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this is a software defined survival where we explore how software defined systems are changing the business of IT today software defined survival there’s no reason and technological landscape that we’re in today to have a control processor in every room you know why not have one that drives everything and if you’re going to have one that drives everything wise after software these days you know scalability if we have to rewrite the code time don’t get any of the benefits that you need to get out of it it just becomes more less conventional system the previous model we designed a system for what’s available today and some or all of what the customer asked for and then we put that system and then we come back at the end when they don’t want to and we do that exact same thing again as engineers as programmers we’re really good at making complexity even though our whole job is to eliminate at welcome my name is Patrick Murray and today’s guest on software defined survival got his start in theater lighting and sound before moving on to be an AB technician programmer and engineer he’s also a member of the leadership committee for the association for quality in audio visual or AQ AV dot org where he’s also Sir where he also serves on the organization’s steering committee for the past several years and if that wasn’t enough he’s also designed and implemented the quality assurance practices that led to the first AV provider excellence program or eight packs the first certification of that from a big seller in the world so please welcome sheen Springer Shane welcome good morning Patrick is going to be here how is that introduction is there anything you’d like to correct or expand upon we know the real problem with that looking at the link then about a true generalist doesn’t cover the time always arborists are mine on software development hobbyists where it stands right up and you got book about excellent so yet tell us a little bit more about your software endeavors hobbyist or professional or otherwise absolutely though and as you mentioned I started the down a programming track years ago in a traditionally be tracks start on a mac side all of that up with some Crestron work and you know is this money for me because my father actually was %HESITATION in IT so I grew up in and I still remember the %HESITATION the exultation seein that cal pattern box come in the house since we got our first computer and what was that I was a a gateway with standard that I can’t even tell you what was this farm and I was probably six years old at that point but you know that growing up in that I. T. you know kind of structure and going to work with my dad you know I’ve seen a lot of these systems start to grow in a software became more important yeah he was a minister or a mix or you know things like blackboard so in those early days it was a lot of custom code it was a lot of you know new introductions to web services for people and I’ve kind of what I grew up and so when I came over to the side it was you know like a time machine going back and seeing now here we are and see I didn’t know they were still using say so that was a an interesting experience around like you know core tramp but you know that coming into that kind of software world gave me an early taste I think of wanting to do something different you know wanting to be a part of moving those things forward so I have been one of the you know earlier folks in the industry that has been playing with raspberry pi and really seeing you know where job rational and so can factor in and finding as I know you have as well that you know in a lot of cases the equipment inside the industry beyond what I’m you know playing with is just not ready for this kind of communications so that’s kind of been my my AV software experience up for the first several years of that career nice I I I like the way that’s come up a few times like %HESITATION having some kind of computer in the house as a child that was my experience as well we had an apple to see and I remember banging around with basic and just the other day I I had to show my son control alt delete which was kind of interesting so you still have something to teach the right yeah exactly so tell us a little bit about %HESITATION what you’ve been doing with the raspberry pi a lot of what I find you know I I come out see in the industry that there for a long time they were kind of story segments right to how we do integration there was the smaller kind of commodities based you know a lot more education thirty five seven saying simple cheap room and then that and are in the middle you have the more complicated grams you know little theaters your class and stuff like that and staying about education model and then you had being custom spaces in auditoriums and stuff like that and what I’ve kind of noticed is that it seems like you know the waters are parting as it were and the the middle of that spectrum is gonna start to go away and we’re finding a lot more commodity space stuff and a lot more you know high and extremely detailed custom so that was originally why I started playing with the choir was you know how can we take that lower and commodities and really make it a lot more efficient you know there’s no reason in there now technological landscape that we’re in today to have a control processor in every room you know why do you not have one that drives everything and if you’re gonna have one that drives everything or why they have to be a thousand dollars the fifty dollar machine do the same bank and that was kind of what really drew me into experimenting more with the raspberry PI know especially is displays more and more are able to be powered on you know it’s relatively simple to get somebody a basic interface that lets them next time a day and then go to your IP addresses of your displays and bam it all turn out the same time to turn off sametime stuff like that so now we’ve been experimenting a little bit more with stating that next step further and integrating into calendar even %HESITATION so that they turn on when they’re needed internal when they’re not which is not revolutionary per se people have been doing that for you know a decade or more but being able to do that in a kind of more IT friendly hardware form no more I do friendly software where they feel they can modify that internally as they need to and in a way that gives them a little bit more visibility to security %HESITATION both at the network layer and physically I think it’s been really kind of interesting as I started working with people for those types of systems so you mention security and I definitely wanna circle back to that so %HESITATION please don’t let me forget it but in the introduction I I forgot to mention what company you’re working for now tell us a little bit about where you’re working is it an integrator and what your responsibilities there and then I’d like to know how the raspberry ties in to the business model that company absolutely I’m so become their records one workplace they are a pretty big enough company in California that probably most people haven’t heard of they’re one of the largest steel case dealers on the west coast and that kind of presented sound interesting working format for me as I work inside and be integration firm that lives inside of that sticky mess I’m our owner is in our chat a family company so when they took the reigns over and we’re looking at near where the industry was going next where they traditionally have an office versions company they decided to diversify and a big part of that was fulfilling the needs of the rest of the commercial space which was a large part of what they were serving at the time so they looked at the technology inside the conference rooms and we also have a interesting construction division that does your modular walls and stuff like that but because of my position inside of what for many intensive seven tiered design company %HESITATION one workplaces fun challenge for me as a designer because I get a really good conduit to the folks that you know now we’re really starting to talk about and you know it makes a world of you know the folks that really drive a static you know it’s not just the architects anymore in a lot of cases it’s interior design berms or you know just commercial punishing companies that are driving a lot of these stations and that’s give me a good opportunity to design with a design in mind %HESITATION you know we use that term human centered design yeah and one workplace is a great example of that especially in America did your business which you know has always been driven by you know user consultation and really interacting with everybody to make sure that they’ve captured what people are looking for people instead of justice you know business returns so talking about what we’re doing on the raspberry pi front right now we’re in kind of a development phase on a couple of different smaller things but a big thrust of what we’re looking at for is your asset management active monitoring and you know having an ability to take a lot of our existing customers that you know may or may not have gotten installations from us in the past and is still serving those customers daily as you know that service resource in that are constant contact by going in and taking over other systems as well to do in a kind of that monitoring portion of it and make sure that whatever system I got stays healthy that’s pretty interesting I like the the way that you talk while the position that you’re in right so it was a furniture company so maybe they don’t have as much baggage of %HESITATION the way things are done in AV or the business model is an already in place for selling equipment on margin which gives you a lot of freedom as coming into this space with with kind of a new eyes and without the restraints of of the past and I also think it’s interesting absolutely true okay so I think it’s also interesting that now that you’re looking at existing systems how you could reach new life into them with asset management and and system monitoring and this is kind of maybe something that any integrator could kind of think about is you know how do we add more value and I think %HESITATION things like collecting data and monitoring are great services or a great opportunity to do that can you talk a little bit more about how you’re kind of executing on that about how you’re rolling those kind of systems out or what are your plans on what technologies are gonna be using for sure no it’s come out when we originally looked at at %HESITATION I had this this voice in the back of my head and in my case the voice in the back of my head is named Paul Sealey works for harm and they were he always says you know there’s a life cycle of the traditionally the room it’s about eight years first three everybody loves it the first next three everybody’s ambivalent in the last year everybody hates it and then the integrator walks and and you know that is kind of the empty desert you know let’s let’s change that model let’s get in there before everyone he said and actually get the opportunity to figure out you know what what they like about it when they don’t a big part of what a system like that looks like my mind is you know just basic data collection and being able to do that in such a way that it actually is applicables you know human interpret ball because you take an example like neon does the display turn on that’s easy you know that’s simple binary function but if you really want to know do people use the display that’s not the same power status so being able to more intelligently and contextually look at those kind of things where you can say you know I need to correlate not only is this way on is the HDMI something sank and is it something sank for the you know entire duration without interruption because that may be a synthetic positive where somebody has their stuff like Dan and just leave that so that’s kind of more our focus as we move through this development phase is looking at you know how can we really provide not only the information context that enables but their business decisions and some of that has come from that data side and how we you know correlating see and a lot of it comes from you know the the qualitative side rather than the quantitative and really talking to the users of the stakes talking to the support staff you know I know I don’t have to tell you there is nothing more valuable than the perspective of the guy has to fix the room that is where you find every single problem in that room and probably some that aren’t even an issue but he wants you to know about so that that has really been helpful and I think you know for me almost personally transformative to get the ability to really look at systems through such personal human lands figure out what their solution is sending you know kind of back to you’re asking about the you know how do we really implemented that so far it hasn’t been super super direct line you know super linear relationship with that it’s kind of an person by person space by space and that is kind of a a hurdle to overcome when you’re looking at something like that but you know for a lot of people need to be very scalable you know obviously that’s the big point of software these days you know scalability if we have to rewrite the code and reinvent the wheel every single time you don’t get any of the benefits that you need to get out of it it just becomes more less conventional system so that’s something that we’re really actively working on now we got you know smaller demos and violence in place to see how to really address that scalability without losing the human touch and I’ll let you know on the go excellent I I like the way you pointed that out bottom I think it’s important to note that you are getting started right you’re not letting that fear of scaling hold you back which I think is is an important thing to keep an eye on right that there’s nothing wrong with making custom applications to serve a particular clients needs but you and as long as during that progression you you’re keeping your eye on what tools you’re using what could be repackaged what could be made to be a a reusable modular type of a tool and still provide that custom experience for the end user I think that’s that’s the challenge but it’s also the opportunity where where you kind of set yourself apart instead of saying we use asset management tool from manufacture ex you saying we’re going to use are known tools to provide something customized for your needs and %HESITATION the other thing I took away from that was you mention this AV system life cycle and talking to the tax and they’ll give you the answers that kind of reminded me of agile software development where you kind of constantly upgrading systems based on user feedback do you have any thoughts on yeah I mean I think if you look at you know really any process in you know imagines mine no involvement in it you will be which is ultimately you know process look at you know can’t do you look at the design process look at you know as a software development they all are a circle and that’s extremely important even you know flashing back to %HESITATION the design days in on Donaldson the father of human centered design even his process is completely circular because ultimately if you know what you do you can you know what I consider to have been the previous AB model we designed a system for what’s available today and some or all of what the customer asked for and then we put that system in then we come back at the end when they don’t want anymore and we do that exact same thing again yeah but it was a different room because the industry has changed but we in no way had you know handed we were just kind of responding to whatever the environment wise and giving you something I’m asking where is today I think the model is shipped in both at a customer level and what’s expected but also you know very slowly at an even greater level of how we really interface with those kind of processes and you know collecting information and feedback you know in the end of the cycle we talked about where everyone hates it is a very different experience and ultimately somewhat less helpful than collecting a lot of the same data mystery you know one of the things that bother me but I’m still happy with the system you know that’s an important difference between the system doesn’t work I never liked it why did we get past and Hey this is something we could improve on the next one maybe it’s not a difference from the development portion but it isn’t Westinghouse development question because you’re getting a lot of that stuff cost much quicker but ultimately I think that that kind of process minded thinking as you you know highlighted it where everything really feeds back into developing a better product is ultimately a real boon to the integrator I know I just listen to the last episode suffered on survival fantastic asked after Murray and the things you mentioned was you know sometimes people are receptive to the system and it’s going to work and they can do it and sometimes people just aren’t and that you know it’s a reality I see as well that you can lead a horse to water but you can drop a lot of horses before you figure out they’re not going to drink and that you know its importance as an integrator to take that brass when somebody brings you a new idea look at it and say Hey how old is this really poised to help me because in the case of that kind of constant feedback cycle not only does it improve your your relationship with the inner with the customer and improve your you know whole business with that customer but you take those same lessons to every customer you touch after that you know all all integrators I would hope are relatively similar to to the experience they have with everyone and take successes and failures to the next one the opportunities to learn so the more feedback you get the more you learn sure it becomes part of your experience and that’s really what we bring to the table more than anything else is is knowing what works what doesn’t and in what situation certain things kind of survive and %HESITATION thanks for mentioning that podcast I was on there was a lot of fun talking to Steve Greenblatt about you know my my journey and I think what you mentioned there are a great example of that is different types of people need a different kind of interface and we’ve always had a touch panel but over the last few years we’ve seen a lot of our products that have seen detection and they don’t even need control anymore because automation is kind of built into the products of the sink acutely and you do the same thing with a motion detector I think the best example of this is his voice control so if you put voice control more in a residential setting perhaps but it may move into commercial settings remains to be seen but if you put a touch panel ends voice control in a home I bet the different people that live in that home will gravitate more towards one or the other and you’ll see different usage and the outcome will be the same right the light will go on or off the music will come on or off but the interface is different and the way it’s controlled from that user is different and I expect to see more interfaces or more different kinds of interfaces in AV moving on yeah I think in many ways it’s important to kind of take into consideration just the different tasks that are relevant states you know an area like a home there are hundreds of different things you can do whereas yeah and you know what smaller commercial space you know medium meeting around you might only have six or seven different things you can do and so ultimately it comes back to focus on that user experience and the complexity as engineers as programmers we’re really good at making complexity even though our whole job is to eliminate that led the constant no internal battle %HESITATION but when we look at things like you know you mentioned pairing two different systems I think that that is very relevant and becomes more relevant as we go forward because something like turn the volume up back to me you know might be easier the button push but something like connect to mine conference with Beijing that might be a voice command you know it’s all about providing multiple access roads and letting people find their path least resistance bands now obviously that can be hard to do with scale but I think that you know you touch on a really good point about just taking that user into account and having people that work in different ways be able to work in different ways and that’s the trend in the commercial and business world today but it hasn’t trickled down to the baby systems as much right because it when you’re in residential you have a home you know exactly who the users are but in an organization you may get an idea for the culture of generally who is working there but it’s still almost like a public space and that’s one of the reasons why half of me believes that voice does have a future in commercial because you have these different types of people and once they get voice control I think they’ll be a segment of people who will never want to give it up and the other reason is it it’ll be easier to implement because like you said there’s just less functions I did a residential job with almost all voice control and we have to print out lists of all