The era of flexible – or, if you will, asynchronous – working is here, and with it a greatly increased need for companies to have access to highly versatile and multi-capability AV infrastructures. All of which means that – coming out of the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic – we seem set for a highly dynamic period of technology renewal throughout the corporate world.
Sony’s latest State of Offices Report, published at the end of August, confirms just how rapidly the expectations of employees have shifted. In tandem with Censuswide, the company surveyed 2,600 white-collar workers, business leaders and CEOs across Europe. In the UK, key findings included an increasing number of respondents (presently 44%) now wanting complete flexibility over where and when they work, indicating that asynchronous working is here to stay. Even more strikingly, 92% of Europe’s office workers claimed that – when done right and “enabled properly” by their employer – asynchronous working benefits them in terms of their productivity (33%), mental health (30%), work-life balance (40%) and stress levels (37%).
This should not be construed, however, as a rejection of the office. Indeed, the report found that 51% of UK office workers still prefer to be based out of a dedicated company office, with the figure rising to 53% for the whole of Europe. But with 79% of UK workers calling for improvements to the company office, and 85% of all meetings now including at least one remote participant, the scope for renewing and upgrading audio-video systems is plain to see.
While many companies still have a lot of work to do, the robust levels of demand reported by all those interviewed for this article indicate that many have now got the message and at least initiated the process of AV renewal. Moreover, it is also apparent that the technologies which will facilitate the asynchronous working revolution – from automated cameras and enhanced audio to AI data-driven management platforms – are increasingly in place and ready to go.
ACCELERATED TRAJECTORY
It is the consensus view that, although this transformation had begun pre-pandemic, it has picked up significant headway since the crisis faded. Marcus-Michael Müller, head of UC Europe at Yamaha, pinpoints several of the most important developments.
“Although hybrid working was already on the rise pre-pandemic (4.3% in 2015 to 5.2% in 2019, according to the ONS), the post-pandemic world has rapidly accelerated the trajectory and forced many companies into re-thinking their technological strategies with a much shorter-term viewpoint. This has resulted in corporate clients now actively seeking out new technologies for meeting room spaces, town hall spaces, even open working spaces that would have been left as standalone meeting rooms previously without an emphasis on technology.”
“There is certainly a technology renewal phase underway in many companies, driven by the changing nature of work,” says Nicole Corbin, VP business ops at AV and UC intelligent management, monitoring and software provider Utelogy. “Corporations are not only updating their existing AV and IT infrastructure, but also actively exploring new technologies such as AI-driven analytics, IoT integrations, and connected workspace systems.”
Crestron director of product marketing Lauren Simmen observes that “refresh cycles are normally pretty scattered around”, but that the new requirements arising during the pandemic era led to a “singular wave of refresh cycles [with] everybody jumping at getting newer technologies to make sure they could get video conferencing into their rooms, and the collaboration tools and devices they needed.” A few years on, and with hybrid operations more familiar, organisations are “getting into a more structured work environment and realising [which] tools their employees need to be successful”.
PRECISE REQUIREMENTS
More knowledge also translates to increasingly precise requirements. Matt Morgan is business development manager, corporate solutions at Ross Video: “According to insights from OpenText, more than 80% of CEOs anticipate an uptick in their technology investments. However, the present challenge lies in decision-makers scrutinising purchases more rigorously than in previous years. So while the AV market remains strong and is expected to see a surge in sales (projected to grow from $263 billion to over $350 billion by 2027 according to AVIXA insights), as providers of technology solutions our focus remain on providing high quality and flexible solutions that resonate with the evolving need of our customers.”
In the next few sections, we’ll take a look at a few of the primary areas in which corporate customers are presently scrutinising solutions – and making investments accordingly.
As a company specialising in the design, engineering and support of AV, UC and collaboration solutions, Kinly is well-placed to chart the evolution of meeting technology requirements over the past few years. Anthony Lear, Kinly’s AVL design engineer, notes that “when people started going back to the office [in bigger numbers] there was a surge in people enquiring about new technologies”. But from a phase of initial conversations, “we’re now seeing clients really nailing down what they want to do, and then pushing projects ahead a lot quicker” – a trend that has also been aided by the gradual easing of equipment supply chain issues.
