Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) has become the world’s largest professional AV and systems integration show. Since its inception in 2004, it has grown in size, scope, and influence: ISE 2019 visitors came from a total of 188 countries, with the United States, China, and Russia all in the top ten in the attendance league table.
Our attendees are professionals from the AV channel and the end-user community who are interested in the integration of different products into a solution that meets a client’s needs. Much of the show floor is taken up by six Technology Zones: Audio & Live Events, Digital Signage & DooH, Education Technology, Residential, Smart Building, and Unified Communications.
Satisfaction rates with the show are high: 92 percent of ISE 2019 attendees rated it as giving a good, very good, or excellent return on investment of their time and money. Another indicator of success is that the show has all but outgrown the venue that has housed it for the past dozen or so years. ISE 2020 will be our last at the RAI Amsterdam; in 2021 we will move to Barcelona, Spain.
There are many reasons to come to ISE from North America, whether as an exhibitor or an attendee. ISE is one of a global series of shows owned or co-owned by AVIXA; to keep up to speed with the latest product launches, you need to attend more than one of them. But because it is the world’s largest show in this sector, ISE has become a key date on manufacturers’ product development calendars. And as it’s the first major professional AV exhibition of the year, many new products are shown for the first time at ISE. In fact, its timing is one of the reasons ISE continues to draw an increasing number of visitors from all over the world.
As I’ve said, many North American industry professionals already attend ISE. Combined, the United States and Canada accounted for a little over 4 percent of the 81,000 people who came through the doors of ISE 2019. Backed by our co-owners, AVIXA and CEDIA, ISE is the only show that caters to both the commercial and residential AV markets. For attendees, ISE provides the opportunity to discover new companies and meet up with familiar ones. The big international companies that you’re used to seeing at InfoComm and CEDIA are also at ISE—but so are several hundred companies that you won’t have seen before. That gives you the chance to experience and learn about new technologies and solutions to help your business that many of your competitors don’t have access to.
For exhibitors, ISE provides an ideal opportunity to reach new markets, not just in Europe, but further afield. For many manufacturers, it’s the perfect place to catch up with their European distributors—and find new ones. ISE’s free M2D (manufacturer to distributor) service is a simple and effective way of advertising to potential new distributors in specific territories and meeting up with them there and then.
Another important aspect of breaking into a new market is getting the industry press on board. More than 500 industry editors from 36 countries attended ISE 2019; holding a press event at ISE is a relatively straightforward but highly effective way to build face-to-face relationships with the European press, and give your company and its offerings greater prominence in the minds of these key influencers.
ISE also has a growing roster of conferences targeted at key vertical market sectors. The best established of these are the Digital Signage Summit and the Smart Building Conference, but we also have events for digital cinema, hospitality, pro audio, higher education, enterprise, XR (virtual, augmented, and mixed reality), visitor attractions, and—planned for ISE 2020—control rooms.
There will also be a full program of other events at ISE 2020, including free thought leadership sessions on the Main Stage, professional development programs from AVIXA and CEDIA, and plenty more. We will have more details at the beginning of October, when registration opens.
I look forward to welcoming you to Amsterdam in February.
ISE 2020 takes place at the RAI Amsterdam Feb. 11-14, 2020. To learn more, visit www.iseurope.org.
To read more ISE 2020 stories, visit avnetwork.com/tag/ise.