the functions that he has so that he could remember what to say and you know he has fifty lighting circuits but in a conference room you’re just gonna have start the meeting stop the meeting ends up maybe a handful of other commands that you use everyday so I even think implementation will will be easier there but that all remains to be seen how that’s going to play out I think it also you know there is saying that when you get systems like voice recognition that rely heavily upon machine learning or you know they’re all medical a I that a lot of the things that comes in a commercial that maybe doesn’t as much in residential is just intellectual property you know business to business do we want a shared pool somewhere in the cloud that has a record of what our people are saying you know that security again comes up and is very very relevant you know more so with voice and more so in the commercial space as we start to see you know I think it was an example I heard on the show not stooping robbing you but you know when somebody says start my meeting and the things I was back all you mean you’re firing everybody meeting that information is extremely sensitive so when you end up even the other way when you say you know John and development says Hey you start my meeting about our new twelve inch I found back it is something that you can’t have scraped out of the internet at any point so how you manage all that data where does things like that become extremely key so having companies that are rare incentives that where you know all our major control systems now do you support those kind of voice functions on the panel but where the data goes after that and as an interface is more more with cloud based machine learning systems how are you managing making sure that you know does same cloud that gives you your TV turning on easily doesn’t also compromise you know your security is in a variety of different ways definitely this kind of comes back to that experience home thing that we’re talking about because as more things get integrated were integrating the calendar well then it’s our job to make people aware you know everything you write in that calendar maybe read back over a speaker and those are just some some of the things that you know that that we as consultants when you’re consulting with somebody that needs to be pointed out and some users will be more comfortable with it than others do you like the garbage routes of the balding workplace exactly and there’s always pros and cons that need to be looked at so you mentioned the UAV can you tell me a little bit more about that because not all systems have the highest quality so what what’s the mission there what’s the mission there and %HESITATION what do you think really is the motivation for anybody in navy to deliver high quality so he is a great organization the big focus is on you know standards based on you know I SO nine thousand style conformance to performance metrics and how we do the process of a you know one example of that is that he is looking for gave prefabrication staging check last not everybody today even does that part of the process you know like I come across a ton of people that steal build everything and I can talk down blue in the face about you know one of the shop through the field all the other things that we say sure yeah let people know that that is probably not the most efficient way to do things but until you have to change not a lot of people are going to so that is a big part of that AKB process is saying this is what you’re looking for and your coming in to say we are in compliance we are doing the best we can to give you the best possible system that I’m adding something like that your process is key it also done follows through with just kind of basic performance metrics and testing you know directives all of that is yeah integrator influencers some cases customer controlled driven by you know establishing early on what you want a system to do so that you can know at the end that you did that you know there is an old box an old kind of AB guide guy that goes around in this truck delivering random sound systems that you turn it on you turn it up you say yeah that’s probably what I wanted to do that that’s good also but you know there’s a big difference between mac and the ability to enter a space but you properly surveyed that you’ve planned accordingly and then at the end of that measuring and saying yes when I put in here is not only exactly what you needed because I’ve been an engineering effort correctly on the front end but it’s what you wanted because I did the discovery after court so that got is that the media does make you if he is ultimately just trying to really kind of track and provide more linear process flow to what people are doing to get quality results and I think that the answer your other question you know where where quality is really important quality assurance I think that’s still something that is really missing in the industry as a whole there a lot of people that do a sand castle and I you know encounter incredible people that probably would do a better job than I do when I’m on the board so but you know when you see the widespread writing a lot of people are still doing the bare minimum they’re doing what they can get away well and so a big guy the rest of really all standards reclamation work inside of this industry has ended up at the consultant store set up and that the users doorstep you know the people that have to ask for it specifically but it has been nice in the last you know year or maybe even more than we really started to see an uptick in the number of integrators that are recognized and saying you know I’m gonna get out of this I’m going to be awhile before I have to be and I’m going to really take the time to understand how that improves my business that is what do you reason for the up tickets I think ultimately it’s more exposure and I think that it’s it’s been difficult to really get in front of the integrator specifically in a way that really helps them understand the value and a lot of that is because they’re working yeah when you all the writers that I know are only fourteen hour days pretty regularly so getting any kind of you know proactive education in front of them is very difficult sure you know even the great and we get it great integrators that are doing you know everything they can for their customer may not also be aware that there are these kind of standards that they can we on as well so education about and really a part of that building awareness coming on here talking year stuff like that so I think that that started to change very positive way trend continues call so let’s play a little game you are will imagine that you are I don’t know some kind of freelance consultant engineer integrate or whatever and I’m one of those integrators that doesn’t do a great job I’m working fourteen hours a day I have my excuses there’s not enough time there’s not enough margin there’s not enough this or that what do you say to me how do you try to help me do the writer one of the easiest ways to get through to somebody is generally talking about dead display because that is a great example that everybody has experienced you don’t do shot build you take it out in the field in the box you put it out you stand you know all day in this room getting out a nine inch display were some massive Europe two hundred fifty pound talking about what about plugin is a lot we you just get a big green like a cult and that moments the benefits of taking it out of the box plugging it in ending the power button in your shop where you could put it back on the truck and it took five minutes to test you’re gonna spend the next two hours taking my display backed down and re boxing thinking about five minutes so Baptist on our list usually the place that I start because nobody has gone their whole career without getting a massively destructive way out of the box and that really helps people identify usually it’s something I try to preach all the time but the conversation is often difficult because you need to buy the equipment earlier that’s that’s the first one that I always get employed why can’t we just drop ship everything to the job site the answer is well then you you become Amazon right I’m as I’m kind of it’s hard you know happening the space to point you know you’re asking nine years for a project thing like that you know there are definitely costs associated with getting back ability to execute on the ground and but you know I worked for three different companies now that has implemented you know like you to be specifically and seen dramatic savings on the back and you know that’s where you end up you have you know the medical zero points last project stuff like that can actually occur when you really you you’re gonna work yeah and you end up ahead actually yeah definitely the the zero punch list the projects I’ve experienced it as well once or twice and it’s always because things were defined extremely two eighty one hundred percent up fronts and checklists were made and everything can just kind of fall into place and if you’re used to having a hard time closing projects getting having all sign off taking a long time because things just are just there’s open items all over the place I think that some that’s really one of the main factors for just doing the work up front so are you a V. dot org to get more information about how to do a better job so tell me about TV cici I am glad you asked David cheat sheet is pretty new projects for me I know that there are some fantastic AB podcasts out there in the world but you know I thought you could use one more we drive a lot so there’s always more time and really the point of baby cheat sheet is truly accessible simple information I know when I started when I talk to people that have recently started in the industry there are a lot of really big concepts out there you know how do you do your pad and how do you do acoustics in a conference room you know what I don’t understand what these channels are doing and why they’re here things like that that seem really daunting and then you get five years in your career when you look back in your life that that was really easy wanted somebody’s explain it to me and that is but the real point of AB cheat sheet is just kind of being your your industry friends that he’s going to give you the low down so you can walk in feeling prepared when you have to talk about different subjects do you project yourself in one episode up as of now decided to act take a big bite start house are kind of women in the industry but our our next episode here a little %HESITATION easier to consume definitely talking about basic top concern acoustics and how to navigate acoustics needs inside of a project because that is definitely something I think a lot of people in the black either just trying to keep the budget down or because they don’t know enough about it so I’m trying to get a second group of people and just make sure that nobody is giving out because they don’t have the education excellent so comes back to education again and that’s something I always really believe in and I wish you all the best with that we’ve covered a bunch of topics today from from using alternative control and automation processes commodity hardware such as the raspberry pi we talked about improving quality and and using processes to do that and you talked a bit about you know some some some basic AV knowledge like %HESITATION acoustics and things like that what would you say to somebody where or where do you think somebody should get started if they’re looking to yet just expand their horizons a little bit where do you think you would get the most bang for your Buck great and complicated question well I think that it really depends what you’re trying to do yes what you want is a really kind of generalized overview of what the technology are available then you know something like the extra maybe associate program I know it’s very helpful for me when I started but if you want you know more specifically to look at you know save programming and I know that after you got a ton of great classes related set out on your website as well there are not a ton of AB directed podcasts otherwise that I’m wearing your baby directed learning websites for programming but obviously every manufacturer has programs available for you to learn whatever their color as and just kind of looking for community ultimately because there are a lot of things even you know Facebook groups and stuff like that that are really surprisingly corners of new people starting out that have questions and just kind of want to get a few things so I think that between some of those three different directions everybody should be able to find a foothold to get started excellent I appreciate that Anna if anybody would like to get in touch with you how they go about doing that leave them is probably the best way I try to stay is on top of that it’s possible you can read your mind awareness work extremely well and other than that at AB cheat sheet maybe Gigi email if they were going to pop out so we’re always looking for feedback stuff like that so and that you know don’t forget sell everything and we have you on excellent thank you very much shame and a pleasure you for anyone on your staff ever considered themselves just in eighty programmer join the club that’s how I used to feel I was just an AMX programmer or just Crestron program or whatever language of your choice is whatever it may be there’s generally this feeling in AV that we’re not capable of using modern programming languages and it simply isn’t true sure there’s a learning curve but once you get through it all other languages become easier to learn and it just expands the amount of options you have when designing a system it’s not an either or decision you don’t say I won’t be using these manufacture tools anymore it’s just you have a broader palate to choose from ends here’s what market day founder of idea box had to say about his experience with the online courses at learn eighty programming dot com you know Patrick it’s funny how the smallest things can sometimes be the start of a really big ideas %HESITATION before I took the learn ATV programming dot com courses I was in that Terry I’m only a control system programmer kind of mindset rate %HESITATION when he came to new technologies or current technologies like Java script error or things like that for some reason I thought that was different from what I’m doing and what taking your courses flipped for me was not so much what I learned technically taking the courses it was the mindset of well wait a second I’m already doing ninety nine percent of what some of these most of modern programmers are dealing I just have to learn %HESITATION you know the other one percent and that’s really what I did so it’s really been kind of a big change after taking the course %HESITATION and I would really recommend this course to any integrator not only will obviously help their skill set but more importantly it might change their whole mindset %HESITATION which is more important and and and really show them new opportunities open the door so they kind of see problems through a different lens %HESITATION I gotta tell you one of the biggest changes for me was as soon as I become myself HTML CSS javascript and solve the you eyes that I can make with those technologies I just couldn’t sell a %HESITATION Crestron touch him again mark is a great example of somebody who takes new information and really applies it I know that mark still sells a lot of Crestron equipment but for him for his company for his customers for his business he needed a better you why he needed another option for user interface and modern programming allowed him to do that so the question is how can you use modern programming to improve your business please go to learn AV programming dot com and wherever you see a sign up button go ahead and sign up and you’ll get some free information to get a feel of my learning style and what kind of information is available and of course it would be an honor to have you in role in one of our courses and help you upgrade your skills and take this industry to the next level thanks for listening software defined survival I hope you found it useful and maybe it inspires you to try out something new this week if you have any questions does software defined survival dot com click the appropriate I’d love to answer questions on the air and if you’d like to help spread the word please subscribe comment and share thanks

this is a software defined survival where we explore how software defined systems are changing the business of TV IT today where do you find survival the other ones that were huge or being able to understand where folks are taking their calls from from like not only like geographically the like what kind of devices there on right there wasn’t much listening going on in my experience it was a lot of how much could be sold and and %HESITATION not so much about user experience we understand that we were gonna have to move at their pace %HESITATION one day might be this device that they’re in love with him the next day might be this other one my advice would be to get the the nerds right %HESITATION the tax the who ever of the engineers sort of the front end of the of engagement than the back greetings my name is Patrick Murray welcome to software defined survival and today’s guest has held Evey and telecommunications positions at some well known companies like juniper networks Zynga Tessler and uber he was responsible for expanding the use of software codecs into quite a large operation environment at uber any is currently co founder and director of business operations at Luna built a custom AB design and integration company located in Silicon Valley that specializes in integrating software codecs Carlos Martinez welcome to the broadcast thank you Roger thank you for having me is there anything about that introduction that you’d like to correct or expect I think it’s it’s it’s the offense you then I’m probably it warrants and my experience but but thank you for for that introduction and yes I have worked at all those spots and held a couple different positions well you wrote the link in profile I’m just reading it back I think I’m going to pay someone to do that but don’t tell anybody very nice very nice so tell me how did you get started in a V. %HESITATION people don’t really grow up and say I want to be in a movie when I grow up so tell us what what’s your journey been like yeah for sure arms I think like a lot of folks in the AV industry I wanted to be a rock star and that didn’t pan out so when I one night when I laughs I guess the music industry and stop playing %HESITATION I wanted to do something related to music and I ended up going to a small college here in the bay area called expression college %HESITATION and they essentially have three different %HESITATION they had three different tracks one was like a graphic design in the other one was like digital media and then the third one which I actually enrolled in was audio engineering so kids want there that wanted to essentially be audio engineers producers %HESITATION or just work in the field right %HESITATION post production it’s either a my goal was to either do live sound or work in the studio I quickly realized after graduating not there was a lot of hustle involved with getting a job in that industry and I’m no I’m no I’m not scared of the hassle I wasn’t I wasn’t it wasn’t like I didn’t want to work hard but it was a different kind of hostile right it’s the kind of thing where in that industry arm the positions are are very few and and the line for those positions is very long so you know it I know it might sound cliche but running coffee and doing all these things what part of at some point getting a world right and the folks that did have these rules weren’t just going to let them go %HESITATION living in one of the most expensive places I guess in the world I didn’t have the patience to wait so %HESITATION I quickly decided to look for other avenues and that’s when I ended up at corporate I think I answered a craiglist ad and one of my first gig was at juniper networks where I didn’t know what I was gonna do to be honest I was completely new to corporate %HESITATION if it was something that I was that I thought I know I would never do work or get corporate but while I was there I ended up joining a team which was like a digital media team we would do things like our record internal live bands archive on at that time we were using like like actual like the many I forgot they were called but they were like the many videocassettes arm we would like them into the camera should be in that added I forgot what software and then archive them so that was my first gig and not something that I thought I would do but but that I kicked off what I but I ended up doing in the corporate world interesting what instrument did you play where do I turn around yeah it was my life for the longest time and %HESITATION hopefully I can get back into it soon we’re actually doing a remodel in our office and part of the remodel is going to include a music room so many stuff about that nice stressed stress management office absolutely I need it so I completely sympathize and relate to your past up until he started to working to June with juniper I attended I a are in Greenwich