration Advisory Group), shared a quick demo of the product from
Synergy Sky, known for
their management and analytics solutions. This new offering allows users to
create meetings in Outlook that can be joined by traditional room systems,
Skype endpoints, browsers, or all of the above. It further simplifies things by
pushing the meeting information from the invitation to the actual meeting room
endpoints, allowing for one touch to join functionality. Endpoints can also be
automatically dialed at the time of the meeting.
Dan
Freeman (CEO) and Michael
Baker (VP of Sales) were proud to show me the new addition to their line.
The new TeamCam is made for huddle spaces (they
prefer the branding of “Team” over “Huddle”) and has an MSRP of $389. We also
talked about their continuing development of auto-tracking technology to solve
the problem of manually controlling pan/tilt/zoom
The Videxio team has been busy with vendor endpoint
integrations, more PoPs for a stronger global
presence, a new app, a new internal development platform, and more. I was
impressed by their integration with social medial streaming, as demoed to me by
Tom-Erik Lia (CEO)
and Karl Hantho (President, Americas) Many cloud vendors now
offer the ability to stream a meeting over YouTube Live, Facebook Live,
Periscope, etc. Videxio however, is the only one that
I am aware of which can stream to all of them simultaneously. I love the idea
of blasting it out on all channels, and letting your audience decide how they
want to watch it.
Jacob Borgeson (Product Expert), and I, chatted about the
increasing complexity of collaboration environments, and the increasing need
for analytics to help us make the most of our deployments. Their recent partnership with Pinnaca, will make
these analytics available to Pinnaca’s global
customer base. As our tools get smarter, and more capable of capturing more
sophisticated data, we should expect to see a lot more development from Vyopta.
The new Yamaha CS 700 got a lot of attention at the show, as well
as the news that Yamaha is getting very serious about the UC space. Randall Lee
(Director, Strategic and Channel Marketing) joined Yamaha with the Revolabs acquisition, which is a big part of Yamaha’s UC
strategy. I got a close look at the CS 700 (as stated before, I am a big fan of
the speaker bar design for video systems) and I enjoyed an excited discussion
about the future of Yamaha in the market. Having once owned a Yamaha motorcycle
as well as a Yamaha acoustic guitar, I know this company can make a quality
product in just about any market. I’m looking forward to seeing what joins the
CS 700 in Yamaha’s new UC product line.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
That’s it for this edition of A
View From the Road.
Look for the next one from the LDI conference - which is in November
this year.
=======================================================
This article was written
by David Danto and David
Maldow, and contains solely their own,
personal opinions.
David Maldow is the Founder &
CEO of Let's Do Video and one of the
visual collaboration industry's most prolific writers. Prior to founding Let’s
Do Video, David was Managing Partner at Telepresence Options, one of the
industry’s most recognized print publication and news sites. It was there that
he authored 150+ pieces of public content, gaining him recognition as an
industry expert. Earlier in his career, David managed the Wainhouse
Research Video Test Lab, where he developed the ability to assess products /
solutions from an IT perspective, but with an eye for user experience and
adoptability.
David Danto has had over three decades
of delivering successful business outcomes in media and collaboration
technology for various firms in the corporate, broadcasting and academic worlds
- including AT&T, Bloomberg LP, FNN, Morgan Stanley, NYU, Lehman Brothers
and JP Morgan Chase. He is now a consultant for the collaboration, multimedia,
video and AV industries. He is also honored to serve as IMCCA’s Director of Emerging Technology.
David can be reached at DDanto@imcca.org and his full bio and other blogs and
articles can be seen at Danto.info. Please reach-out to David if
you would like to discuss how he can help your organization solve problems,
develop a future-proof collaboration strategy for internal use, or if you would
like his help developing solid, user-focused go-to-market strategies for your
collaboration product or service.
All images and links
provided above as reference under prevailing fair use statutes.