INTERVIEW: DIRK HENDRICKX, BARCO 19
integrators need: How big should the videowall be? Where should we put it? You surprise me with these questions because most AV specialists haven’t asked them. But you’re right: it’s about ergonomics, what are you going to do with this, what kind of data do you want to see, how are you going to work with this, how is it going to affect your workflow? These questions are seldom asked by AV specialists and sometimes even consultants. It’s all about providing a display on which people can really work. In some cases you see people running displays that are too large, where they don’t really know what to do with all that resolution. In some ways it’s like
building a house. A good architect shouldn’t ask you how many bedrooms you want – they should ask, how do you want to live? So that they can configure an environment in which you’ll feel good. We see similar mistakes in the AV world. When we ask those ‘challenging’ questions to end users, like ‘What are you going to do with it?’, some of them say, ‘What do you mean’? But that’s what it’s all about. It’s a secondary transition that the AV world had better try to make – seeing the purpose, seeing what kind of application the equipment will be used for.
So are you saying that AV integrators should be thinking more like consultants? They at least should understand what the customer is trying to achieve with building an expensive infrastructure. For instance in control
rooms, there is the debate between super-narrow bezel LCDs or rear- projection cubes. Many people say they could live with the seams, but many of those control rooms are being used for 15 or 20 years, so you really need to consider what the best solution is. Once you’ve built an AV
infrastructure, the cost of the AV part is often negligible versus the surrounding costs. The cost of maintaining the AV infrastructure is often not considered.
Is migration to the network a positive or negative change? The change is positive – there are so many opportunities for AV people, because many IT people don’t understand anything about AV. In some corporations IT is taking over the infrastructure responsibilities as well. In many cases, for small AV integration, you can see the IT department hesitating: should we take this on or leave it to the food and beverage department? I say food and beverage department because AV is seen as a consumable.
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. If I want to convince someone, I put together some PowerPoint slides and I lead the meeting, I lead the way of thinking. That’s what we have as an advantage in this industry, but we have to be careful that we don’t throw it away. That’s the threat, but the opportunity is there: make sure you combine visuals with multi-site collaboration, and you run
it over the IP infrastructure which is out there and under-used as of today. That’s also the big strategy of Barco: we have visualisation components; we are working heavily on collaboration – Clickshare is a nice example; and the next big pillar is network infrastructure components.
What do you see as the barriers to this change?
This thing with networking is so logical that the only thing that could be hindering us is resilience
and resistance from integrators and fear from consultants. We are working with probably the largest AV consultant worldwide, and he said, “If I design something for a large corporation, it has to work for certain. With IT, I’m not too sure.”
So what is happening right now is we need a proof of concept for the end-user. It’s per se less expensive – there’s no need to build a second infrastructure. But the capabilities… You build your network and expand it, in
terms of size and capability, as technology the evolves (and it evolves faster than any AV market, as the market is much larger). When I need to decode more show more, combine more, all I need do is add more standard hardware. As a consequence I’m buying something that is futureproof. If I need to change anything, I simply add applications. I grow with an ever growing and changing market.
www.barco.com
August 2014
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