Village which was also like a music recording and production trade school and I had a similar experience with the New York City recording industry where nope wasn’t going to be %HESITATION trying to calibrate a tape machine and get the peach Snapple that the producer absolutely needed at the same time so that that you had a similar experience yeah for sure %HESITATION I like to stick it out but it just it just it wasn’t for me so I’m gonna fight then on the flip side %HESITATION you name it corporate but you know anything that kind of has the video audio is for fun video is for money right so you actually got to work with interesting equipment interesting technology and maybe tell us a little bit about that some of those early days when when you were doing the recording and archiving or maybe maybe tell us about what your most successful project was in and what made it special for you yeah arm so I mean back in your birthday was actually very primitive right it was literally a camera on stacks and shooting folks that we’re just talking at the front of the room us so nothing too fancy there it really wasn’t until probably Black Rock which is a very well known financial institution here in the states are actually at the time it was %HESITATION Barclays global investors which was then bought out by blackrock but it wasn’t until then that I really cut my teeth in in terms of video right %HESITATION and not so much the production side of it but the video conferencing side right the permanent installs and and be on the corporate world of being able to communicate anytime from any place across the company in the us so that was my first my first exposure to things like the C. asking them to you in vitamins and really understanding that infrastructure %HESITATION not only understanding how to configure at but %HESITATION how to troubleshoot it %HESITATION how to how to expand on it engendered genera %HESITATION I was really lucky to be here I had I have a mental still actually a good friend of mine Richard Leon he’s actually a director over at the VM ware a great great guy doing a lot of cool stuff over there but he he he’s actually said look here here the keys to the castle I try not to mess it up too much %HESITATION but a like this is where you’re gonna kinda learning at the time it was it was timbre it wasn’t even Cisco %HESITATION you know we had BCS as intense use big we had a big presence and datacenters essentially %HESITATION it’s not like today where you just stand up a few mac minis or whatever it is you’re using and you don’t really worry about anything behind the scenes but in terms of my first real big pride so that’s where I learned the video conferencing world %HESITATION I did some implementations there but my first real %HESITATION implementation where I I was on my own and managing it was a single arm and the mandate there was I showed up once again it was I think it was a Craigslist ad that I replied to and I showed up there and sing after Black Rock in they basically said look already has broken fix it and I was like okay %HESITATION you know how much time do I have yeah I know about you know a month to come out with a plan for for a company and by the way we’re growing exponentially and by the way you know everyone’s frustrated seminal how many rooms yeah exactly how many rooms was it all arm it was I think at that time we were probably at around a hundred and fifty rooms but soon to a double arm across his about right yeah %HESITATION under the rooms of the time and and I think it was called a calm that was giving them headaches and so %HESITATION I was very familiar with the Cisco environment and so that was a first for projects were where I dug my teeth into into kind of all aspects right everything from the list the the logistics of planning the rollout aperture man’s arm and just all the different dependencies that went into transforming doing the rip and replace %HESITATION and into a certain extent when you do these things it’s also it’s also a cultural shift right for all the users %HESITATION so planning the education around it and what not %HESITATION in the good thing was it went well %HESITATION we were able to do a proper record replaced everything from the infrastructure to the end points %HESITATION we had some really good partners at the time that a lot that helped us with the physical integration of the spaces %HESITATION yeah we migrated one hundred fifty rooms from high come to Cisco dressing I like the way he’s talked about that it was a cultural shift I think it’s important to realize that the end users if if a company really relies on video conference and and collaboration which more and more companies do every day today that it really does affect their day to day how productive they are how things get done ends replacing or just it just changing the color of the touch panel for example could you know kind of for somebody for a loop and %HESITATION could you talk a little bit more about the cultural impact of of of AV systems absolutely %HESITATION I mean specifically talking about Zynga I mean in in this is happened a couple times throughout my career but going back to sing that you’re you’re right right even the smallest things %HESITATION folks are used to walking in the spaces and %HESITATION pressing a series of buttons or you know doing the steps repeatedly arm to get their call started cetera and when something changes in something as small as a different touch panel or different camera whatever the case or dual display over single right arm they gave the kind of freak out a little bit and that’s okay it’s not their job to know video conferencing or AV or know why changes happened so %HESITATION the impact came from from being able to well number one going from an environment that was broken and where folks were like you know what I don’t want to use video conferencing to meeting minutes just exploding arm because all of a sudden things are working writing calls are connecting and they’re staying up or maybe the way that they’re interfacing with the system is much easier %HESITATION the the steps that it takes to join the call has been reduced from five to one to two or whatever the case may be so all of those things played into %HESITATION providing a proper experience across the globe and in teams being more efficient and now instead of folks saying you know I mean there’s no way I’m not touching it to wanting to be in rooms and rooms now being but all the time and needing to build more rooms %HESITATION so the impact is just it’s it’s kind of all around right it’s happier folks more efficient %HESITATION and essentially giving us the us the ability to to create to build more rooms and and and do it in a way that data is is impacting I don’t know though in this is one thing that I will I’ve always I always wanted to do %HESITATION just was really hard because there was so many elements I would like to actually measure efficiency in some way shape or form in an existing environment and then when it was improved right I never got to do that but %HESITATION we do know that at least usage exploded for sure what I took away from that is the interesting perspective of how success can kind of have %HESITATION some some side effects that aren’t wanted right so you have like the more the meeting minutes so usage exploded you had more minutes to take care of and if you’re not prepared for that that that could be a problem in the call staying up so people weren’t hanging up the calls because it worked too easily so those %HESITATION interesting side effects of of implementing a successful system are are kind of interesting they are for sure %HESITATION while others in the the team wasn’t too large but we definitely had to augment %HESITATION the team and and make sure that we had enough of folks to support these offices now right and now also stand them up sure and then the next thing you talked about was actually measuring as efficiency and I’d like to talk more about what kind of metrics you would have liked to have measured because I think that’s before you could actually analyze your data you kind of have to have a goal in mind what is it that you want to learn from the data and if you don’t know why that at the start then you will be collecting the right things so Germany thoughts on what metrics you would actually measure yeah for sure so I mean one there’s a there’s a couple things that come to mind %HESITATION one of all my I was actually able to I was actually able to %HESITATION measure later in my career while I was a new route but %HESITATION one thing that I would like to do early it was I see sat right and understand how happy are folks really with the systems are what does that mean its customer satisfaction okay yeah %HESITATION so basically %HESITATION having some sort of tool whether it be real time war or after the fact after the second a little bit harder just because in real time expression of mine %HESITATION and they can they can actually execute on a survey right %HESITATION later they might be my flag the email that they got it’s really hard for them to actually go back in and spend that time not because they don’t want to just everyone’s really busy arm but sees that would have been good the one thing that %HESITATION we were able to measure was the laying of calls arm we noticed that after the implementation you know calls went from and then this could have been both because they were actually stay in the calls were actually staying up or because they were just happier to actually be speaking to their teammates across the globe across the country opt for longer periods of time and being able to collaborate longer but we did notice that the calls were going from you know twenty five minutes thirty minutes to an hour hour and a half right well %HESITATION those sort of things were pretty easy to measure %HESITATION and we were able to present on and %HESITATION but she said I would have been one good that we would like to measure back yeah I think it’s often overlooked so my I my guess is most listeners to the podcast our work for an integrator of some sort but there are probably a lot of technology managers who work directly for end users and I think when you’re in a position like that having that kind of data be really useful just for negotiating your budget what kind of systems get installed how things are managed just being able to come to the table with a however his record to with some real data I imagine that’s got to be really useful it is I mean especially when you’re asking many times on the front end for a really big track right so as a service honor I had to multiple times say Hey you know I need I need a million dollars I need two million dollars right to do you just do what you’re asking me to do sure right obviously there needs to be some data behind that %HESITATION even though I had the experience there there needs to be some sort of data that that are in some sort of confidence for whoever signing those checks to say okay Carlos yeah here it is right trust me usually isn’t good enough and I get it someone asking for that much money into a trust me I would also ask for some some info %HESITATION so it comes in handy %HESITATION in those situations %HESITATION by yeah it’s in some it’s it’s not just the financial part but it’s also being able to to show that things are working that things are improved %HESITATION because as users I mean as far as service owners are integrators we know all that goes into building the systems right and we know what works well and what doesn’t as users or as as management Jersey staff that that you know they just want things to work they don’t know all that goes into it right so having that data and being able to explain the there trends in the industry why we’re doing what we’re doing why we’re implementing the technology we’re implementing is off key inset into kind of garnering back trust in in nineteen team and AB team and and and and being able to continually get the support from from management and how has the move to software based codex made that somewhat easier I imagine collecting data presenting reports monitoring trends yeah I’m it’s made you so I mean specifically talking about soon %HESITATION it’s maybe the easier from a couple a couple different perspectives I’m I would say that zoom now does a really good job of reporting on a few different metrics when we first implemented at %HESITATION who were I guess going on five years now okay yeah forty five years now %HESITATION some of those metrics for lacking but some of those things war and and going back to see that one of the things that we ask soon to do was to implement a survey at the end of it each call for example so you would have your call you would hang it up and then you can turn this feature off if you want to have basically a survey would pop up that was thumbs up thumbs down and then if you gave a thumbs up great it disappeared if you give it comes down a list of what we thought were the things that could potentially go wrong in a call would pop up and you’re able to select them and you’re able to enter your email us so that we could potentially get back to you or just get more info if needed you didn’t have to enter your email but we could collect data like that %HESITATION and so those sort of metrics were key arm and the other ones that were huge were being able to understand where folks are taking their calls from and from like not only like geographically alike what kind of devices there on right one of the things that %HESITATION has been really hard throughout my career through dropped just a constant in general I would imagine is is quality issues right so many times with let’s just say old model but more traditional systems like all the comments just go where their hardware based %HESITATION you could get geolocation because you were installing these in offices so you knew where they were they were installed and you could potentially look at the network at that location %HESITATION and and try to figure out why there was an issue you go into a video anywhere basically from your mobile from here from your mobile phone from your iPad from wherever I’m Danny gets a little trickier so understanding outside geo location and device allowed us to provide a better answer when there were quality issues it’s like okay look where we noticed that this person was on three G. arm and a remote city somewhere that could at least point you in the right direction so that was another huge one %HESITATION and then later on they were also able to to provide a janitor and packet loss for both audio and video so she sat metrics on the call itself and geo location and where folks were actually taking their their calls from I mean they actually have a graph that shows the the breakdown of the different devices was it a mini mac mini wasn’t an android devices and iOS devices so that was really huge as well that sounds a really interesting so then you could take a look at that and actually suggest to your users what what they can you could educate them what their best experience will be what what devices provide the best experience just so I understand a little better were you able to take that survey and then compare it to where the device and and geo location worse so if you get the thumbs down you could kind of sort out everything that came from mobile network yeah absolutely arm and we were always able to get granular and and and you know the the the best detectives and say aha you know like it was then but at least it pointed us in the right direction %HESITATION it with a lot of this stuff it we were trying to be as least intrusive as possible right story you don’t want to do is is %HESITATION have users become ATV our technicians are any engineers so we we try to ask them them the least amount of questions possible to be able to get them the right answer %HESITATION so sometimes we would go back and say Hey you know what whatever question we might we might have that would lead us on the right path %HESITATION and if they give us an answer I’ve been been great we were able to potentially say okay this was the issue a lot of times like I said books are busy and you know that little conferencing call is over so they’re they’re moving on to the next one or or the next thing they need to do %HESITATION so yes sometimes we were able to pinpoint but others we weren’t %HESITATION and that I think as long as we were at least following not entirely showing that look we understand that you had an issue and and we’re following up on it and and these are the tools we have %HESITATION they they were generally very happy about about our support yeah that’s that’s quite different from those hardware codec days where %HESITATION getting that kind of feedback was it was an impossible but it just wasn’t mainstream your your amex or Crestron programmer wouldn’t it I never saw it in a requirement back in those days but I think it’s a really great way to know if your systems are being used properly and %HESITATION and functioning well yen you were there any challenges with implementing that that zoom room solution acts Hooper maybe talk about that project in general here are yes there were many challenges %HESITATION but I think I think it was because to be honest and not they were trailblazers are pioneers reading but I think we we were definitely trying to do it %HESITATION implements implement a zoom at a large scale at a time where it had been done yet %HESITATION if I’m not mistaken I think we were the largest implementation at that time and even I had just a few years back when they did some job yeah I think I heard that the team had received an award for most of your rooms I was not there anymore but I love those guys are still my friends and I I I I heard that they receive that award which is great I think it’s awesome and I was very proud of them because they were huge a reason for that condition but can you give us an idea of that scale I think before when I left we were at fifteen hundred rooms so we went from a small pilot of I think thirty rooms to about fifteen hundred rooms in a little bit under two years globally %HESITATION and I I don’t know what it’s out right now but I would imagine it’s it’s you know two thousand plus %HESITATION and that’s all shapes and sizes right that’s everything from a large space that still visible with projectors and screens to a small space that might you know two or three folks %HESITATION but that was the scale at the time interesting and what were the challenges sold the challenges were and that I’d soon was in its infancy right and so while they had a really good foundation %HESITATION as we started to deploy %HESITATION or as we started to PO see I should say %HESITATION we we we started to poke holes right in and and to some of that potential featuring class or stability arm of the client itself running on a mac maybe %HESITATION some of the things that we ran up against where %HESITATION the integration of the peripherals right so %HESITATION it wasn’t just about saying okay let’s take zoom and install it on a bunch of mac minis and just have it run right the rest of the AV world had to play nice as well whether it be a camera whether it be a speaker Mike whether it be the I. pad at the time the only controller available was the I. right so we had to live so it was a hybrid we had to live in kind of both a commercial world but at the same time a residential world as well right more %HESITATION consumer based iPads to this date aren’t intended to be an in an enterprise environment for the most part right %HESITATION it’s something that is used for surfing the web or playing games or you know whatever the case may be so it was %HESITATION that was a big one finding the right peripherals for the room making sure that they’re controlling that Jews controlling them correctly so we had to actually work with I mean some of the manufacturers we work with where like we’ve all labs for example %HESITATION they had a device called the %HESITATION they still have it the I. you see you see five hundred which is just a simple speaker Mike you put it on the center of the table it’s USB and %HESITATION you you know you go out and buy even having something like the iPad knew that and have the lights be you know reciprocal and and provide feedback something that simple was huge because users for example would meet on the iPad and they would still see green lights on the result and they would be like well am I really needed right and now they’re on clicking read aloud because they’re not sure if they’re being heard or not on the other end so there was things like that %HESITATION and I just think that our so peripherals I’m feature requests %HESITATION another big one that we faced was the network so now you’re asking an enterprise network team to %HESITATION said taking in let’s just say in the building three hundred I pass right all on wifi so now you’re flooding kind of the wifi space and if that why fi network isn’t set up for that well you’re gonna have issues right %HESITATION that was a big one where we were having trouble having had stay up and since the iPad is the controller you would walk into a room and the room is broke there’s nothing you can do there’s no other way you can start your call right %HESITATION or or from a physical perspective the iPad we try to get a little bit fancy for example and be %HESITATION these stands are holders