I’m just now getting a chance to sit down and capture a few thoughts following a very busy InfoComm show for Biamp. Between Tesira® presentations and customer meetings, it was the rare occasion that I got out to walk the show floor a bit, but when I did the show attendance seemed healthy. I think though that the show was bigger than in years past, so at times it felt as though there was little less general floor traffic than usual. It is my understanding that the attendance was higher than the last show in Orlando.
It’s hard for me to say now where the industry might be headed between here and ISE 2012. If I had to guess, I would say that I expect there to be a run up to a significant number of product introductions at ISE. InfoComm seemed a bit light on new products, but I suspect that is just because companies were not ready to announce their new products yet.
The AVnu Pavilion had a number of companies participating showing how AVB enabled products can communicate. This was certainly good to see and definitely where I see the industry heading.
AVB has been a long time in the making. The AVnu Alliance is doing a lot of work with regard to interoperability of products, and that work is going to continue over the next six months or so and is vital to the acceptance and growth of AVB. For the longest time now we’ve needed a similar language that all manufacturers can use to communicate with each other. CobraNet solved that problem initially, but as technology has improved and demand for more bandwidth increased exponentially, we needed to start to look for something else and AVB was the answer.
AVB uses intelligent switches that know what to do with AVB packets. It means that facilities need only one network to run data for email, servers, etc. and the switches will know what to do with AVB traffic on the same network. Using AVB, an IT manager can have a mixed network. They no longer need to be parallel and I think that’s a giant step forward and a radical shift in design philosophy for our customers. I don’t think it will happen right away — we’re definitely converging more but it’s not done yet.
As you may know, our new product Tesira incorporates AVB transport protocol. I was very happy to see it launch at InfoComm — it’s a product we’ve been working on for some time now and it’s great to finally see the hard work of the entire Biamp team come to fruition, and get a very positive response on top of that. I’m hoping that it was evident to those who visited us during the show what we’re doing here at Biamp and where our heads are at as far as design methodology. If it wasn’t evident in Orlando, it will be — there is certainly more to come.