Volume 13, Issue 1 — January 9, 2020

January 9, 2020 | Volume: 13 | Issue: 1

Happy New Year, #AVTweeps! 2020 has … arrived, with a deluge of news from CES in Las Vegas, and news ahead of ISE next month in Amsterdam. We’re posting coverage of CES on our Instagram Stories, and we’ll also have more coverage and videos from the show up shortly. You can also see our preliminary coverage of ISE 2020 here. Our columnists were busy over the break, so we have a lot of good content for you to check out today — Scott Tiner talks about HETMA and how its virtual conference worked, Christopher Gillespie does a deep dive on ITSM architecture, Mark Coxon on how integrators can capitalize on the Zoom Room craze, our top stories of 2019 from Gary Kayye — and a lot more!

— Sara Abrons

COLUMNS

+ HETMA Virtual Conference [Scott Tiner]

The future is looking bright for HETMA as it becomes a resource not just for higher ed in-house integrators, but for the businesses that want to support them. HETMA can be the place to reach out to when you need a focus group, when you want to test a new product, when you think you may have found a workable AVaaS model. HETMA is already planning for events in 2020 and will soon be making some announcements, so keep an eye out.

+ The ITSM Architecture [Christopher Gillespie]

We live in a world where IT provides services and rules and guidelines are standardized as to expectations. We need to know where everything is, we need to know its value, we need to create incident tickets when things go wrong and we need to perhaps use catalog items to record that we audited/tested the room on a regular basis. But most importantly, the AV “stuff” can no longer sit in its own realm. All these tasks listed above (and many more) and the various dashboards/reports need to live inside the same system as all the other IT functions. And this will be the Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) platform that we are using.

+ Zoom, Zoom, Zoom [Mark Coxon]

In a world where we hear many that like to complain software and hardware companies are talking to customers directly and that the scourge of “good enough” is ruining our businesses, I have found that customers are still looking for partners to add value to their spaces, maybe just not in the way that integrators traditionally have. I can’t answer that question for your company, but for mine, customers have led me down a path of flipping the script and finding a niche. With that, here are three recent system designs that all came from a starting point of Zoom and diverged from there, all utilizing the Zoom Room UI for ease of use.

+ The “Can I” Question [Dr. Frederick Ampel]

How can we fix the miscommunication between AV professionals and others in a project meeting? Position the request within the overall project matrix and explain how a goal could be achieved rather than why it can’t.

+ The Top 9 AV News Stories of 2019 [Gary Kayye]

2019 was like no other year I can recall. While the AV-economy experienced explosive growth, at the same time, a few big brands nearly disappeared, namely InFocus and Polycom. How can the Kleenex of projectors, InFocus, literally divest themselves of projectors? Well, it happened and, that happened to be our biggest story of 2019.

+ Comparing Wired and Wireless Lighting Control [Andrew Jimenez]

The commercial building lighting controls market is experiencing a period of rapid transformation. With commercial lighting technology making the shift from traditional fluorescent to LED lighting fixtures, legacy analog lighting controls are being replaced by more scalable and reliable digital controls that can operate over a wired or wireless infrastructure, including high-voltage, low-voltage, wireless and Power-over-Ethernet (PoE).