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A View From The Road – Volume 2, Number 3
Observations on technology trends from the latest conferences
and seminars.
June 20, 2008
 In This Edition:
• InfoComm 2008
• IMCCA “Unified
Collaborative Conferencing Pavilion”
• Leveraging end-users for
convergence
• “I’ll know it when
I see it”
• Other news from the show, part one
One year shy of its 70th
anniversary, InfoComm International’s 2008 exhibition and conference just
wrapped-up here in Las Vegas. Most of the exhibitors and attendees I
spoke with had the same experience of the show that I did – this was the
biggest and busiest conference InfoComm has ever done. Final attendance figures were not tallied
yet, but I heard the number of attendees was around the 35,000. Especially in light of the size and
scope, kudos need to go out to Executive Director Randal Lemke and the rest
of the InfoComm team for the tremendous job they did organizing the
exhibits on the show floor. With a very small number of large vendor
exceptions, the exhibitors were grouped into logical areas for their
space. This is just the kind of
organization that technology conference attendees have been asking for for
years. There were pavilions for
audio, lighting and staging, digital signage, and the IMCCA’s
very own unified collaborative conferencing pavilion. Never before have this many competing
telepresence and conferencing systems been shown, fully functioning, side-by-side,
right on the floor of a conference center.
This was a remarkable achievement in logistics, connectivity and
coordination, and proved to be one of the most popular spots on the show
floor.
This year’s pre
show “Manufacturer’s Forum” featured senior executives from Christie
Digital, Harmon Pro, Crestron, Polycom and Scala
discussing many interesting and complex topics. There was general agreement around a
number of ideas:
· EMEA and Asia are the
hotspots for growth in the industry right now, especially in light of the
current US
economy.
· Our industry is beginning to
focus more on the creativity our solutions providers can deliver as opposed
to just the technology.
· Video based communications
is definitely “mainstream” at this point, with digital delivery and
connectivity becoming the norm.
Yours truly raised
a question regarding the pressure on end users to facilitate the kind of
interoperability that successful AV installations require. The panelists felt that this was too much
to expect of the end users, and that manufacturers should do a better job
of working together. However, when
it was pointed out that some of these manufacturers are not from the
traditional AV industry, but rather the IT industry, the opinion quickly
changed to one of reliance on these end users to bring their leverage and buying power to the market on behalf of the
AV industry – asking companies like Microsoft and Cisco to “play nice” with
AV companies. I hope we can come up
with a formal process to organize and exert this leverage more effectively
than has been done to date.
One of the
traditional IT manufacturers did step-up at this years show, as much to
their credit, Cisco chose to participate in InfoComm and the IMCCA’s first annual “Telepresence@infocomm”
full day seminar. The event was also
a tremendous success, with the many in attendance able to hear from and
speak with the manufacturers and service providers in the telepresence
space. In addition, actual
telepresence end users presented case studies regarding their deployments
and usage. The last part of the day
was a rousing open forum to try to get some definition around the
telepresence vs. videoconferencing confusion. The general agreement of the more than 20
experts that participated in the discussions was that Telepresence is truly
a marketing term that refers to the experience more than the technology
involved – meaning the results are greater than the sum total of all the
parts. Rob Arnold, The CTO of Telanetix, appearing on the “ask the experts” panel,
was a particularly vocal advocate of looking past the expensive equipment
being suggested by most of the manufacturers in the space, and using the
end-user’s experience as the guideline.
Whatever Telepresence truly means, it is now a defining term for the
industry and one we’re stuck with.
Or, as one of our end-users put it, “I may not be able to define it,
but I know it when I see it.” The IMCCA
(with much thanks to York Telecom) was able to capture most of the event on
video for use in a webcast of excerpts to be shown in the future.
This session was
only one of the more than 350 educational opportunities that InfoComm and
its partners presented. While many
of these were widely attended and appreciated, and as much as I like to
keep these conference reports positive wherever possible, I do have to
comment about how personally embarrassed I was about the quality of the AV
support present at many of them (at least the ones I participated in.) With layouts set wrong, wireless
microphones failing more often than working and no organization around the
provision of PCs in the session rooms, I felt like the in-house Las Vegas
Convention Center AV staff should have been attending the sessions, not
helping facilitate them. Shame on
our industry - the clear experts in the space - for putting up with the
obviously amateurish effort. We owe
our session attendees an apology and our gratitude for putting up with and
looking past the problems.
There were a number
of interesting stories at this year’s show that may be overlooked in the
traditional event coverage. Here are
just a few of them in the conferencing space:
·
Polycom
formally exposed its new “VC2” marketing campaign to the attendees. Their literature said VC2,
“transforms traditional video conferencing into visual communication. With
VC2, video is a pervasive component of enterprise communication - on
desktops, in meeting rooms, [and] on mobile devices.” It was really great to see Polycom
showing that they “get-it” in a way that arguably may have been missing
from them in the past. With good
ideas, good products, good people and good marketing their VC2 initiative
was a great step for them.
· Tandberg, also positioning themselves for the future, showed both their new 1080P
“telepresence engine” and a new, SIP only, desktop video phone coming early
next year.
· Teliris showed what they
believe to be the next step in immersive telepresence, their InterACT Touch Table and Touch Wall. This is a display built into a room’s
table or wall that uses a human touch interface to share documents and
collaborate with other participants in a conference. (While this is a vast oversimplification,
think IPhone with half the surface in one city
and half in another.) There was
debate amongst those who experienced it if it truly is the next step in
telepresence, but there was no debate that it was extremely impressive and
innovative.
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With too much at
this conference to cover in just one “view from the road”, we will send out
a second edition and/or an additional newsletter with more details from
InfoComm in the very near future.
To be continued……
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A View From The Road is written by
David Danto and contains solely his own, personal opinions. David has spent
30 years in the audio visual and broadcasting industries. He has designed
facilities for firms such as AT&T, Bloomberg LP, FNN, Morgan Stanley,
NYU and Lehman Brothers. He has just joined JPMorgan Chase & Company
and is the IMCCA’s Director of Emerging
Technology. Email David at David.Danto.IMCCA@Danto.com
About the IMCCA
The Interactive
Multimedia & Collaborative Communications Alliance (IMCCA) is a
not-for-profit user application and industry focused association with
membership comprised of service and product providers, consultants, and
users. Members benefit from the understanding and the use of various
interactive and collaborative communications technologies in their
professional and everyday lives.
For further information please contact Carol Zelkin, IMCCA Executive
Director, at 516-818- 8184 or czelkin@imcca.org. Visit the IMCCA web site
at www.imcca.org
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