that we use for the iPad were removable right so it was like I had a case and then you can put it on the dock %HESITATION any would charge in what we were thinking at the time was well let’s give folks the ability to control the call from anywhere in the room right now cannot they start their call the manager and volume muting it center at %HESITATION and then they put it back the put it back where it didn’t as you would imagine Wright’s ordered up happening is you know we found I pads in the seats we found iPads alone you know on the tables our were ever on the floor so now we’re chasing all these iPads and docking them and making sure that they’re being charged for the next person to use so we we work with %HESITATION with zoom on on that challenge and saying Hey can we get some sort of notification when the battery on the iPad is down to a certain level right %HESITATION so they helped us do that sort of thing %HESITATION subject just I mean there’s I could go on and on and on in this is not a dis on June it was just very new at that time and since we had a large sample size and we’re going so quickly we were running up against these issues very fast and almost on a daily we were %HESITATION we were working with our our a ramp and to a certain extent even Eric CEO over in June like Hey Eric Frank we need your help on this one I know that it’s you know it’s five o’clock on a Monday and and I’m asking you to have a solution by Wednesday opera we need it right and I was kind of the agreement we signed up with and it was like look we’re gonna take a really big risk arm by if if you’re not there if it pays off it’s going to be really well should be really good mutually %HESITATION and we took the rest can just ran up against one thing or another for about I would say six months arm before we actually stabilize the environment that’s a pretty interesting you reminds me of a story I heard about an integrator who %HESITATION or actually a control company that rolled out a new products and they made sure that they were close geographically because they knew there would be issues and they they view that whole process as a way to improve their products you know not not to use the customer as a Guinea pig they knew their stuff works but they also knew there would be things like like the iPad issue that you mentioned that nobody could really foresee how people use these things in real life and it’s like you said within a few months all those things got ironed out they needed to be reactive the need to work hard and in the end they got a better product out of it so I’m sure a lot of those challenges that you went through the mute not going on and off I know that there’s now an API for soon so that’s probably where a lot of those things were were born out of yeah absolutely and and and when we learn when we signed up with them we knew that we were going to run up against these challenges right it wasn’t the kind of thing where we signed up and expected things to be perfect but the reason that I was essentially allowed to to take the risk was because %HESITATION we we understand we understood zooms version vision we understand that %HESITATION what they were trying to do was the right thing right as opposed to just kind of doing the same old thing so we were willing to take those risks because we knew if we got it right the reward would be pretty large I mean the deal tend to be complain transparent we I’m basically I have them come on site date a white boarded kind of their vision and some of the things that were on the road map it’s at our general and after two or three hours I basically said yeah we’re going to go with you guys right and I was lucky enough that my manager at the time Chris Craven’s shot up to him if you listen to this %HESITATION he was just like yeah look you we were going to take a risk on this %HESITATION because they they’re they’re trying to do something outside the box and %HESITATION and we did it and it was painful but I mean look at them now right there doing some amazing things and then just place some of the some of these hardware codecs and have been in place for many many many years so um definitely not naive to it we were up to the challenge and that just had a really great team that was also to the challenge and was able to support me in in in getting this initiative off the ground and and stable yeah I recently %HESITATION took a weapon are or attended a weapon are for integrators who are interested in zoom room and I was actually really impressed with all the functionality that they’ve built into it and the interrupt inter operability with all the other software codecs that were out there I think come I think there is if you don’t attend the weapon are like that you think it’s just what we’re using now to make this call but I think there’s room room has a lot of features that are interesting for for Evey integrators so you work for a lot of end users and now you’re involved with some with the integration company can you tell me a little about that switch and where your focus is yeah for sure %HESITATION so this which involves a couple different time changes %HESITATION I went from essentially being a service owner at corporate to being owner co co founder with my point of telling my partner %HESITATION so that was a big switch in itself right that I’m no longer under this huge umbrella where there’s a lot I guess a safety net right %HESITATION and then the other obvious changes the fact that now I’m integrating and I’m providing solutions for many many clients right not just one company where I’m just responsible for maybe five initiatives odd now were responsible for adding standards for all of our different clients arm so those are the two biggest changes %HESITATION and so I have to we have to we have to make sure that we’re doing the right thing for each and each each of our clients right because not everyone’s the same and not everyone’s in the same phase not everyone’s using the same technology that everyone everyone’s culture is the same so %HESITATION we have to be really good listeners %HESITATION and and say okay we know one size doesn’t fit all like in tell us how you’re currently using technology in your conference rooms tell us how you would like to use it and just like give us your craziest ideas right %HESITATION and we can see if we can make some of those things happen or or we can just %HESITATION we can find potential alternatives are so those are the biggest things are being able to be flexible and just good listeners because it was I think it’s the biggest reason that Mike and I decided to do this kind of jump to the other side %HESITATION not to DST Amy immigration industry are or anything like that but after being a service owner for you know twelve years I I just felt like it was very patted them and it was like it was like let me try and sell you you know the new greatest biggest TV now right I I know I told you last year that was the biggest and brightest but now this year this is the biggest and brightest and %HESITATION there wasn’t much listening going on in my experience it was a lot of how much could be sold and and %HESITATION not so much about the user experience arm don’t get me wrong we had some you know I had some really good integrators in my career but I would have liked a little more listening arm and I think that the experience is up for our users would have been a little more tailored and %HESITATION provided better user experience is whether it’s a video wall or whether it’s a little group but yeah that those are some of the some of the bigger changes going from %HESITATION owning a service at a corporate to now having to kind of %HESITATION navy for for multiple companies thanks for that perspective are really appreciate that %HESITATION I think the AV industry or the AV integration industry is is really changing rapidly right now and the move to software defined solutions like something like zoom room or just a move from hardware based codex to software based codecs and things like displays becoming a commodity everything all the hardware is kind of moving towards commoditization I think there’s a lot of changes going on and the business will have to change and for any company that’s been doing things the same way for a long time it’s tough to make that change so do you have any advice or tips for integrators that you know maybe those integrators that we’re trying to sell you that TV and not asking enough questions obviously listening you already said focusing on the user experience is there anything else we can do to deal with this change and and be more successful yeah I mean I think one of the things for us for example that we are doing I am not that we’re the only ones doing it but we’re doing a little bit different is %HESITATION we actually don’t have a sales team at Louisville %HESITATION one of the things that we felt was was lacking was the immediacy between a service on earth they meet you see between a request and one in either it when it got implemented right or or what we were essentially the quote unquote sold arms and what was what actually ended up being the end product and so my advice would be to get the the nerds right are the taxes the whoever the engineers are closer to the front end of the of engagement than the back right %HESITATION Iran against many times where we were we were sold something or the picture was painted on something and I’m some sort of system and then what we actually got was different and there was a lot of frustration from the engineering side because they were basically saying well I didn’t sell this and I don’t design it and it was like aw man like so the accountability there was a little blurred I’m so that would be my my advice %HESITATION that folks running the projects on the front and focus on on you know in those meetings out whether it be a project manager at technical product project manager is able to at least get some sort of answers are without having to go through three layers and then potentially getting an answer to the client so that’s that’s I think the biggest thing that %HESITATION that %HESITATION I kind of had an issue with as a service honoring and we’re trying to fix now is limit belt at least for us and our clients excellent I can certainly echo that as a software developer the projects that go best are the ones where were called early and often so do you have any final thoughts thank you for having me having this is really cool %HESITATION it’s it’s it’s been a pleasure talking to you about you know what what I’ve been up to over the last twelve years and and are our most recent endeavor which is living bells and don hopefully it helps other folks %HESITATION you know reflect on kind of the same path that I have been on a like yeah like I remember those days or whatever the case may be because things are changing really fast right and %HESITATION and %HESITATION it’s important that we all keep up with the new technologies but like I said the biggest one is just being good listeners and and especially in the bay area where %HESITATION things move so fast %HESITATION we understood that that we were gonna have to move at their pace %HESITATION one day might be this device that they’re in love with them the next day might be this other one %HESITATION and that’s okay right %HESITATION as long as it it falls in line with the the the master plan then we’ll go with that but it’s also really good to be objective I think on the objective with with if you’re an integrator be objective and don’t be afraid to say well like I know you saw that thing in the magazine and your you know your friend might have it over at at company acts or whatever but it doesn’t fit your roadmap so I’m it’s okay I think to to be objective and to to push back on the client if it at the end of the day it’s going to provide a better solution for them and %HESITATION and maybe it might might not be the biggest margin maker come across a major up but that’s okay that’s okay it’ll it’ll show them that you’re thinking about their environment their culture their %HESITATION their end goal and it’ll it’ll produce I repeat business and and and it just overall a great partnership so that would be my my take away excellent yeah focusing on the long term is kind of a an investment in your own company so if anybody would like to get in touch with you how would they go about doing that yeah I guess the best way is through the website just looming bill dot com %HESITATION if it’s an inquiry but you could also just honestly where a small enough company where we’re very %HESITATION accessible and you my email which is Carlos Selimiye dell dot com %HESITATION yelling about that comes our website you can you can contact us through there for any on any support questions requested chatter great Carlos thank you for being on the podcast he’s a much better if you or anyone on your staff ever considered themselves just in eighty programmer join the club that’s how I used to feel I was just an AMX programmer or just Crestron program or whatever language of your choice is whatever it may be there’s generally this feeling in AV that we’re not capable of using modern programming languages and it simply isn’t true short there’s a learning curve but once you get through it all other languages become easier to learn and it just expands the amount of options you have when designing a system it’s not an either or decision you don’t say I won’t be using these manufacture tools anymore it’s just you have a broader palate to choose from ends here’s what market day founder of idea box had to say about his experience with the online courses at learn eighty programming dot com you know Patrick it’s funny how the smallest things can sometimes be the start of a really big ideas %HESITATION before I took the learn AV programming dot com courses I was in that Terry I’m only a control system programmer kind of mindset ray %HESITATION when it came to new technologies or current technologies like Java script error or things like that for some reason I thought that was different from what I’m doing and what taking your courses flipped for me was not so much what I learned technically taking the courses it was the mindset of well wait a second I’m already doing ninety nine percent of what some of these most of modern programmers are dealing I just have to learn %HESITATION you know the other one percent and that’s really what I did so it’s really been kind of a big change after taking the course %HESITATION and I would really recommend this course to any integrator not only will obviously help their skill set but more importantly it might change their whole mindset %HESITATION which is more important and and and really show them new opportunities open the door so they kind of see problems through a different lens I gotta tell you one of the biggest changes for me was as soon as I become myself HTML CSS javascript and solve the you eyes that I can make with those technologies I just couldn’t sell a %HESITATION Crestron touch him again mark is a great example of somebody who takes new information and really applies it I know that mark still sells a lot of Crestron equipment but for him for his company for his customers for his business he needed a better you why he needed another option for user interface and modern programming allowed him to do that so the question is how can you use modern programming to improve your business please go to learn a few programming dot com and wherever you see a sign up button go ahead and sign up and you’ll get some free information to get a feel of my learning style and what kind of information is available and of course it would be an honor to have you in role in one of our courses and help you upgrade your skills and take this industry to the next level thanks for listening software defined I hope you found it useful in maybe inspires you to try out something new this week if you have any questions does software defined survival dot com and click the appropriate I’d love to answer questions on the air and if you’d like to help spread the word please subscribe comment and share it with your friends

this is a software defined survival where we explore how software defined systems are changing the business of TV IT today where do you find survival what we had data as simple as that is what we data that said no you haven’t used the video the VC are in the last three years because you know if you know a lot of the devices that we deal with today aren’t incredibly secure more secure at all if you think of it you know our clients a lot of cases they have tool overload today and the more of these they have why on any one of us because they all present different a piece of the data they all presented in different ways and they also have a different way in that if you can become that data aggregator take data from individual take data from different manufacturers platforms in bring it all together that’s real power and we want to be a real trusted adviser to our clients because that’s what’s going to keep us relevant in the future and the software really is the key to enabling homeland greetings blistering hot summer creating this from central Germany my name is Patrick Murray welcome to software defined survival today’s guest started his career at Disney world technical services where he learned about integrating show control with AMX systems he’s held several other positions in lighting and sound before zeroing in on AV programming and project engineering at Rosco corporation and he is currently with AVI systems where he is working on some interesting solutions welcome to the broadcast Dave hats Dave welcome thanks for having me but appreciate it absolutely is there anything about that introduction that you’d like to correct worse expand upon now you you you had to be over right square on the head you know all this stuff sort of a background that spans many many areas of our of the live entertainment and the audio video industry yeah I will touch on that a bit I think the the live aspect is interesting a lot of people in our industry started out in in show control in live sound and lighting and I see a lot of overlay there so can you tell us a little more about your origin story in the AV industry how did you really get involved with AV absolutely well I mean it really goes back to the time you know when I was in even grade school and high school getting involved in theatre and live productions %HESITATION you know I learned pretty early on I wasn’t the best are the most comfortable being on stage but I sure loved all that high tech stuff that went on behind the scenes and so you know even going through school I was you know I was drawn into that technical side the lighting the sound production and even you know as if I got into starting to contemplate you know what do I want to do for a living you know when I got into college and when I you know and after that you know it never really left the back of my mind and so you know I started into my four year degree %HESITATION I electrical engineering figuring that Hey I like high tech stuff I like computers this electrical engineering sounds like something pretty cool and I pretty quickly understood our learned that you know I’m not so sure that you know that my desires are really going to be filled if I sit in a compact Cuba called calculating out math formulas as a true engineer and so in the back of my mind was this well you know I like doing this you know this live production stuff and somehow I stumbled upon an internship with Disney and at the time I was going to school Freddy does any of you who know the geography I was in the upper peninsula of Michigan so I think just about the most remote area you can go to and the closest place I could go to interview for this in this internship we had to go in person to interview was to down to Chicago to Northwestern University and in the middle of winter that’s about a ten to twelve hour drive and so you know maybe foolish maybe naive I said let’s do it salt middle winter I. truck down there %HESITATION interviewed well apparently ended up getting it getting a position with Disney on it was a three month program and the goal was to expose you to different areas of life production within the Disney theme parks you know it was it was a phenomenal experience and even to this day when I look back at is you know the the though the work of the internship taught me that you know what just running shows day in and day out for a theme park isn’t really where I want to be but if the same time you know there was a one week part of the program was factored in and you were given the opportunity to go explore some other area of everything that is me does that interest you and at the time I had a manager who sort of you know saw some of my interests and he knew a guy friend of his who was doing this thing called show control and so he said you know how would you like to go spend a week you know learning and working with this group sounds good to me let’s do it and so I went and spent a week %HESITATION working with with some folks in the design aspect of what is needed so you know I’m not running the show is day to day but building in the next %HESITATION but you know the next in new stuff and it really opened my eyes you know the work they had me do was you know was about as mundane as you could get but the exposure it gave me to this whole realm of of audio video control