Another Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) has come and gone, and at this year's event, I once again spent my time running from hall to hall, meeting with clients in the enterprise communications and A/V space. ISE 2018 certainly did not disappoint in the area of new product and services announcements. The event also brought out a slew of new partnerships -- some already inked and others soon to be announced.
Important Announcement
ISE 2018 marked the unveiling of a new research and analyst firm called Recon Research. The new firm will make its official debut in Q2 2018 with a range of new offerings, a high-power team of industry analysts, and a next-gen business model that will turn some heads.
After 15 successful years at Wainhouse Research, I decided it was time for a change. Sign up now at www.reconres.com and we'll notify you when we open our doors.
Via inductive reasoning, my team came away from ISE having identified a handful of trends that are of clear interest to vendors, service providers, channel partners, and of course end-user organizations:
- Huddle, Huddle, and More Huddle -- What started as a concept just a few years ago has become a dominant theme for the industry, as vendors large and small released and presented their huddle room-optimized offerings. Not surprising, given that there are more than 40 million such rooms in the world.
- Meeting Room Mode -- Cloud video providers are introducing (or have already released) meeting room friendly workflows and UIs within their software apps, with a goal of simplifying and expediting the process for joining hosted meetings.
- Skype and More Skype -- Vendor upon vendor upon vendor released, demoed, and discussed new and updated forms of integration with the Microsoft's Skype for Business ecosystem. (Who says A/V doesn't understand UC?)
- Rebirth of the VC App -- After years of chatter and hype around WebRTC and browser-based conferencing, we are seeing a resurgence in dedicated software apps for conferencing.
- Audio Does Matter -- Finally, after decades of telling people again and again that video is sexy but audio is king, the industry seems to be getting the message. The show floor was still packed with new, thinner, and larger displays, but the background noise at the show was about better audio for the meeting room.
- Management of A/V Rooms -- During our whirlwind tour, we stumbled across dozens of monitoring, management, and control portals for A/V environments. While the systems vary in breadth and depth, the theme is quite clear: Flying blind won't cut it anymore.
- Ideation Goes Mainstream -- Just a few years ago, the concept of ideation fell mostly on deaf ears. Today, however, ideation has become a mainstream application -- both as a stand-alone tool and as a feature embedded into other solutions and systems.
The above list is certainly not all-inclusive. For example, the topics of voice recognition and artificial intelligence (AI) came up again and again in our briefings, as did the importance of analytics and the value of cloud services.
Now that you have the top trends in mind, click to the next page to take a look at highlights from many of the companies my team had briefings with at ISE, reviewed in alphabetical order.
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