Increasingly, companies are tending to settle on an approach where employees come into the office for “two or three days” per week. Infrastructure-wise, notes Lear, this is leading to “less of a focus on individual meeting spaces and more on slightly bigger rooms to accommodate a minimum of about six people, but that allow more collaboration to take place. [In addition], we’re seeing more companies looking at equipping bigger meeting rooms and ‘town hall’ type areas.”
Standardising on a communication platform continues to be an important driver of change, and for Kinly there has been a “massive uptake in Microsoft Teams; a lot of businesses are now on an Office 365 subscription, and increasingly everything is going cloud-based which makes it easier for the IT teams to [activate and manage]. Also, people want the same experience in the office as they do at home, so it has to be seamless” – hence the choice of a platform that most people have become increasingly familiar with over the past few years.
James Spencer is business development director, video – EMEA north for audio & video-conferencing technology company Jabra, whose solutions include the PanaCast 50 video bar that combines audio for ‘more natural conversations’ with a 180-degree field of view and AI-driven intelligent camera experiences. “A lot of customers [now have working patterns where people] are in the office for maybe three days then at home for two, which can lead to a sort of over-subscription within offices on, for example, Tuesday to Thursday,” he says. “So from an AV standpoint, not only do those rooms need to be kitted out in the right way, there might be further spaces that [require new equipment to be] used as a sort of overflow.”
“With more people working fully remotely or on hybrid schedules post-Covid, it has only supported the need for corporations to refresh the technology in their meeting spaces as more and more team meetings include both in-person and remote participants,” says Clint Hoffman, president of Lightware Americas, Lightware Visual Engineering, whose solutions in the collaboration space include the Taurus UCX line of Universal Matrix Switchers.
IMPROVED MEETINGS
Not surprisingly, priority number one for many companies is ensuring that all participants in a meeting – wherever they are located – can have a comparable and consistently high-quality experience. Referencing the aforementioned statistic about 85% of UK meetings having a remote participant, Adam Dover – senior trade and segment marketing manager at Sony Europe – confirms that “if you’re nearly always going to have a remote attendee, then you want them to feel included and really part of the meeting.”
Technologies cited by Dover as helping to improve the meeting experience for all include LED displays: “We’re seeing those starting to take off, especially in the larger meeting rooms, boardrooms or communal spaces [employed for] town halls. They’re also being used as part of webcasts and filming, too.”
Talking of video capture, the streamlining of capture and transportation is another growing priority for some organisations. Alluding to the multiple options currently greeting corporations, Morgan remarks: “2110, fiber, NDI, HDMI, SDI… the list goes on and on with buzzwords and standards of how to transport video from one place to another. Whether you’re looking for ways to deliver content for digital signage, a speech by your CEO or live streaming a keynote speaker, there are countless ways to push and deliver content.”
Ross’ response to the call for a solution that can help accomplish all these objectives is Hyperconverged. “We define Hyperconverged as one piece of equipment that can do the task of multiple pieces of equipment while still performing its core task and with our Hyperconverged platform, we are able to merge multiple pieces of equipment into a single, unified platform,” says Morgan.
“With a Hyperconverged Solution, you can quickly and easily add software-defined features throughout the platform to solve problems without the need to add any external equipment.”
Meanwhile, from an audio perspective, improved speech reinforcement is a common priority across the board. More integrated ceiling microphones to capture in-person speech for the purposes of remote contributors is a popular request. Similarly, demand for software and hardware solutions that can improve the acoustical experience of meeting spaces also continues to grow. Needless to say, these systems also need to be easy to manage and operate, sometimes by staff without a technical background.
For Yamaha, Müller confirms an ongoing focus on business audio “for the best speech intelligibility and audio quality in any kind of environment. [For example] the Yamaha ADECIA family of pro-audio conferencing solutions enable organisations from SME to enterprise to overcome implementation, configuration and room acoustic challenges”.
Along with the newly released CS-500 video collaboration system and CS-800 video sound bar for smaller huddle spaces and personal offices, Yamaha has a range of products able to “serve different purposes within a corporate environment with one aim – to provide an entire solution to the end-user that is easy to manage, and gives the highest quality results, all under one roof”.