on is something that really just sort of kick started you know where my career is today you know at the end of that I went back to college I decided you know what I’m going to get this degree even if I really don’t use the focus of it day to day but you know once I got my electrical engineering degree that it was a matter of okay now what do I want to do and I had some really good contacts for my time in Florida and unfortunately the economy was in a spot where there just weren’t a lot of opening so as I was looking around I found out that this position in Chicago for an audio video control system program well okay it’s got the manufacture names of an an accent a Crestron engine extranets some of those on there really know what it’s gonna do but Hey it sounds fun and so I I jumped in you know feet first and you know ten years later I was you know I was ready for a change we’ve done AVI and now you know almost eighteen years in the industry you know I’m still loving and enjoying it all based on you know just sort of that set up that’s a great story it seems like a lot of things have to come together for it %HESITATION I like how you discovered you know the behind the scenes that technology home theater I think that’s something that’s not really %HESITATION looked upon that’s not really promoted of course you see the people on stage but there’s all this technology that goes on behind the scenes to create the emotion of the show so getting that exposure and recognizing how much you enjoyed doing that at an early age I think is really important and as soon as you said electrical engineering I started thinking of calculus it’s funny that you said that yeah you realize that that’s not what you want to do with with the rest of your life and %HESITATION this Disney internship and that free week of doing show control design sounds like quite auspicious thing to have stepped into %HESITATION that’s not something that would normally be available without a bit of luck and finding that could be a job as a control systems programmer everything just kind of fell into place for you it really did it there was you know I know and I know a lot of people say that you know just the path they take is just you know you can’t plan it all out but you just got to be ready they’re ready to seize the opportunities when they come your way and that was you know absolutely a case you know a case of that even if you had a drive twelve hours in the snow to make it happen exactly so over your eighteen years what was can you tell us a little bit about your most successful project ends what made it special for you so if I were to pinpoint one and it’s really hard having worked for you know so many clients so many opportunities but I I think one that stands out I was you know I was at an integrator and a client came to us with the the challenge that they were there a global corporation and video conferencing is really core to their you know to everything they do their CD level executives are spread out throughout the world and so you know it’s just in their culture to conduct meetings over in over video conference over telepresence and they were in a bizarre client that was approaching us was in a position where they wanted to everyday in their team were really task with documenting a lot of meetings of a van and being able to distribute these you know videos of these meetings around the corporation or sometimes publicly so think of those quarterly meeting those you know any you know it may just be you know a global team quarterly meeting or it may be that the company’s quarterly meeting and their goal was you know they were doing these productions they were basically just recording abridged video conference call their challenge was really to step up the production value so they wanted to start to introduce character character generators to put titles on there to incorporate pieces of media getting incorporated into those meetings and at the end of it their goal was to really produce a video that was you know when you look at the production value of it you really think the level of a cable TV or cable news network or a you know a sports broadcaster where it’s just a seamless well produced really polished video and so I was brought into the into the into the discussions because it became evident really quick that there’s nothing off the shelf that just makes that happen so you know we went through the the process of understanding you know what’s the work flow of the client how do they you know do they really intend to do that and one of the biggest challenges became they don’t have a big productions that so if you watch a TV network you know especially ten twelve years ago there’s a lot of people behind the scenes making that happen sure well in the case of this client they typically have one producer who needs to do it all and at the same time they’re the ones coordinating the people in the meeting and starting the meeting and stopping the meeting and all the logistical side of it and so they don’t have a technical background they don’t have the time to learn or the time to deal with all the technical intricacies but they want a product that rivals a team of you know a dozen technicians behind the scenes so you know as we started to explore this it really became a situation where we needed to take traditional broadcast solution and really mix them with the conferencing collaboration world and then use software to sort of bring it all together so you know as we started to put the solution together it started out as a broadcast system with a large each DST I video routing switchers we would add in we added a large production switcher with multiple control panels so that we could have you know multiple of these events going on at the same time from the control room you have a large multi view are so that the producer could see all the different video feed they were working with video playback servers character generators you know all the things that you would typically find in a production suite but then we also brought in a number of you know the traditional AV components so all the video conferencing codecs that are used to join into bridge participants in these call there were several PTZ cameras in the system so that the producers could appear on screen to the participants are to the audience on their digital white boards and you know and just computer inputs so that they could bring their power point presentations into these production and you know a lot of it and then you know we got into a lot of you know a lot of format conversion bridging between HDMI HD SDI really in the early days of doing so you know now it’s pretty common place but you know ten twelve years ago there weren’t a lot of products out there that allow computers you know dynamically joined the HDS the I. production world and so you know we we came up with a hardware design that really brought it all together but we were still lacking in the in the software side of you know how do we actually make this something that’s really simple do you and you know we looked at a number of ways of approaching the software side on we were you know that previously the client had some software that one of their people had had written some application and was doing some white automation and our challenge was we needed software that could be supportable by multiple people we couldn’t just have the guy who could program it and so in the end we actually turned to may be what some people would say is a little you know you know uncommon approach and we used to crush drug control system okay actually use multiple processors and what we did was we segments that down to the beach you know each processor was responsible for a different sub system so there’d be one program that dealt with just video routing and another that dealt with the audio system and then we’ve created a you why that allowed for the producer before call started they would go through sort of a checklist and they would select what capabilities they were gonna use during the call saying that I’m gonna use video unit to to call my audience in video unit read a call and get a record speed and video unit or to talk to some of the remote site and at the beginning of the meeting they would then just run through a bunch of mackerel bought so just like the big flashing button that says hit the next and so the first button would queue up all the video units and get all the routing in place and allow the producer to talk to the participants before the call start and then when the call was ready to start they had at the next button would new to all the parties on the call it would play an introduction video and then fade to the first participant at the meeting all along it would have you know talk back notes to the to the participants saying you’ve got fifteen minutes to go you got ten minutes to go you got five minutes to go and then you know the producer could switch beads in the middle so they could still have that control they need to manipulate the call in the middle but we scripted the the solution as much as we could so that they got a consistent and predictable result and you know in the end it was something that you know we had to keep you know confidential because of the nature of the client and their desire not to share this with all their competitors but it was really a pretty incredible bridge of technology of software and you know sort out the merging of the broadcasting navy spaces maybe five to ten years before it really happened you know in commercial available products sounds like a challenge and what I like about that story is that %HESITATION obviously using software to merge these not typically city systems that are not typically integrated with one another but the reason for doing it was to kind of re purpose the contents and the content was perhaps these somewhat boring business meetings but adding a layer of production on top of it makes it more interesting and of course the distribution and you probably wound up getting more employees to actually pay attention and watch these meetings absolutely I mean it’s one of those where you know we forecast with the client how many meetings the year they thought they were gonna do and it was you know it initially it was several hundred meetings a year they anticipate it well after about you know it was like twelve to eighteen months later they were already double that so you know they based on their capabilities had increased the demand for their group and you know we were in there six months later expanding the system that we had already built a lot of headroom into and they were already exceeding it so it really is you know a case where if you get the solution right you know it did they use will go up significantly just because you know because it’s the right product for their end users yeah that’s the best kind of feedback when you get asked back to work increase the system when you actually exceeded your your usage goals and metrics Ackley so let’s shift gears a little bit here are you working on anything interesting at AVI all am I working on anything interesting you know the answer to that absolutely so my project for the last few years has been on a project that we call AVI in sight as an integrator you know we were several years ago were sitting with our leadership team and we were discussing how can we better provide support to our clients on you know we had been just like all integrators of time you know were you know we offer support contracts we when a client has a problem will come out we’ll fix their systems but we were looking at it of how do we provide the next level of service and in the end we really came to the realization that we need software to accomplish that and specifically we need to have a better understanding and better visibility into the technology that we’re selling and deploying in designing for our end users and you know this really you know this really comes down to the fact that we need the ability as an integrator offered the monitoring of all the disks separate technology that we sell you know we sell in which we sell audio video system certainly some of those are fully customizable system but others of those are just a few components in a room more and more we know that we call huddle space wait maybe just an input panel maybe a wireless presentation box maybe some unified communication mixed in but these little disc separate things that are custom configured we do a lot of us a lot of business in the video conferencing space so this could be traditional video and point the Cisco’s the poly calms the life size unit that we’ve had for the last fifteen years but also more and more we’re running into the rooms with just a small little PC running socks go to running a Cisco a poly com it could be or could just be running scared for business resume our Starley for any of the others that are out there so how do we get visibility into the old our baby I have the digital media practice so how do we get visibility into our signage platforms and our content distribution networks and then all the other components that are part of our solution the networking switches and routers and firewalls on servers cloud platforms at times eight WS is an Asher’s of the world how do we bring a platform to our customers where we can provide that disability across all that crazy stuff and so you can imagine if it’s a pretty daunting task when you decide you know you need to figure out how to how to bring that all together and so as we went through we identified our goals really to be able to create a single pane of glass so one web portal where our support personnel couldn’t go for information and we can also offered to our clients so that they could get information and you know the idea would be that this would directly integrate into our support structure so it enables easy I’d be more proactive in identifying incidents and problems for our clients it provides the ability to help track those incidents and to take multiple words from different pieces of equipment and determine are these part of a single incident and then to group those incidents together and say okay we I think we have a problem that we need to investigate further here because every Thursday at two AM we see these this set of alert and so that you know as an integrator we can get smarter about getting to that route because of the things you know were otherwise we might get a phone call saying it broke are you know and so you know really we set out to to develop this software platform you know really to meet these goals so what were some of the challenges you faced while developing this new system so I think the very first one was in we went out there looking for our there’re software platforms out there that we can just find software and just let’s just incorporated in our solution and we quickly found that or for us in the AV industry there really isn’t something off the shelf that meets all these goals there’s manufacture specific monitoring solutions and more and more every day and these work great when every product you have has that manufactures badge on the front yeah but the challenges we were live in a world where we’re choosing the right product for the customer specific needs and we we don’t want to have to shoehorn them into one manufactures solution job to get monitoring in doubt you know Armitage Sir into our solution with a little yeah and so we were really faced with the fact that there really isn’t anything out there so how do we go develop so what we what we settled on was that we would license and we found the right partner to license the underlying enterprise grade network monitoring tool and we did that because as an integrator were not you know we’re not specialists in developing that from the ground up that incredibly secure only redundant global network monitoring solution and that we can get past the I. T. security %HESITATION analysis of every single global enterprise that we approach we needed to find a partner that is their specialty at that house that that part of the problem that that part of the solution you know really you know well in hand then what we did what we would do then is take this monitoring this platform and customize the data acquisition side of it so that we can focus on getting data from the things that we know about the AV system %HESITATION conferencing and use the platforms digital media platforms the networking component we we would focus on developing the communication to the devices but not to worry about black no developing the platform of monitoring from the ground up so can we get a little technical about that mentions communication to the devices so I’m I’m imagining there’s a cloud application running somewhere does each individual device report to that or do you have some kind of gateway on the local network so so we we we looked at different architectures to a cheap to achieve that and what we settled on was we have to have a cloud application running so that that becomes the portal for you know for our support personnel is about is the vendor as well as for end users but if the same time we we have a lot of our of our clients who are really sort of their adverse every device going out on on the internet everything hitting the clout and so so the architecture we chose was to place a server on every on the client’s network and that server is sort of the data aggregator communicating with all the devices and we did that because that way all of that communication can be done inside their firewall because you know if you know a lot of the Eevee devices that we deal with today aren’t incredibly secure or secure at all at all in their communication and so you know and it is to minimize network %HESITATION to %HESITATION security vulnerabilities we decided it was better if we have devices that are secure let them communicate on the client’s network where the client site key groups still has the ability to monitor and to control how that traffic flow put them in a cage put him in a cage and then from there that server that’s on premise can open a secure total up to our cloud application and everything that leads leaves the customer’s network than can be both secure encrypted and that we architected it so that it’s a one way clutch now that doesn’t mean we’re not having to wait conversations between the premise server and the cloud application but the that sockets are always initiated from the client’s network out in what that Dallas was as we’re going through security planning we need we do not need any inbound firewall ports opened up and forget you can imagine when you go to the enterprise you know the global enterprise and say Hey I need you to open up inbound port X. Y. Z. that’s not what it it’s sort of like telling them Hey I want you just to leave the bathroom window propped open yeah I’m gonna crawl in it in the middle of the night some time but trust me I’ll make sure nobody follows me why so that that album push of data or data about initiation of the socket they should say what it was really central to you know to our acceptance with our with our clients %HESITATION ID groups sure and and that’s probably a a websocket I imagine yep yep yep it’s a websocket opened up in a secure and encrypted tunnels %HESITATION you know going back and forth and then you know and then once that once that socket is open up then we have you know things like patch management and configuration control to that server opened up so that we centrally managed that that server that’s on the client’s network but it’s done you know from from that server out at all times sure yeah I’ve had a few conversations about what this kind of %HESITATION system could look like and I’ve actually spoken with one or two IT professionals and they said they wouldn’t mind if many devices if all the devices connected war spoke with a cloud application and if you think about it you know that’s kind of what every computer does whenever you open up a web page that every computer making out on request to a web server so I guess I can understand that argument but I also talked with just as much many other professionals who said no I’d much rather have a gateway because at least I know for your easy stuff which they still don’t understand that as you pointed out some AB devices don’t support H. TTP or things that are secure yellow they’d much rather see that kind of a a gateway where everything gets funneled through it so tense yeah and in talking through with you know with a lot of the security reviews you know it’s interesting that you know many organizations are are becoming much more accepting of cloud platforms in cloud application many of whom are on only three sixty five for Microsoft they’re you know they’re accepting of the clout of the cloud environment but there’s still a lot of hesitation they want to understand exactly you know what data is being transmitted when how is that data being secured encrypted how is that data being stored and so you know from our perspective every time we can remove one of those check boxes that puts us into that higher risk category doesn’t mean that they’re gonna aches you know not gonna accept it but every time we can remove one of those concerns it just makes it that much easier for the client to accept that our solution is safe and secure and then we can get down to the business of really supporting the end user with their technology with their audio video needs which