First, it billed itself as an eco-friendly room management system and then it was a simplified control system architecture. Now, three years after its USA debut and having never shipped a working system in America, ARRIVE Systems is back calling itself a “collaboration solution” — today’s buzzword for wireless room systems.

Am I being too hard on ARRIVE?

Nope.

For the past two and a half years, after it’s made claim after claim of shipping systems all over the place, I’ve been asking ARRIVE management for the name of a single US-based user who was happy with its system — niet, non, nein, nope.

The company has yet to provide me any users or any integrators in the U.S. that have integrated a system that works.

So, when the news came last week from Liberty AV Solutions that it was now the U.S. distributor of ARRIVE, I reached out to James Blumhardt — someone whom I’ve known for over 20 years and the VP of business development and consultant relations for Liberty. I asked him the same question I’ve asked ARRIVE execs for the past 30 months and his reply came today: “I can tell you this, there are approximately five systems going in this month at various facilities and a few major consultants.”

Yay!

I sure hope so! Especially for the Liberty AV guys as, otherwise, they’ve been duped too. But, now ARRIVE has hired AV veteran Lee Dodson as its president and COO and we may very well see an actual working product integrated here.

I’m not holding my breath, but am hoping because Arrive’s technological claims are interesting: a collaboration system that includes support for alternate collaboration clients (WebEx, Go-To-Meeting, Blue Jeans, etc.), multiple cameras, BYOD with support for any wireless smartphone, tablet netbook and wireless control.

Well, we’ll see…