Chris Merrick, senior director, global marketing integrated systems at Shure, observes that in light of sudden changes to requirements in recent years some companies “purchased the wrong conferencing equipment based on the wrong criteria”. This issue has created what the global study conducted by IDC [an IDC Infobrief, sponsored by Shure] calls the ‘circle of frustration’: where poor audio quality is not helping solve communication and culture challenges of hybrid working. “In order to break the circle of frustration and to help teams improve productivity, organisations need to involve the right decision-makers who understand and can invest in the right conferencing technology,” says Merrick.
Fortunately, he adds, “appropriate stakeholders” are now being included increasingly often in the decision-making process, leading to a demand for “high-quality conferencing equipment with more intelligent, flexible solutions that can integrate both in-person and virtual attendees”. Shure’s solutions in this area include the Microflex Ecosystem portfolio of networked products – ranging from microphones to DSP and loudspeakers – with the latest addition, due for launch in January 2024, being the MXA901 Conferencing Ceiling Array Microphone with Single Zone Automatic Technology: “[Consequently] audio professionals can ensure efficient and powerful communication in every hybrid working environment.”
NETWORK SECURITY
With a perceived backdrop of escalating security threats affecting both the public and private sectors – not least through a sustained rise in DDoS and ransomware attacks – it’s to be expected that the emphasis on security has also increased. Lear confirms: “Companies in general are a lot more security-conscious. They want more use of closed networks as well as things like 802.1X [IEEE standard for encryption and authentication]. They also want to know exactly what is going on to the network, the security standards the equipment complies with, and so on. So I would say that awareness of security issues is very high now.”
Opinions over the desirability of combined network infrastructures – with everything inside an organisation essentially sitting on one network – continue to differ between service providers and vendors. In an increasingly challenging security environment, it may make more sense to keep, for example, mission-critical building and IT systems separate from AV. The nature of the organisation’s business – financial and legal services firms, for instance, have to comply with specific regulations – will also be instructive, so it’s not surprising that vendors in general seem keen to accommodate different approaches.
Yamaha’s Müller observes: “Although VPNs for remote workers have been standardised for many years now, the requirement for more technology to sit on a corporate network has become a security and safeguarding concern for many.
“Yamaha have taken the steps with the ADECIA system to separate our Dante network actually entirely (for audio transmission, control etc) and the corporate network. This means the security risk is nullified; however, there is flexibility in that the two can be brought together if required via software.”
Merrick adds: “We recognise that communicating confidentiality is important for organisations installing such sophisticated conferencing equipment, which is why we build our solutions with Shure Audio Encryption, [which] ensures audio content is protected among all Shure Microflex Ecosystem devices in the room.
“Beyond technology, there are also aspects in education and trainings for IT teams that will help ensure security precautions are being managed. For example, through the SAI [Shure Audio Institute] we not only help audio professionals understand how to optimise our audio solutions, but also how to apply the best practices for security.”
Perhaps inevitably given its present salience in industry circles, and wider society, the subject of AI also came up during multiple interviews for this article. However, whilst its potential to make data collection and informed decision-making seems pretty clear, it could be a while yet before fully-formed corporate applications become prevalent.
For Adam Dover, there is likely to be a big role for AI in automating “mundane tasks and freeing up your time and resources to do other things”. He recommends a focus on “how we can use it to optimise what we do rather than it being a worry about taking away resources and things like that”.
Wayne Gratton, chief commercial officer of collaboration solutions provider Nuvias UC, says: “Technologies such as [AI], machine learning, blockchain, and the Internet of Things are gaining traction in various industries. Companies are exploring how these technologies can enhance their operations, automate repetitive tasks, and provide valuable insights for decision-making.”
BROADENING HORIZONS
The impression of a sector where horizons are continuing to broaden is reinforced by Gratton’s comment about emerging areas of interest. “Cloud computing is another area where corporate clients are actively investing, allowing them to scale their infrastructure, improve collaboration, and enhance data accessibility,” he says. “[Also], augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are finding applications in training, product demonstrations and virtual meetings.”
Suffice to say, it’s a sector where the present state of ‘dynamic evolution’ shows no signs of changing any time soon.
