In order to address the needs of those spaces effectively at scale and at a price point that people will feel appropriate you’re inevitably just going to have to go and use standardized solutions, and I hope people don’t see that as a negative.
I mean, it’s what made the PC industry reach dominance, when people standardized the hardware, the software and so forth, and we’ve all been beneficiaries of that. I see that same trend happening for AV.
However, AV integrators as a broad group don’t have a great reputation for adjusting to change. What are some areas in which you’d like to see more evolution?
Andrulis: Partly what’s coming in using AV more broadly is a change in responsibility for managing those systems and we’re starting to see a shift away from the purely dedicated AV professionals who were really extraordinary at delivering these truly unique experiences to the IT organization whose skills are at operating broad-based enterprise-wide deployments of technology and coming with that you’re seeing the IT organization bring some of their buying priorities.
So they’re interested in network centricity, manageability from a centralized location, security of the information held within those networks. So those are some new processes or new priorities that are new buyers are looking to the vendors to provide, and they often are different than what AV professionals today might be comfortable with.
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So yes, there are some people who have grown up serving the traditional AV buyer who maybe aren’t entirely equipped to handle some of the questions coming from IT, but you’re seeing people recognize that that’s going to be a requirement to succeed in the new word and people who want to address those widespread deployments are bringing on the capabilities or training their people so they can comfortably handle the questions coming from that IT buyer.
So the AV industry is very fragmented; there are a lot of different dealers, so I don’t think we can say that the AV industry is slow in adjusting. It’s just maybe a little uneven. Some people will adjust quickly. Some people will decide it’s not something they want to adjust to at all and they’ll target the type of business that matches their traditional expertise.
What’s the outlook for the integration market and AMX as we enter 2015?
Andrulis: I’m extremely excited about the prospects for the industry generally and AMX within Harman more specifically and it really goes right to that very fact it’s becoming generally recognized that audio and video are just the way you do things and I think our video interview today kind of reinforces that.
This isn’t the way you would have done an interview in the past and yet it’s so natural and almost expected at this point that video and audio are the way we communicate together. So we’re going to see video and audio integrated into the daily experience across almost all vertical markets and in our personal lives as well, and that’s just a great opportunity for our industry.
We can really be a driver for new forms of communication. And AMX within Harman now has the product breadth and the reach into market spaces in different geographies that really puts us in a great position to help lead that expansion of AV.
