Welcome to our first ever Biamp blog post.  I’m pleased to be the one from our company to submit the first post, particularly given the enormous amount of opportunity and change currently present within our industry.  I believe we’re on the verge of what promises to be a very interesting Infocomm show this week.

This year at Infocomm, there will undoubtedly be a number of notable product introductions, announcements, and valuable exchanges of information as old friends and colleagues converge on Orlando.  Given the increasingly rapid convergence of AV and IT, one of the most interesting technologies to watch is AVB.  It is being increasingly considered one of the most important developments in the industry at this time, and Biamp has fully embraced it.   There are a growing number of prominent and recognizable member companies in the AVnu Alliance, and I believe it will be at the center of many discussions on and around the show floor.

On the business front, the industry itself has recently experienced a smattering of interesting acquisitions and alliances in the video conferencing space.  These look to be less about gaining efficiencies through consolidation, and more about strategic alignments across the full range of the market.  The most notable acquisition of a gargantuan size is the purchase of Skype by Microsoft at $8.5 billion.  Other deals include those by Cisco in their acquisition of Tandberg, LifeSize by Logitech, and Halo from HP by Polycom.  All of these are of great interest to us as an industry, and all of them are indicative of the further blending of AV and IT, and evolving UC space at a rapid pace.

As the landscape of the industry continues to shift, there are some constants that remain steadfast in these most dynamic of times for us.  The first is quality and the second is reliability.  In our case, we’re very focused on the quality of our products and the tools we provide for integrators to ensure that the output from any of our systems is of the highest quality.  Any professional application whether it be a business, school, or courtroom cannot tolerate poor quality.  Desktop conferencing over a public network where video may freeze, or audio may echo or drop, appears to be tolerable to consumers.  However, in a business setting where workgroups must collaborate, there is no place for frozen screens, or unintelligible audio.  The output must be high quality, and the products and their performance must be solidly reliable.   Biamp has always valued both and for that reason has focused on quality by building all of our DSP products in our own factory in Beaverton.  We were also one of the first companies to achieve EN 54-16 life safety certification in Europe and most recently, ISO 9001 certification.   Our own design and manufacturing capacity, coupled with our support and sales organizations spread around the world focus on delivering quality and reliability every day.

We’ll be making the largest product introduction in our company history at this Infocomm.  It continues the evolution of our Networked Media Systems concept and it is an amazing product.  We’ll also have other product news as well for Vocia, Audia, and Nexia users.

Markets, customers, and technologies are changing at a fast rate, which means that Biamp is moving quickly to remain ahead of the curve.  I believe our introductions at Infocomm will reflect that and you can continue to expect the same quality you’ve always experienced with us.

Wherever you may be traveling from to get to Orlando, I hope you have a safe trip and that you’ll stop by to visit us at booth (#1033) during the show.