is the goal of all of yeah definitely %HESITATION it’s I don’t think it’s an infinite list of security issues that that %HESITATION they really want to know about the just wanna know what ports you using is it secure %HESITATION is is your data encrypted while it’s in transit and if you’re storing it in a database is is that database also encrypted I think like you said it’s just a list of check boxes that once you have those checked off then you can get down to a doing what we do so well which is %HESITATION managing AV IT systems so can we talk a little bit about data and analytics because that’s really what this is all about collecting data and analyzing it and gaining insights ends DAB industries has historically concentrated on distributing media and reproducing picture and sound in the room so what are your thoughts about this industry about eighty professionals moving into this kind of adjacent skill of collecting and analyzing data well I think it’s I think it’s essential to you know keeping us relevant that you know we all know and for a number years have looked at you know the the number of boxes is decreasing %HESITATION there’s commoditization of the hardware side and the solutions ID been in many cases but wiped at the same time what our clients are really faced with is they don’t have visibility into what’s going on with this technology they don’t have visibility into how it’s performing they don’t have this ability in the hallways it actually being use is it being you you know more often than not when you look at the planning phase of you know I’ll take university for example the university has a dozen classrooms and you know coming up on the summer the registrar decides we need more classrooms because we don’t have enough space for all of our of our classes well half the time in my experience that next classroom is built in the cookie cutter of one that they already have it’s just a blind cookie cutter if there’s some debate over do we need something or not well then we get the committee together and in my experience what happens when you have a committee of users they typically don’t know how to articulate their needs or what they really want and so what happens is either the most vocal person will win just because they’re stubborn and don’t want to stand down in an argument that’s why we still have document cameras everywhere that’s why we have VCRs in in some places sell because by goodness I use that all the time well what if we turn around we had actual data base those decisions on what if we had data as simple as that is what if we data that said no you haven’t used the video the VC are in the last three years you know that’s a simple one but it starts to help our clients be able to make informed decisions and to justify the you know I always say that when I’m you know talking with clients I want to be their best friend yeah I want to give them data that they can go to their leadership and make them look good we want to know you know when it comes to space planning if you know we all know real estate is one of the highest expenses that any of our clientele and so are they using their real estate effectively that twenty person conference room that you know has really nice didn’t finish but never get to use well it’s a waste of real estate in so you know if we can get to the point where we can tell a client okay you have a twenty person room but on average you have four people use that room well okay maybe we need smaller space or if we look at a scheduling system and we can say you know only ten percent of your users actually booked the ropes the rest of them are just walking in ad hoc well okay that that means that we need to focus on the scheduling system and put some policies in place to make the scheduling system more effective so that everyone uses that but we also can rely on you know if we look at what percentage of the booking of the room bookings actually show up for is there actually a body in the room at the time that they scheduled because that reduces you know if we can get through that that reduces the number of times where rooms are sitting vacant but their reserve so no one else can use you know when we look at analytics there you know in the scheduling side it’s a really easy stretch but then we can take it even further you know on the performance side we can start to look at Trent we can start to really analyze you know not just when is something broke tell me about it but when are we creeping up on it you know when when something breaks at the class well I don’t really want to know when I falling off the cliff what I really want to know is three steps before I fall off the cliff so I can stop because ultimately we wanna you know our goal is to make sure that that technology is utilized as much as possible so that our clients get the full return on their investment that they they’re expecting and more as well as keep it one hundred point zero percent you know available and free of issues and ready for the end users that the holy grail were chasing and if we can achieve that or is close to that as possible that’s what makes us a valued partner that’s what really solidifies that relationship where we’re not just you know being a you know we’re not just a transactional partner where clients as they need something we sell it to them but we want to be a real trusted adviser to our clients because that’s what’s going to keep us relevant in the future and the software really is the key to enabling all that I really like the way you put that that %HESITATION it’s not just transactional because I think installing systems you do need to have a relationship with the customer understand their business understand how their meetings are held to install the system but I often feel like we deliver version one dot zero and that’s the end of the relationship so having something like this will help us can you adding value as the experts who are really providing real data I mean as you mentioned in the beginning of this question people sit in a meeting and and how decisions get made well if you have data it’s it’s real power there’s there’s not much to think about anymore you could see in black and white the the room usage the component usage ends even the trends of how certain types of devices make may continue to fail or reach their end of life which probably helps a company like yours tighten up your SLA isn’t and offer some some really great value absolutely what you can then you can start to look at okay well as were planning what products best meet a client’s needs well does this product across all of the clients that we monitor have a recurring trend not just is it the problem know the products used for one client at a time what we can look at it the more holistic view of across all the times we implement that black box widget is that a product that opens us up to molt more vulnerability are more choice chance of failure well if so it’s not the right solution for our clients let’s find something that has you know better performance better %HESITATION better reliability sure so this idea of data and analytics beat being a critical part two how a vis a vis a vis industry stays relevant do you have any tips or advice for your typical integrator programmer technician on how to start learning about collecting data and and analyzing it and doing some of the things we’ve been talking about I think the biggest advice I can give really is don’t under estimate the number of details you’ll need to cover because if you start to peel back the layers of the onion on there really are a Lotta aspects of that monitoring solution that you know you need to get right a hundred percent you know you can’t half launched the security of your application you can’t have lunch you know the architecture of it you know the future side there you you can create a starting point and allow over time but it out number one needs to be the security of the data in every client I’ve talked with about you know that the the roll out in the technical side of our application and everyone of them wants to know the details of you know how is the data transmitted you know is it secure how is it stored you know how long is that they’re not retained for what happens to the data after those retention settings are in a retention thresholds are Matt on you know just every aspect of that because we can’t just keep data forever and there’s a there’s a you know a useful lifespan of each piece of data as well and so dealing you know understanding and having a plan for how you’re going to manage that on is extremely important you know the other piece is you know I think for a lot of TV integrators is looking at manufacture tools in manufacture platforms as one of gathering all this information on because there’s many manufacture platforms which have API’s in and out of and that can be a valuable source of information but in less you really are focused only with one or two integrator or on many factors relying exclusively on the manufacturer platform is you know I think it’s short sighted and if you think of it you know our clients a lot of cases they have tool overload today they have you know they have platform from vendor acts in platform for men or why in platform from vendors eat and the more of these tools they have the less they’re going to rely on any one of them because they all present different a piece of the data they all presented in different ways and they all behave in different ways and so relying exclusively on manufacturer specific tools in the law is that this you know this you know this is %HESITATION you know combined environment it doesn’t really achieve the entire goal all that that your clientele instead if you can become that data aggregator and take data from individual devices take data from different manufacturers platforms and bring it all together that’s real power that you can then integrate into your processes into your presentation of data on both for your teams and for your client team and that’s really where you know where the real power opens up and and ultimately this is all to drive business to you this isn’t just to say you have the capabilities but all of this is a way of driving and generating new revenue %HESITATION and sustainable revenue on into the future I agree with that one hundred percent thanks a lot for those insights I really do appreciate it because moving forward as things become more commoditized were definitely going to have to think about you know how we fit into this puzzle of how projects are done and how we’re going to survive how we’re going to %HESITATION create that revenue that every business needs to to run ends collecting and analyzing data in a custom way away that’s customized for your clients who you know better than any manufacturer can I think is a great way to do that so do you have any final thoughts I just you know it’s what it is that the data and analytics is is an area that I you know just sort of is my entire career it all I didn’t anticipate getting it out there this deep into but it is something that I really have found you know a joy a four and a passion for because it can be so valuable to our clients and so you know I really you know we all know we live in a data driven world but you know it’s exciting to me to see this coming into the audio video space in a real meaningful and tangible way arm and and I just I look forward to what the future holds both free V. I. as well as for our industry as a whole excellent if anybody would like to get in touch with you or learn more about TV I or a V. I. insights how they go about doing that so you can learn about AVI insight from our website AVI systems dot com %HESITATION if anyone wants to get a hold of me my email Dave dot have HGTV at FBI systems dot com I also work out on the Twitter’s act gave half AVI %HESITATION but yeah I encourage anyone who has interest in this you know feel free to reach out and always look into that share my knowledge Dave thank you very much for being on the podcast my pleasure if you or anyone on your staff ever considered themselves just in eighty programmer join the club that’s how I used to feel I was just just Christian program or whatever language of your choice is whatever it may be is generally this feeling in AV that we’re not capable of using modern programming languages and it simply isn’t true short there’s a learning curve but once you get through it all other languages become easier to learn and it just expands the amount of options you have when designing a system it’s not an either or decision you don’t say I won’t be using these manufacture tools anymore it’s just you have a broader palate to choose from ends here’s what market day founder of idea box had to say about his experience with the online courses at learn eighty programming dot com you know Patrick it’s funny how the smallest things can sometimes be the start of a really big ideas %HESITATION before I took the learn ATV programming dot com courses I was in that Terry I’m only a control system programmer kind of mindset ray %HESITATION when he came to new technologies or current technologies like Java script error or things like that for some reason I thought that was different from what I’m doing and what taking your courses flipped for me was not so much what I learned technically taking the courses it was the mindset of well wait a second I’m already doing ninety nine percent of what some of these most of modern programmers are dealing I just have to learn %HESITATION you know the other one percent and that’s really what I did so it’s really been kind of a big change after taking the course %HESITATION and I would really recommend this course to any integrator not only will obviously help their skill set but more importantly it might change their whole mindset %HESITATION which is more important and and and really show them new opportunities open the door so they kind of see problems through a different lens %HESITATION I gotta tell you one of the biggest changes for me was as soon as I come myself HTML CSS javascript and solve the you eyes that I can make with those technologies I just couldn’t sell a %HESITATION Crestron touch him again mark is a great example of somebody who takes new information and really applies it I know that mark still sells a lot of Crestron equipment but for him for his company for his customers for his business he needed a better you why he needed another option for user interface and modern programming allowed him to do that so the question is how can you use modern programming to improve your business please go to learn a few programming dot com and wherever you see a sign up button go ahead and sign up and you’ll get some free information to get a feel of my learning style and what kind of information is available and of course it would be an honor to have you in role in one of our courses and help you upgrade your skills and take this industry to the next level thanks for listening software defined survival I hope you found it useful and maybe it inspires you to try out something new this week if you have any questions does software defined survival dot com click the appropriate I’d love to answer questions on the air and if you’d like to help spread the word please subscribe comments and show thanks

this is a software defined survival where we explore how software defined systems are changing the business of TV IT today where to find survivors can’t just kind of put together a software program on the back of a napkin it just doesn’t work constraining values find out what you excel at but many many times in life so like a lot and I will admit that guilty pleasure and we also get satisfaction out of that anybody came in the lock me up right away that’s you know and I would see could be the driver that convinces display manufacturers to adopt one protocol right because we all know there’s nothing special about your power on command and I think this is kind of a danger in just accepting what comes out of as the solution of the year I am Steve for invite your special host for today our guest today started his career as a freelance service technician moving up to serve in the industry in various roles as a systems engineer and control system program and finally pursuing his entrepreneurial spirit by starting an independent programming company for he’s been in business for over thirteen years and he’s going to become an educator a software developer and inventor an online marketer and podcaster his extensive experience a major control system platforms as well as other mainstream programming languages has proved to be very valuable in being able to make his mark on the industry he’s worked both in the US and in Europe and he’s fluent in both English and German well he probably needs no further introduction he’s the host of the software defined survival Patrick Murray how are you Patrick I’m excellence the thank you for that flattering introduction so it was that accurate is there anything that you’d like to add %HESITATION though that is accurate for sure %HESITATION yeah very flattering like I said %HESITATION it’s it’s always interesting when you get the when somebody else reads back your resume to you and now I’m I’m just a programmer I I can know the feeling so I’m give me a little bit of background here what got you into this industry what keeps in this industry and what would you like the most about it so yeah this question is always like where do you start %HESITATION I I dropped out of college because I couldn’t keep still right had all this nervous energy and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do and I was working as a messenger Manhattan delivering boxes here and there and and I worked my way up there to %HESITATION be enough operations manager for an overnight distribution company for office products and then a buddy of mine told me he was going to the institute of audio research to learn how to record music and so I said wow that sounds like something I could sink my teeth into because you know I was a bit of a musician guitar and piano and stuff and I was always curious about how sound actually worked so this idea that you could go to school for that %HESITATION sign me up and at I. R. instability research I learned a whole bunch of stuff about you know what I’m able to do like I learned how to solder I learned how to build electronic circuits of course I learned about the physics of sounds and things like that and you know I hated science and in high school and stuff like that because the subject matter was really relevant right how guitar amplifier works it really sparked my curiosity and and love of learning and %HESITATION yeah and I realize that I did not want to work in the New York City recording industry I wasn’t really cool enough for that but building these racks pulling cables plugging things together %HESITATION the flow of systems and how all that works that’s kind of how I got into a V. I got an apprenticeship fixing pro audio gear and then I did a few projects with a guy named Dennis flood from I. designs and %HESITATION he taught me a whole bunch of stuff about how a V. works and how to build these kind of projects and wire them up and then I went to the systems group it’s %HESITATION broadcast company in Hoboken New Jersey and see what I really learned there was how on how to manage large projects right in in broadcasting installation is like ten racks is small there’s just there’s so big that you need to have a process to make that happen and it would start with you know cutting cables ninety ten cables that are a hundred feet long and they got to be white hens %HESITATION and then people would terminate those cables and then they would get taken to the back room where they would be installed halfway into Iraq and you dress them up and it was just a process for every step of the way and then when you got to the site you know things would plug could be plugged in and kind of work and %HESITATION I guess a year or so after after that I work for Harry Joseph associates and they had that was the first real AV projects or AV company that I worked for board room AV and they kind of had that same idea everything was engineered we build up Iraq in their office and we tested everything everything was programs was really process oriented system oriented so when you got to the job site you plugged it in and it just kind of worked and %HESITATION so back to your question I guess what I like about TV is is a kind of the signal flow I really enjoy that how things work together how to piece together different types of equipment %HESITATION to make a system and how it works ands yeah ends Harry Joseph sent me to a mixed training that’s how I got into programming ends software is just like all of that times ten because you know you can really do anything with software there’s so many different building blocks that you can piece together and so many different ways and %HESITATION yeah I guess that’s what kind of keeps me in AV I I can relate to that I so you mention number times process %HESITATION process I think is important thing and it certainly is for somebody who’s organized and and technically minded process is really the key to success do you see process is being an important part of software in ATV and because I I don’t necessarily know that we use enough process and it of course we don’t right %HESITATION there are people who do great jobs at their integrators out