Evangelistic. That’s the best way of describing Dave Labuskes, CEO of AVIXA, when it comes to his enthusiasm for ISE. “Yes, I am evangelical about it,” he told Installation editor Rob Lane for The ISE Daily, as ISE 2022 prepared to fully open its doors in Barcelona for the first time.
“There’s been an enormous amount of [vendor] innovation, development and investment into what will be shared with everybody over the coming days. And that is testament to the resilience of the AV profession and community,” he went on.
“The beauty of these events, the really fundamental part of what they deliver from our perspective as an industry association, is the ability for the entire ecosystem – from buyer to integrator to manufacturer – to share and gather, and discover and reaffirm relationships, and at the same time make a commercially viable offer.”
Labuskes was equally enthusiastic about the city of Barcelona, and its role in this new phase for ISE; in fact he believes that the city was destined to host the event. “How do we carry on reinforcing and evolving that indescribable part of the ISE show?” he mused. “When you close your eyes, and you think about London, Dusseldorf, Paris, Barcelona – and try to picture where it belongs – it starts to become almost sort of obvious that Barcelona had to carry things forward for us.”
He concluded that Barcelona had been “extraordinary” for ISE. “It’s been a fantastic partner through our beginning times together, and through this most difficult period; it has just reaffirmed the choice that we made. We are so pleased to be here, the city has rolled out the red carpet for us, as well as aligning a huge number of resources to get us to where we are this week, as well as to carry us forward.”
