In our series of #InfoCommInspo blogs, we're getting inspired by InfoComm 2019 exhibitors and learning what trends they expect to see at the show—plus a special sneak preview of what they'll show in their booths.
Q&A with Samuel Recine, Director of Sales—Americas & Asia Pacific, Matrox.
Q: What about InfoComm inspires you?
SAMUEL RECINE: The fusion of skill sets that merge workflow design, acoustics, user experience, and ease-of-use with the simply unparalleled expansion of capabilities occurring during the current rapid transition to converged data, live multi-party communications, and high-performance media over IP can call InfoComm base camp for the multi-disciplinary experts to come together. While this is already a deep trend in AV engaged from several years back now, the additional thing that’s fantastic about InfoComm is how such a substantial portion of the foot traffic is now highly-educated corporate, enterprise, and industrial end users, who have the sophistication to challenge conventional thinking and have a plethora of expectations of how to re-leverage their existing infrastructures in new ways as well as what they want to extract from their new investments.
Q: What is the most exciting trend you expect to see at the show?
SR: The end users have not reacted well to fake standards and half measures when it comes to how they want to see their assets have order of magnitude more scalability and multi-vendor interoperability than the first wave of AV-over-IP products from so many manufacturers has thus far been able to demonstrate. The users want to mix-and-match high-performance media over IP as though it was HDMI (last gen) or VGA (previous gen). They want to keep that level of agnostic interoperability. But they want to eliminate proprietary matrix switching, limits to number/distance/types of sources, and limits to number/distance/types of destinations for their media assets. The most exciting trend, by far, is the quite vigorous push on the part of end users for true standards. AIMS is at InfoComm this year and is one of the many advocates for true standards.
Q: How will your solutions inspire integrators?
SR: Integrators need things to be easy to install and operate without sacrificing user experience in any way. As a company that provides only strictly standards-based products, what inspires integrators about Matrox is the way Matrox products mesh well with hardware and software products from other companies so seamlessly. Only once integrators see any-to-any and many-to-many with true standards as the heartbeat of the solution, do integrators truly understand the abundant new high-performance workflows enabled by the transition from traditional matrix switching to AV over IP. The AV industry does billions in services revenues. This industry is the tip of the spear for delivering new capabilities to end users never before possible on physically limited baseband AV matrix switching. Much like network itself has seen virtualization from the physical infrastructure to the management layer and how the PC industry has seen virtualization of compute capacity on-premises and over cloud, AV over IP is the first 100-percent AV-focused technology to allow the physical layer and the software-defined applications and workflows to evolve both in tandem as well as independently from one another.
Q: How will your solutions inspire tech managers?
SR: Tech managers don’t want to waste previous investments and don’t want to make new investments into things that will become obsolete. By concentrating on security education for payloads and command-and-control, and by focusing on education about true standards versus proprietary single-vendor propositions, Matrox and its fleet of partners and OEMs have established a solid reputation for helping to communicate the proper perspectives in designing twenty-first century performance AV-over-IP infrastructures to replace AV matrix switching.
To learn more, visit Matrox in Booth 3055 at InfoComm 2019.
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