there who do everything the way it should be done but it was kind of a rude awakening for me when I became an independent programmer and open my own company and started to see you know how different integrators handle projects and %HESITATION yeah it was a bit of a surprise how on process the it is hell how little systems play a role in in how projects are actually executed on and there’s a lot of room for improvement in the industry as a whole from my experience I guess and they’re always companies to do it right to the places where I learned from %HESITATION they taught me that way so that’s I I was kind of I guess a little spoiled because I thought that’s how everybody operated and %HESITATION once it became a free lancer found out that that was totally different so how that relates to software if if software is the play more of a role in where this industry is going we will not stand a chance and less we spend more time up front defining things because you can’t just kind of put together a software program on the back of a napkin it just doesn’t work so in going down that road a little bit further the the we’ve been able to get away with it quite a bit right exact and %HESITATION and and so what what do you think that people are going to need to know as technology evolves or as the industry evolves we’re what what what are some of the the areas you know it’s one thing to learn a programming language but it’s another thing to learn and develop and scale sure can you elaborate a little bit about what what that might look like for people that don’t necessarily have that either knowledge or expertise well it depends on what your role in the industry is so if you’re an integrator what you’re wrong that company are you the engineer program or are you the business owner Judy you gonna have a different ones depending where you are if you’re technology manager at an end user enterprise or university for example you’ll have different people we need to answer to their as well so many times it becomes more of a a skill of selling an idea then actions then been the technology itself of course the technology has to work you have to be good at what you do you need to be skilled and trained and you got to have some experience under your belt but if you want to do things a different way %HESITATION there needs to be a reason for it and if a company has been operating a certain way for a long time and like you said been getting away with it it’s hard to make that shift and to be honest with you spent some of my customers they get it and they appreciate it ends there will give you a brief example I always encourage integrators to build the system in their factory first right building off site as much as you can and we will look great at the ends but that cost more money right it takes more space you need to order the equipment earlier that money needs to be there you need to have the space for it and since there may also be this attitude where these texts doing here in our office when they could be off it job sites doing things so that’s a mindset that %HESITATION that needs to be changed somewhat if if you’re if you’re not used to doing things that way so I think %HESITATION a bit of sales and and not really in that you know used cars made sense but just thinking about what why am I doing what I’m doing why do I need to take a new approach what is the benefit and think about who you’re explaining it to what’s the benefit to them and I have a hard time explaining that some of my customers they just they’re just not open to the idea that they’re not the right customer for this idea right it doesn’t mean we can’t work together but I just need to know that they’re not open to working in that way but the other people who are accepting of it and they give it a chance and then they see the results then it’s like well why did we do it that way all the time I I totally get that and I I totally appreciated I I think the there’s a lot of of value that we provide as kind of that third party auditor we are also the %HESITATION at a independent Graham a company and and you know being able to bring an outside group in to say Hey let’s Sam clean clean up this process a little bit or or let’s approach things in a certain way or what we need to know this information in order to be successful I think is challenging the the the typical in house process a little bit let’s shift gears a little bit and it all over the course of your career what are some of the more significant changes that you’ve seen in the industry the iPhone that really was it I mean what what’s a touchdown write it in the late nineties early two thousands nobody knew what we did nobody knew it I think the only exposure touch panel had to the general public was when Ozzy Osborne was on cribs right there was a touch pad on there I don’t know the manufacturer even if I did not see the name but I think as he picked up the touch panel I’m not sure if he actually through it but he was complaining that it didn’t work sure instead look at this thing it doesn’t work so great for us but as soon as the iPhone came out right everybody suddenly knew what a touch panel was and they knew what an app was they were used to touching the screen and having something happen maybe not in the room itself but something happened on on the phone or in the game or whatever it was so I really think the iPhone so you know whatever it is you think of apple but the way they brought that to market and the the way the general public became aware of technology just the influence it had you know it’s it’s like the personal computer I think it’s on the same scale everybody has a mobile phone or you know many people do it nowadays it’s had a huge impact on the way the general public views technology bands because of that the expectations on us on the things we do has also risen in once the iPhone came out the expectations of technology completely changed you know it should be simple if you work it should be easy but maybe it should be or it doesn’t only belong in the corporate boardroom anymore it should be more accessible to more people maybe not necessarily commodity but definitely within the reach of more people than than just that that high level executive board room I I definitely think that’s the case right now and I think that because of that and I’m sure you’ll elaborate on this a little bit industry is feeling the pressure everything that is now more attainable a means that it doesn’t mean take as much effort urchin cost as much or a or or why why what what so complex and custom or why does it have to be custom so with that in mind at how how to people in in our position maintain their relevance because aids is what we do gonna continue to be in demand and or or is is there a different way that we should be thinking yeah the shorter answer is I don’t know it’s it’s why I started this podcast to have these kind of conversations and just see what the different takes are because the bottom line is nobody knows the answer nobody could tell the future and even if it looks like things will work out a certain way something could come out of left field and completely change the way %HESITATION projects are done war the way video compression is done or whatever this anything can happen so nobody really knows so what we can do to maintain our relevance is really the question right because as like you were talking about or systems used to be really complicated ends this question comes up kind of a lot on my mind is are there less complex projects because there will always be projects that need custom programming that need that operator twelve inch operator touch panel with lots of functionality and it ends then another version for a simpler user that has less buttons on it so that you know group of creating an environment of commanding control center is a perfect example of that you know if you’ve got a big video wall and maybe a hundred more sources and lots of destinations and different scenarios that you need to call up that’s complex and then you have a different groups of users right so you’ll have the user who could deal with complexity of another user that just wants to or three bonds to make what happens those kind of projects are really you know where companies like ours shine right as independent programmers that’s where we really bring a lot of value to the table and you know that’s always been the case I think those projects are becoming less right that I think it’s but as a percentage of AV overall it’s definitely declining so the amount of those projects may still exist and you could concentrate on that niche right so that’s one approach is your business could say we are command control center experts or whatever it is whatever that complex in the cheese and then just continue doing what we’re doing for another approach is %HESITATION had Ryan Howard on the show and he had this interesting idea that as things become commoditized %HESITATION and you have a platform so you one of the system may not be interesting because it’s just a display on the wall but managing a hundred of those displays on a wall will then that could become complex right that could be a reason to hire %HESITATION a software developer to create whatever it is systems for digital signage for analytics or whatever it is that special and custom that that enterprise needs on that platform level so I think that’s you know we may not have to change right it’s a choice how how do you want to run your business where you see opportunities how you want to spend your time I think you’ll we all need to be a little more focused on what we do instead of saying we do AV we do some residential we do some commercial it we can do anything and seen I’ve I’ve done that for a very long time and it worked out well but I think with this commoditization we may need to specialize even more on certain things even though we are the generalists and will always interact with all these different systems I mean that’s what we do but to find our niche is in %HESITATION in certain articles maybe for certain applications I think that’s something that we can do to to me remain relevant so it’s more of a business model idea than than actual technology which which makes sense because the they say that you wanted to find your niche at a business in any any industry sure and you know I’ve heard this term used quite a bit is you you instead of being one mile wide at what age did you want to be running schweid and one mile deep say you are you really own your marketing you you own your area of focus and that’s something AV never really was right we were just AB if there was a picture and sounds we could do it this has that been your experience too well %HESITATION yeah there there are people that it that specialize in certain areas but I think the that they’re they’re not there there isn’t enough of pushing the envelope you know we we both know we can do a lot more with what what we provided instead of just providing satisfying the the the requirements there should be looking to be able to do something that providing more value or satisfying more of a need for a client yeah and and I think when you focus more then automatically you’re you’re focusing on but what is the value that are providing and and that’s where you find your niche and it doesn’t have to be like I only two hotels are I only do yachts it could be this type of a system like %HESITATION I don’t know integrating this with that concentrating on the value is where you find out what you excel at so what with that in mind and I think that as it may be a good time to bring up your you you are a little bit they go to the differently than than others in the industry have come to to understand you know you and I know each other for awhile and and and I value that relationship and and I really admire the things you’ve been doing it a one is this podcast and other is is offering training to the industry dabbling in online marketing and so forth it’s it’s risky and and it’s tough to think differently %HESITATION what’s been your experience and and that kind of kind of like you know paint this picture for everybody just to kind of give them a little bit of a of a of a insight into the inner workings of Patrick oh boy so he had the motivation for it all was really it was first you know living in Germany it’s it’s different like I come from this New York New Jersey area there was always work to be had for anyone in AV ends I kind of live in a rural area of Germany but Germany in general has its own quirks about how projects are done and %HESITATION if it wasn’t always easy so there was a lot of feast or famine we we did well and I would %HESITATION be involved with very large projects where you you just put your head down for longer than a year at times right and then coming out of that it’s kind of like okay what do I do now and eventually the phone always writing in and we always found our way but after I guess a decade or so doing that you start to wonder is you know is there a better way is there a way to just avoid this famine and get something consistent happening met maybe not a hundred percent there but just some kind of consistent income to %HESITATION to get through those times ends and take the stress out of being a small business that’s kind of where my head was at a little bit and at the same time looking at software right the iPhone is out it’s everywhere right it’s there’s this huge change in the industry happening but there’s this whole idea of well I can’t do that stuff right all I heard about is how difficult objective sees right that’s the program apps were written in and all these things you don’t know about and Crestron came out with simple sharp around the same time and it was well off if they’re introducing this to the market then maybe this is something we could learn so I put my head down and %HESITATION I forced myself to learn see sharp and it only took about two weeks of focused concentration not to become an expert programmer but just to make something happen right you want to push a button ends and %HESITATION make a switch or turn a light on and off whatever it is and %HESITATION yeah I press that button many many times and watch the light go on and off I will admit that guilty pleasure instead we also get satisfaction out of that people think anybody came in the lock me up right away but so once I realized that I could do this apple was talking about how easy swift was the program at the same time it was their answer to everybody saying objective C. was difficult so I gave that a shot and lo and behold I could write it now ands wow I could open a TCP connection right from an iPad what can I do with that and that’s where the technical part of me that you know how do I. peace these systems together and do things was like wow I don’t need to control processor all the time ands yeah I did a projects %HESITATION came across my desk where I was directly working directly for an end user and it was in the visible room simple enough and we did it just with iPads and little global cachet converters and it works it still works today just fine so all this kind of came together to say to me like okay maybe there’s some opportunity here so I’m looking for some way to create some consistent income and I’m seeing technology change before my eyes executing on it and getting it to work so technically the whole idea sounds so %HESITATION yeah I started creating some apps and tried to bring them out to the market and show them on some trade shows and everybody said wow that’s cool ends not many people bought it so it was kind of his rude awakening of fathers a lot of things that I don’t know %HESITATION technologically I I know quite a bit and I know this thing works and I know it’s valid and I know you could make a business out of it right I’ve had people pay me customers our customers pay me money my company money for delivering solutions like this what’s going on ands yeah that’s what I kind of realize there’s a lot of things that I don’t know about business or bringing a new idea to market and I just had more questions than answers and I was having some great conversations with people I just started calling pretty much everyone I knew and asking questions and %HESITATION one day I forget what it was I think it was Colin Bernie mention that you could contract menu actor the equipment for an entire TV projects speakers the display just contract manufacturer everything and that idea was so you know different to me an interesting I said wow I wish I could share these conversations with people and I don’t know if you recorded conversation and put it on the internet it’s called podcast and here we are today so that’s that’s kind of how the podcast was born and %HESITATION the course is really just came from looking in the forms learning %HESITATION learning simple shock myself and having such a hard time with it and it was such a lack of information about how to do simple things I I made a YouTube video that showed you how to make an interlock with simple sharp pro and it’s like hundreds of people I think about two hundred people signed up for the source code for that so I had the video in little league for the source code in your email because I wanted to know if anybody was interested in %HESITATION in doing that and that was a nice little test if you give me your email address that I know that you know your at least someone interested in it and that’s kind of what set me on the path of making the online courses very interesting hair is so obviously is a lot that you’ve learned what what are some some things that you can share with the audience because I know that part of what I value out of listening to the podcast is how you are always looking to learn from your gas what are some things that you think that you can share that would be valuable to me or other people listening the whole start slowly start early %HESITATION have as many conversations with you can as you can with the people you want to work with so really know what you want out of life out of your career out of your business I think that’s important setting goals and knowing what your expectations are for yourself and from there you could kind of the side you know what kind of projects you want to be working on and then figure out how to do it figure out if there’s a need for before you go down that rabbit hole of creating something that %HESITATION that doesn’t have that much value that doesn’t create that much value for other people if you’re just learning something thing go ahead and have fun right if you did it so that’s again knowing what the goal is if you just want to learn a new programming language then you know shut the door put the headphones on and and go into your own world little world by all means but if you’re you know if you you are looking to create a product or a business or something that that idea of product value of validation is extremely important and I really that if I learned anything it’s it’s that is the most important lesson is find out if anybody else is it or find out how you could provide value to other people and really know it because if somebody says something somebody says that’s cool it’s not enough you know you got to get them to part with something of value in the I think it starts with an email address or some of their time you know can we talk about this going to give your product demonstration and of course if somebody’s willing to pay for something that’s the ultimate validation there so I think in this whole thing that I’ve been through over the past few years that’s really the most important lesson that I’ve learned is %HESITATION you know find out what the value is that you you could provide and to so I I’ve heard the term you know have your potential customer of vote with their credit card yeah that they may apply there and I and I can appreciate that it it’s something that I that I have learning gained in and something that over my career I can look back and say I wish that I did some things differently similarly to what you described but I think it it takes a lot of courage and it takes takes a lot of Dr and and determination to keep at it and and that’s why you’ve gotten to where you’ve gotten %HESITATION what he thinks is next for you for me well I really enjoy making the courses at learning the programming dot com because I get to learn something new I get to explain it but the feedback from people is really it’s just it’s great to know that you help somebody learn something and you know there are people in that situation where I was saying I’m just any programmer what do I need modern programming languages for what will that do for me I I you know why should I bother and then having people take a course and say alright now I understand how this works and I know that I could do it %HESITATION they’ve been people who said they’ve gotten an interest new job because now they could write simple sharp roll on their resume %HESITATION people have created new products because they’ve been inspired to look at modern programming in a different way to look at how they design systems in a completely different way and you know I say all this some feeling a little weird because it sounds like into my own horn but it’s really it’s more of a its roots really satisfying as for feeling to know that you were able to help somebody %HESITATION make a change in their career so I want to continue doing some courses I’m also working