INTERVIEW: RANDY LEMKE, INFOCOMM INTERNATIONAL Signing off
InfoComm’s CEO retires at the end of this year. Paddy Baker caught up with him at last month’s InfoComm MEA show in Dubai to talk about career achievements, industry developments and how technology changes lives
You’re retiring at the end of this year. Some people, when they retire, step away from their industry, while others are busier than before, with committees, consultancy and so on. What are your plans? I’m in the first category. People have asked me if I’m going to come back to the InfoComm show in the US, and I always say I won’t next year and probably not the year after. The new person [new CEO David Labuskes] doesn’t need me around. I’m looking at just retiring – I’m not looking for consulting or anything like that. My wife’s retiring on the same day. Who knows what we’ll do? We’re going to travel a lot, we’re going to do some things. In the future if I do anything for income, it would be something very different.
What would you say has been the biggest change in the industry during your time at InfoComm? I started as executive director as most of North America and Europe were changing to become installation companies rather than selling boxes. In 2000 that change was underway: some companies were well into it, some weren’t – different parts of the world changed at different times. As an association, I think
we did things with education, certification and shows to help that to happen. But what has occurred in the past few years with AV and IT... that’s the change we’re undergoing right now. Using that whole network as a transport mechanism, that has changed [the situation] dramatically. So installations, instead of having four or five different devices, from DVD players to Laserdisc players to all the things we used to have media on, now it’s all coming through the network and it’s transferred – people are able to use the network to go everywhere. Industry growth has come with that and it’s made us much more capable. Growth has also brought new people into the industry: IT companies, manufacturers like Cisco buying Tandberg, and even on the design and installation side, people that were traditionally in IT or telecoms are now working with AV. So the market has grown and looks like it’ll continue to grow for the near future.
Do you see the increasing influence of IT as entirely to the good, or are there downsides?
First of all, IT is our customer, and if you’re not seeing that,
you’re missing out on the reality of who’s buying AV equipment now. In corporate and university environments, that responsibility has shifted in many places from the facilities manager to the IT department. I think that’s very good – you’ve got departments with money and people that are interested in technology. They can be a great customer, but you have to be able to meet their ways of doing business, you have to protect their network security, protect their bandwidth and play by their rules. If you look on the other side, people would be concerned that IT is going to be a provider of design and installation – and it will be. That’s not really too different than where it’s been with, particularly, universities in the past, whose own audiovisual groups were doing – and still do – smaller jobs: not stadiums or big churches, but classrooms and things of that nature. I think IT’s going to be the same in that they’re going to have internal capability of providing AV services, but it’s a larger-growing pie all of the time. If you look at where the opportunity is, it’s still in highly engineered systems, where we have skills that IT doesn’t have. Not that they couldn’t learn them, but it’s not what
they’re probably going to want to do: there’s only so many auditoriums in a building – it’s not worth them learning to do auditoriums if they’re only going to do two in their life.
How would you characterise the ways InfoComm as an organisation has changed over the past dozen years? People in different parts of the world see InfoComm doing different things. In North America and Europe, especially the UK, we’re seen as a tradeshow provider as well as an organisation that
brings education,
certification and standards. In other parts of the world we’re known primarily as tradeshow people. Tradeshows are very important for the industry in getting products out around the world – that is how developing countries first see new products. InfoComm has used its tradeshows to do its other jobs and, frankly, to pay for them. Nobody makes money on standards, and certification is kind of the same, although there’s a little more money there. But we’ve been commercial enough to