18 INTERVIEW: DIRK HENDRICKX, BARCO August 2014 Network centric
Barco’s vice president of strategic marketing talks to Paddy Baker about migrating AV equipment onto IT networks – and the associated advantages, implications and challenges
What are the advantages of putting AV onto IT networks? The ultimate dream of large end users is to have a visual system that enables them to communicate faster and collaborate better. They want to get something from an IT channel, plug it into a network and power it up, and have their IT staff configure it. But today many AV infrastructures have different ‘flavours’ – even within the same corporation. Those flavours have been designed and redesigned, and they run on a very particular network – call it an AV network – which is not standardised. As a consequence if you want to combine visualisation over different sites you run into hurdles. On a panel at one of the first ISEs, I think it was in 2007, I was asked, will HD videoconferencing break the rules and be used everywhere? I said yes,
but only if the interface is as easy to use as a mobile phone. It’s to do with having the same look and feel everywhere. The only way you can do this is by making use of an existing IT infrastructure. This offers you several benefits. First, it’s already there, and second, if there is one infrastructure in a company that is heavily maintained, made secure and kept up to date, it’s the IT infrastructure.
Presumably this thinking goes wider than the corporate example you mention? Far wider. For instance in healthcare, inside a surgery room, some conditions dominate your choice of equipment. Previously there would be zillions of cables, matrix switchers and touchpanels. But they need to be able to clean this by spraying water everywhere. In our
Dirk Hendrickx – a brief biography
Dirk Hendrickx joined Barco in 1997, as vice president/general manager, control rooms. He became vice president EMEA and vice president EMEAILA of Barco NV, rising to his current role of vice president strategic marketing industrial & government in 2013
Previous employers include Uniden, a wireless communication equipment manufacturer, and Philips Professional Systems
He has a Masters degree in industrial engineering from KAHO in Ghent, and also studied strategic management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School
healthcare division we’ve created a network-centric solution where the only thing you have is a network cable, and this could be wireless, where you can see everything under glass without touching it. All the applications, videos or analysis that you need are in front of you before you start the surgery.
‘The big opportunity for the AV world is to convince the whole user community that it makes a lot of sense to make proper use of AV’
Another example is inside
control rooms. Traditionally people have worked with a big overview. But we see a migration towards the operators – they want to access any data anywhere, and they don’t want their workstations sitting under their desks. So we see a migration of those workstations into a server room – and they need to be able to access these in a network-centric way. Again, they will make use of standardised networks to assess, control and manage that data.
One point you made when we last spoke was that endpoints are becoming more commoditised and so AV expertise is
migrating towards networks, connections and communications. Where will that trend end?
Ultimately it will end in software running, perhaps, on FPGAs that are decoding those specific AV signals. If you have zillions of AV cables or signals today, you could package them over an IT network – and then it’s about how you deploy
them, manage them and make them available. So ultimately you will have standardised hardware using hardware or software decoders (depending on the quality and latency that you want) to regenerate and recomposite images for whatever display there is.
But presumably there will still be real-world AV knowledge that
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