These four notable issues, Wilson says, are important for integration firms to consider, but he adds a cautionary note: “ The biggest challenge is to enact change and be profitable at the same time. If you try to implement all these priorities, you’ll go broke this year.
“Each of these opportunities is like a river and you can’t see where it’s going. Is it going to turn into a beautiful, clear lake or a tiny little stream that dries up? Integrators need to put their money into the rivers and the smart ones know how to manage those bets and avoid the ones that are unattainable for them.”
In order to take those calculated risks, companies first have several industry-altering challenges to consider.
Boiling Point: IT/AV Convergence
It was eye-opening at a recent NSCA Best Practices Conference when AVI-SPL technical training manager Joseph Thomas pontificated on how few AV integrators are “network confident.”
“All of our systems, all of our jobs involve networks,” he said, adding that AV integrators and the CIOs or IT directors that are increasingly becoming their client contacts don’t always speak the same language. He speculated that “about 10 percent” of AV integrators are network literate.
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For AV integration firms, improving IT expertise “has to be one of the top priorities for 2014,” says NSCA’s Wilson. Even though, “there’s still some argument that things don’t have to be on the enterprise network,” he acknowledges that “if the client is steering toward that, we have to move in that direction.” CI Research asked respondents to rate their firm’s ability to discuss networking with their clients’ IT contacts, and they rate themselves somewhere between “good” and “very good.”
Many in the industry, however, need to get better, according to InfoComm’s Labuskes. “The fact is, if you can’t integrate your technology solutions with the rest of the technology that’s involved for an organization, you’re not going to be able to provide the type of value that you want to provide for your client and the type of value that your client is going to pay you for.”
For some reason, a contingent of the industry doesn’t grasp that and seems to resent IT directors’ lack of AV understanding.
Before becoming CEO of industry member support group USAV, K.C. Schwartz spent much of his career in IT.
“It’s funny for me to see this angst in the industry toward CIOs,” he says. “AV is increasingly going to be identified as a component of IT and we’re going to have to learn to play in that ecosystem. The way to do it isn’t to become heavily IT-ish; it’s to understand our role.”
Most successful integrators do know their role and have IT-savvy staff that can ease IT directors’ worries when it comes to equipment installed on their all-important networks, according to Steve Grace, president of specifying consultant AV Helpdesk. “Unfortunately, though, most salespeople, project managers and installers, which have the highest client exposure, are not as well versed and fail to bring the information to the table early enough.”
It’s “very important,” Grace adds, for integrators to overcome this obstacle because so much “basic equipment such as Digital Media from Crestron, wireless devices, IP telephony interfaces, etc., mean that AV integrators need to place equipment on the client’s network. Some wireless units like the Barco ClickShare do not connect to the client’s network, but do broadcast a wireless SSID which is noticed by security sweeps. It would be difficult to do a project today without decent knowledge of the IT side of things. These are all new devices for IT departments, too, and when the selling vendor cannot bring potential issues to the table early or answer questions when they arise, they are immediately at a disadvantage.”
Again, however, optimistic integrators can view that potential disadvantage as an opportunity to create invaluable relationships with IT directors, according to Mike Landrum, CEO of Atlanta-based Technical Innovation and chairman of industry member support group PSNI.
“I’d like to think of it as a tremendous opportunity for us, because we’re at the crossroads of this technology, and we can be the smartest guys at the table when it comes to the challenges CIOs face taking their organizations into the future,” he says. “We want to be technology partners and be fluid when addressing these big, broad questions. We want to be trusted advisors, not just projector integrators. For me, it’s an offensive play, not a defensive play.”
