Name: Samuel Recine
Company: Matrox
Title: Director of Sales – Americas Asia Pacific
Why is it important for your company to attend InfoComm?
InfoComm’s population has been changing for the better. Last year, 50 per cent of attendees were AV/IT knowledge workers and even executives from government and enterprise end-users. These people are fast and smart. They have forward-thinking and a deep grasp of short-, medium-, and long-term trends with regard to technologies in AV and IT and what they wish to evolve in their organizations to meet their AV/IT needs. AV technology vendors and AV channels have not kept pace with their customers in a lot of cases. And Matrox had FOUR TIMES the number of conversations last year (versus previous years) at InfoComm with organizations that are taking more control over the scoping out of AV/IT projects in-house. That’s not to say all vendors and channels in AV are “bad”. Far from it. But there is a widening gap between those trying to sell a new version of the old scene – and this not connecting with a vast majority of end-customers – versus those that are making the necessary skills, relationship, technological, and products/services shift to adapt to the times.
Matrox is a core technology supplier. While some of our products are purchased directly by end-users, we also sell a great deal of our technology to companies that make AV and IT products for the industry. InfoComm is important to Matrox because we are connecting directly to the people who can communicate their pain points and ambitions: the users. This helps Matrox arm our OEM, integrator, and service partners with all the help we can muster to meet the dynamic communications, presentation, video management, large campus, multi-site, and cloud AV ambitions of the end customers.
What can people expect from you at the show?
It’s a big year for Matrox and our fleet of OEM partners! The end users do not intend to repeat the mistake of buying proprietary equipment like HDBaseT again. As the market has shifted towards AV-over-IP for everything from conferencing systems, to intelligent video archiving solutions, to digital signage technology, to control room AV & IT, and large-scale facilities AV management, they are not buying into high bit-rate and proprietary technologies.
Matrox and our peers have been showing the market for years that they could achieve quality, latency, and performance at orders-of-magnitude less bandwidth versus low-end products and using true standards-based technology versus single-source proprietary technology. And bandwidth is everything! It represents the ability to scale, the ability to share more existing and future assets, the ability to leverage cloud technologies, and the ability to maintain quality and performance…instead of maintaining two entirely parallel infrastructures such as those that suggest users should have enormous high-bandwidth local infrastructures to handle local AV and “something else” to use enterprise communications software over cloud, enterprise video management suites, and cloud-based products and services.
Gateways and conversion products are not the answer. Products designed to handle the performance requirements of local environments but operating on standards-based, low-bitrate technology compatible with cloud-based applications is the answer. We will be showing a Matrox-Panopto Enterprise Video Management solution for state-of-the-art, advanced, intelligent, real-time streaming and VOD video management for private AV. We will be showing a 4Kp60 4:4:4 KVM solution with no perceivable latency running at 1/80of the bandwidth of some of the stuff being proposed by some vendors that requires a whopping 10Gb/s bandwidth “PER 4K screen”!
We will be showing an interoperability demo along with Lumens, Cinemassive, Haivision, Wowza, and LiveScale, of the SRT transport protocol which takes great strides in helping to deal with noisy and unpredictable networks and still maintaining high-performance / high-quality video over cloud. We will be showing best-of-breed multi-channel enterprise encoders. And we will be showing IP video walls and multiviewers that are literally replacing all forms of traditional baseband video walls gradually because they are no longer limited by ‘number of channels’, ‘distance’, or ‘being viewed on a single large collection of screens’.
Where can customers find you?
At InfoComm 2018, Matrox will be in booth N1322, North Hall front
