On Wednesday, June 9, at 2:00 p.m. ET, AV Technology with host the Adaptable Hybrid AV/IT Ecosystems webcast. New Era AV/IT Series moderator, Cindy Davis and panelists recently met to go through the program. The following are some of the highlights of what will be discussed.
Tossing the first curveball was Laurent Masia, director of product line management for Managed Switches at Netgear, who questioned how many corporate or campus networks are ready for a true AV/IT ecosystem. "It is an illusion to believe that the majority of the existing networks are ready to go, not only because of the time-sensitive nature of that payload between audio and video, because the AV signals when they are packetized follow internet standards," Masia said. And he does mean payload because video is a beast on a data network. Masia suggested a list of best practices that he will share during the webcast on June 9.
Ron Berty, business development manager at Matrox, agreed that pushing across a video network is tremendously demanding versus the light data from users doing email. "At the same time, it doesn't necessarily mean that you can't push video over the data user's network," he said. "There are ways to manage it." The critical element is that IT admins are responsible for the network. "Whether it's the video network or the data network, they're going to be responsible for traffic control, management, and so on. That is part of the true mega ecosystem," Berty said.
Erik Beyer, business development manager at Sennheiser, explained that with audio being one of the first elements in the chain, "we need to make sure that our audio signal is accessible across the board." When discussing an AV/IT ecosystem, the conversation comes around to standards and protocols. "Whether it's via Dante or AVB or AES for that matter, we're trying to embrace all of those to the point where we play well with everybody," Beyer said. "It doesn't matter what ecosystem is in play—our products can be manipulated on the backend to make sure that our audio signal can go where it needs to go."
"The great thing about Sony and the industry is that we pushed everything to have to be connected," said Rich Ventura, vice president of B2B for Sony Electronics' professional division. For some companies and institutions, connectivity meant they could take advantage of the cloud during the pandemic. "A lot of companies have finally made these changes, partly due to COVID, but even the last two years, with customers saying that they want to be able to do more virtually," Ventura said. "And we can thank the push that Microsoft has done with Azure and Google with their cloud, and Amazon with AWS—everywhere we look, you're touching that now."
As consultants, Shen Milsom & Wilke helps its clients achieve their goals. "We help organize the ecosystem with an idea of not only achieving their goals but also creating a user experience that can harness the value of the systems that are being built for them," said Randy Tritz, partner of SM&W and managing principal of SM&W Chicago. Albeit slowly, the AV-over-IP or the AV-and-IT conversion has been moving along. "I think we've made some terrific progress in an IP domain over the last four or five years, but for higher education and corporate clients, this last year brought that to the top," he said. "Now we're starting to see everybody lighting up the conversation saying, 'Well, what about this ecosystem?' It's a new conversation to them when in reality, most of them have had versions that their IT people only know about because it's under the black veil. They're all starting to learn more about it. Is it going somewhere? Yes. Has it been somewhere? Absolutely. Where's it going to go?"
Hear more of the conversation from our panelists on Wednesday, June 9 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern. And bring your questions and opinions to add to the discussion.
Adaptable Hybrid AV/IT Ecosystems
Wednesday, June 9, at 2:00 p.m. ET
