As recently as five years ago, the broader world of audiovisual (AV) equipment was straightforward. Companies purchased what they needed as they needed it, and most of the technology was isolated from their network. AV equipment was viewed as standalone, workhorse equipment that didn’t require extensive planning to implement or maintain. That’s changed.
AV is far more complex when you consider the range of technologies and cloud-based services companies use to achieve various business outcomes. And the fact that many of these tools are now part of a company’s network adds to the complexity.
What Audiovisual Solutions Look Like Today
AVI has seven distinct practices to meet our customers’ needs. You might call them technology specialties or even business or product lines (and you’d be right). But the fact that we have seven practice areas demonstrates how complex AV technology solutions have become. Let’s take a closer look at what these seven practice areas include.
1. Audiovisual
Audiovisual helps you communicate with people in the same space. This might be a small huddle room if you're an Enterprise customer. In the Education vertical, this might be a university classroom. In the Sports & Entertainment market, this could be Soldier Field or an immersive fan experience. The pure AV market is more complex because the technology is delivered in many different contexts.
2. Unified Collaboration
Unified Collaboration is the ability to connect people, their places, and the work products they’re developing together. This is more than helping people talk to one another, it’s helping them collaborate and achieve business outcomes. And it’s not one cloud system; it’s an ecosystem of multiple cloud services.
3. Digital Media
Digital Media helps companies stream content, host town halls, or communicate through digital signage. These tools also offer the ability to create, curate, and manage massive data, video, and graphic files.
4. Microsoft Consultancy
Microsoft Consultancy this elite global practice supports companies that use Office 365 and Microsoft Teams. This consultancy also includes enterprise cloud and security, managed IT services, identity, and data security. Our developers can help you with Azure and other applications in the Microsoft ecosystem.
5. Enterprise
Enterprise helps large companies create a strategy and plan that leverages technology solutions and turns them into human productivity and outcomes. Here, we help companies identify their best tech fit to achieve their goals.
6. Broadcast
Broadcast allows companies to host live events, virtual town halls, and other executive communications that require production, streaming, and media storage.
7. Managed Services
Managed Services is our global support and helpdesk option that monitors and maintains the ecosystem and helps you deliver an IT workflow that makes AV feel like IT.
How AV Lines Are Blurring
When you look closely at how these practice areas come to life in the workplace, you can see that they don’t fit into tidy categories.
For example, say you want to host a virtual town hall meeting with your CEO and two outside speakers. The meeting might originate from your onsite auditorium with broadcast capabilities, but your speakers join the town hall from different locations through a Unified Collaboration platform. The output of their conversation is the input for your camera system that ties back to your broadcast studio and is streamed over a Microsoft Teams Live or Zoom event.
Is this town hall event considered AV? Unified Collaboration? Digital media? Broadcast? Microsoft? It’s all these things. And that’s why the world of AV is suddenly much more complex.
The Case For Interoperability Integrations
To deliver flawless audiovisual experiences, IT leaders need to understand how all of the available platforms and technologies work together and integrate with one another. It’s called interoperability and experts in this space (AVI Systems) are systems integrators.
Interoperability ensures that each element of your AV tech stack works and performs as intended and when used as part of a system (see our town hall example above). In a world where the tech product life cycle is six months, this is critical to ensure new equipment in your network doesn’t cause issues up or down the stack.
Interoperability And System Integration
Systems integrators can work with you to identify your goals, expectations, and use cases for the technology, whether you’re managing AV requirements in a 60,000-seat stadium or a flex space designed for hybrid collaboration. AVI has the experience and connections with technology manufacturers to solve your challenges with a thoughtful design – resulting in a solution that achieves your unique goals.
Want to learn more about interoperability and system integration? Schedule a free AV assessment with AVI.
