One of the most striking observations from exhibitors at this year’s UCX London event, at the Excel on October 1-2, was about the changing composition of attendees, a shift that mirrors the broader convergence of IT and AV disciplines. Mark Ridgwell, senior business development manager at Crestron, said he was seeing “more lanyards with ‘modern workplace manager’ on them” at the unified communications showcase.
Ridgwell explained: “Traditionally, we are an AV house, and we would have our AV customers. Now we’re seeing much more of a unified team from the end user space… We have been introduced at this year’s show to new IT-focused customers with Teams and Zoom. The same AV manager might be the same IT manager, or they’re working inside the same modern workplace team.”
He added: “It’s not so much about saying ‘that’s an AV appliance, I don’t need that near my network’. It’s much more about incorporating the technology into the network. It’s now about taking the traditions of what Crestron have done and seeing how that can be explored in the modern UC environment.”
John McGinley sales EMEA, Neat, echoed Ridgwell’s sentiments. He said: “There’s a lot more crossover in terms of technology. This year’s we’ve seen some new names here, as well as manufacturers coming to the market with new solutions.”
Several exhibitors emphasised the value of the intimacy of a smaller trade show with a narrower focus, allowing in-depth interactions on the booths.
Chris Brzostowski, regional sales manager at Lightware Visual Engineering, commented: “You are able to have more quality conversations. You’re not so time-constrained as at ISE when you have back-to-back meetings and someone standing next to you waiting for you to be free, so you actually have a bit more time to have those discussions and talk through the solutions.”
Adam Ferguson, business development manager at Q-SYS UK, highlighted the value of direct engagement with end users, who increasingly want to understand technologies first-hand rather than relying solely on integrators and consultants. He explained: “I think there’s been a big shift in end users wanting to potentially not lean on integrators and consultants for all of their audiovisual knowledge. They’re wanting to see what manufacturers are now doing, what innovation we’re presenting to the market, because it is a really rapidly changing industry.”
Ashton Richards from Shure, attending UCX for the first time, found the show valuable for brand awareness. “There’s a lot of people that come to the stand who either haven’t heard of us, or think that we’re only known for the SM58 microphone in pro audio, so they don’t actually know that we’re in that conferencing market or UC market.”
The conversations at UCX reflected the rapid evolution of the unified comms sector, with AI and data-driven insights emerging as dominant themes. Ferguson described Q-SYS’s vision of becoming “a full stack AV platform” that uses in-room peripherals to gather data about room usage. “Using the ‘cognitive cloud’ to understand how my rooms are being used – that’s the vision of Q-SYS where we’re seeing the industry move, and it’s interesting to see other vendors and other people talking about that.”
He noted that AI was already being implemented in practical applications: “With our vision suite and our presenter tracking solution, that is using computer vision AI to determine, is this person human? Are they walking? I want to track them in a certain space, and then we want to trigger certain events to happen just by that person walking into a space.”
One highlight that multiple exhibitors mentioned was the keynote from Ilya Bukshteyn, corporate vice president for Microsoft Teams Calling. The session, entitled “The Teams Upgrade: Advancing Communications and Collaboration for the Modern Workplace”, drew a packed audience.
McGinley said: “I was in the main theatre yesterday when Ilya from Microsoft was delivering his talk, and it was very well attended by a lot of end user decision makers around unified communications and AV. It was pretty packed. I had to get there a bit early to get my seat, but it was good to see where they are taking Teams.”
Bukshteyn’s presentation was part of a rich series over the two days, reflecting this year’s show’s overall themes of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation; cloud migration and consolidation; people-powered and hybrid work; security and compliance; and integrated workspaces.