with a to other developers on an application called catch connect and it’s it’s a little software application that runs on windows or on a raspberry pi and you put that on the local network and you can define little connections to the TCP connections or website gets to the devices on a local network and then that that piece of software also opens a connection to a cloud application so you can log into that dashboard and you could see if your devices are online or off line and you can send them commands so you could control the projector on and off and do some first line trouble shooting right there and that kind of structure gives us the opportunity to do a lot of interesting things because we have that connection that secure connection from the cloud to your local devices we can integrate with Alexa war IFTTT ends we can start collecting data and doing analytics with that so that’s kind of warm focusing a lot of my time now and %HESITATION at looking for to see where it takes takes us very fascinating I I yeah I think I think that that’s a nice glimpse into the future and I think that that’s also a product of you thinking differently and being and knowing that there’s going to be some some trends a at that are showing the industry is changing what do you think what is your prediction I guess for for the next day I don’t know five years and as far as the the the what what people are going to be experiencing where where the the demands are going to be and and down and you know obviously there’s seven there there there’s the pressures that we talked about %HESITATION but but there’s also sentenced a lot of shifts in technology that are influencing what is going to be a current of modern AV system Adam will end in your mind what it what do you what do you think is going to be where have a second be defined I think there’s a few things to unpack there that there is the business side and there’s the technology side and then there is the kind of the middle where those two with two things mixed together and that’s never really clear right with technology it’s a one or zero you know exactly what’s gonna happen you don’t know what’s going to come right away but how things play out how new technology plays out in the market that’s that’s that mixture of of business and technology and it it makes it murky it’s it’s hard to know what’s going to happen %HESITATION I I think I would see why have a huge influence on AV because we do networks of things it’s a buzz word %HESITATION when I first started hurting hearing it for the longest time I just dismissed it right as a buzz word %HESITATION we’ve been doing networks of things forever doesn’t mean anything to me but what I think we can learn from it is the practices right how it’s being implemented so if you look at something like a nest that’s an IOC products and what are they doing with it while they’re managing a fleet of their devices right do we don’t do anything like that maybe her and said look at the management platforms that that are available to your typical AV integrator how often are they really use how effectively are they really use what are they actually being used for how often does it gets back to never installed how often does the programmer just stand there and say alright you ordered this thing what would you like it to do right so that plays into the you know the whole software practices you know how does the software development community at large how do they do their projects and what can we learn from them and it’s going to be hard it’s going to be really difficult because that again affects the business model you need to front load a lot of work you need to spend a lot of time defining what your goals are who your users are how you’re going to compartmentalize the different technologies so that multiple people to work on the same project at the same time and then plug it all in together and it all just works that’s a different work flow than your typical UV project has and I think it’s a real challenge for us but I think there’s a there’s obviously a lot of opportunity there %HESITATION but I wonder you know this conversation always ends for me is we’ll just cool will do it for us should write I I feel like it’s an exaggeration when I say that but it also could be a real thing that you know Amazon Google whoever just comes out with the protocol that everyone adopts ends that’s you know and I would see could be the driver that convinces display manufacturers to them adopt one protocol right because we all know there’s nothing special about your power on command we also know that they’re not interested in a standard because CC was their opportunity to do it and they just ignored it but maybe I would see is that thing that executives talk about enough to create enough motion with decision makers from manufacturers to agree to actually agree on a standard use something like that could happen and if that does happen you know they will have a real challenge of finding out where we remain relevant because you know that then that’s an opportunity for Amazon to just make an app that does everything just real quickly your take on what dire T. means and you know just what just so that we can make sure that we’re we’re clarifying for everybody yet what immediately coming whatever you want to be I mean it internet of things okay so it’s it’s a it’s a device that has a connection to the internet aren’t so we’ve been doing networks of things even if it’s %HESITATION cereal and relays and I are we’ve been making little networks of things for a long time integrating devices so the IOC introduces the internet ends but what that does is it’s how you apply that is what I owe team means to me it’s not just that you have this network of things that have the capability talking to each other it’s the practices and application of using that type of a system so what do you do you well you can do integrations so if you look at any kind of a a webapp integrations are huge part of many of their business models what does your software integrate with those that integrate with sales force doesn’t integrate with this or that so the IOC makes it possible to do those things right and collecting data business analytics business insights it’s it’s obviously a huge thing and you know I really think everybody should be collecting the on their systems starting today even if you don’t know what the heck you’re going to do with it or what kind of format it should be an because either have it or you don’t right even and it’s not hard to do I’ve done a bunch tutorials online that show you just how easy it is to just you know record how often a source was selected and then you’ll know in a year or two if anybody ever really selected the apple TV right and these are really simple things that we could start doing today and it could be a value add that keeps us relevant and I just don’t understand what the resistance is or you know if it’s really just a lack of knowledge or a fear of security but I would see brings all of these questions along with it you know it’s it’s also an opportunity to learn and we’ll close along those lines because I think I or T. is going to make the system is more intelligent and they’re going to make them more yes more more he I write and then that’s where I was going sand in it they’re gonna make this head they they gonna make a more personalized and more and and more predictable right %HESITATION store or being able to leverage predictability so where do you think we have a really think a I and artificial intelligence is going to have fried in what we do I have phases where I think about it a lot and then I just forced myself to stop thinking about it because you can really come up with these crazy ideas and stuff you know and I have talked to people about it years ago like look this is coming this is possible and that the idea has it changed the way I can do and you know they say to me all what it’ll turn your TV on for you because it knows you’re of the home at five o’clock and say well yeah maybe maybe that is the thing right you know and if you have an iPhone it’ll tell you how long it’ll take to get to work that some form of a high in these kind of technologies are sneaky right it’s nobody labels it like some people do what it is that that feature on the iPhone doesn’t get labeled this is artificial intelligence telling you I know where you live I know where you work and I’m taking all that data and figuring out with the traffic on the fly how long and tell you how long it’s gonna take you to get to work right that’s in a I application but it it’s it doesn’t feel like it it doesn’t feel like skied it at all if it’s like you said it improves your life it’s just this little thing that makes it easier to do something so how does that affect the V. in many different ways like I had to even be on Charlie on the show I think was a week or two ago and he’s talking about software that just analyze everything analyzing everything that’s happening in the space what kind of you know if somebody’s facing a display he’s got skeletal recognition software so you could tell how you’re moving %HESITATION using I tunes I tune begins to see how you know what kind of phones people have so it for just say digital signage right you’re showing ads and you could use these beacons to determine the ratio of iPhone to android users right and then you can show a different set of ads because the iPhone people maybe more affluent than people with androids and you’re gonna wanna show them a different kind of marketing so think something like that is a great application for for digital signage ends you know it’s another one of those rabbit holes with there’s just so many ideas that are that you could do with it but I think when you call it a I that it just it’s just programming right in the ends there’s some logic happening somewhere and if you’re feeding that into something that can really crunch a lot of data and spit out some kind of an output these are things you can start playing with today look into tenser flow from Google and just watch a few videos on it and you’ll get the creative ideas going and then go to your customers and ask them if it has value for them really that’s what it comes down to it’s not going to be an overnight thing where you know everything’s automated in perfect and and and personalized it’s it’s going to be a process of incremental changes that we can introduce to our systems and you may not even realize it like augmented reality it sounds crazy right but if you have one of these cars with a video display and rear camera where they overlay arrows or a map on top of it that’s augmented reality or it doesn’t look like it there’s no label on there but it’s an application of augmented reality so I think these things are more %HESITATION useful than they sound so you mentioned a few times pass gas and I know that part of the podcast ways to be able to to learning can gain as we mentioned so what would have been a couple of your favorite moments I did a highlight email a few weeks ago it’s tough to choose it really is because I do get something out of every episode %HESITATION I enjoyed talking to you facts right because %HESITATION were in the same business and it’s it’s it’s just really cool to ask somebody you know I have this problem with my business what would you do in my situation how do you handle this and you know like we kind of deal with the same kind of customers and and getting that kind of feedback was you know useful %HESITATION I would do this even if we weren’t recording it %HESITATION what else I think %HESITATION yet Dave Silverstein comes to mind with the whole I would do you think I think he has some great ideas on on I. O. T. and its role could play on TV a lot of the things that I was just talking about you know came from him it’s it’s kind of strange because I don’t even know what ideas are my own anymore or what I’m stealing from other people and mixing together %HESITATION I like to Ryan’s idea about you know commodity hardware becoming a platform and what you could do with that this whole idea of storytelling %HESITATION the guys from control envy told me that it’s really important to %HESITATION defined user stories for at all your different users at the beginning of your project and it’s this whole idea of stories has become the theme %HESITATION you know that AV systems are really just tools for storytelling that’s come up quite a bit %HESITATION I really enjoy the interview with mark day %HESITATION because he’s doing some very interesting things applying modern software tools to that is not completely change the severity systems are the same but the way his customers view this systems their experience with them are totally altered it’s it’s it comes back to you know how do you stay relevant how do you provide more value he’s executing on it at a level that %HESITATION that I think that is really encouraging to me and and really enjoyable to hear about so I enjoy that show %HESITATION I don’t know open up the website will go through the whole thing because I really do enjoy every what this episode which is why I keep doing it exactly so is there anything else that you wanted to share that we may not have touched on no I just think my messages really just keep learning just don’t stop learning it you know what really %HESITATION this is all about is like I said in the beginning when I started in navy Crestron amex just sold touch browsing controllers extras all switchers in auto passion and clear one and you know everybody had their thing that they specialized in so as an easy integrator or even a programmer you brought a lot to the table piecing all the systems together defining what %HESITATION the customer needed right listening to their needs and really putting together a system with your talents and creativity ends I what worry if a little bit of that gets lost in this move to one manufacturer delivering everything and I think this is kind of a danger in just accepting what comes out at Infocom as the solution of the year and I would really just encourage anyone to %HESITATION think a little more critically about you know the technology of course the applications the things that are available to us keep learning but also about you know your business and your career and how you want to be spending your time and %HESITATION find out if there’s if there’s a fit there in the market for you know what you love to do ends and what you can do well so I I appreciate your time and and sharing this in the a couple things that I got out of this conversation was that it’s not just about technology it’s about business and technology which was which would which made a light bulb go off for me and both that you know your business as well as your client’s business and I think that that’s a real real big takeaway for me so I hope that I could share that with the audience and others will find that the same type of value in that that message job and I’m sure everybody knows how to get in touch with you but why don’t we let let them know and add dad how can how can that the audience get to %HESITATION get some more of your wisdom and and that ghetto touch with you and and and sample some of the things you’ve been doing yeah it’s it’s getting a little ridiculous my email signatures all these websites so there’s learning reprogramming dot com where there’s lots of online courses you could sign up there and %HESITATION and you’ll get some emails with me and I’m on YouTube to %HESITATION link then of course some very active there and %HESITATION I appreciate everybody that connects with me because it lets me share my ideas and and %HESITATION that interaction is really important to me so yeah I guess messaging me on linkedin Patrick Murray and you are a why %HESITATION or learning the program to calm the software defined survival dot com look around you’ll find me current as well thanks for being on your show and thanks for hosting it you’re welcome anytime if you or anyone on your staff ever considered themselves just in eighty programmer join the club that’s how I used to feel I was just just Crestron program or whatever language of your choice is whatever it may be is generally this feeling in AV that we’re not capable of using modern programming languages and it simply isn’t true short there’s a learning curve but once you get through it all other languages become easier to learn and it just expands the amount of options you have when designing a system it’s not an either or decision you don’t say I won’t be using these manufacture tools anymore it’s just you have a broader palate to choose from ends here’s what market day founder of idea box had to say about his experience with the online courses at learn eighty programming dot com you know Patrick it’s funny how the smallest things can sometimes be the start of a really big ideas %HESITATION before I took the learn ATV programming dot com courses I was in that Terry I’m only a control system programmer kind of mindset ray %HESITATION when he came to new technologies or current technologies like Java script error or things like that for some reason I thought that was different from what I’m doing and what taking your courses flipped for me was not so much what I learned technically taking the courses it was the mindset of well wait a second I’m already doing ninety nine percent of what some of these most of modern programmers are dealing I just have to learn %HESITATION you know the other one percent and that’s really what I did so it’s really been kind of a big change after taking the course %HESITATION and I would really recommend this course to any integrator not only will obviously help their skill set but more importantly it might change their whole mindset %HESITATION which is more important and and and really show them new opportunities open the door so they kind of see problems through a different lens %HESITATION I gotta tell you one of the biggest changes for me was as soon as I become myself HTML CSS javascript and solve the you eyes that I can make with those technologies I just couldn’t sell a %HESITATION Crestron touch him again mark is a great example of somebody who takes new information and really applies it I know that mark still sells a lot of Crestron equipment but for him for his company for his customers for his business he needed a better you why he needed another option for user interface and modern programming allowed him to do that so the question is how can you use modern programming to improve your business please go to learn a few programming dot com and wherever you see a sign up button go ahead and sign up and you’ll get some free information to get a feel of my learning style and what kind of information is available and of course it would be an honor to have you in role in one of our courses and help you upgrade your skills and take this industry to the next level thanks for listening software defined survival I hope you found it useful and maybe it inspires you to try out something new this week if you have any questions does software defined survival dot com I’d love to answer questions on the air and if you’d like to help spread the word please subscribe comment and share it with

this is a software defined survival where we explore how software defined systems are changing the business of IT today software defined survival in ninety percent of what we build will never be seen by us or the client until it until all on site all the station for months and months the game engine use game characters who behave like our users eight slash you think about it we created a whole feedback three they sent to the occupants and the generation of media but we’ve done it all virtually the custom custom custom all the time how are you going to retain some of that intellectual property and I know how and actually build a reusable modular tool kit my name is Patrick Murray ends today’s guest founded avian city in nineteen ninety nine where he leads a team of designers developers and engineers that deliver software driven installations to enhance storytelling place making connectivity and responsiveness and I’m really excited to hear more about what all that means and how an AV programmer like myself can start applying some of these ideas so welcome to the podcast David beyond Chardy David welcome I think is there anything about that introduction that you’d like to correct or expand upon no I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head in terms of what our practice in our churches end up bringing to the built environment and %HESITATION yeah I’m really looking forward to expanding on our yes so I think a great place to start is %HESITATION obvious I want to talk about software but can you just tell us a little more about storytelling place making all these these different terms where I might just might just call in the navy system you’re getting a little more involved in a little more descriptive and how you describe that can you are kind of good that it more perspective for me surely if we think about a navy system or you know the software layer sitting on top of me these and these are the what of the of the physical installation of the functional behavior I’m so really the story telling the place making all of those descriptions of the worker really about the outcome in the why why would you put in place in the first place whose objectives the on the stakeholders died in on the user side are we trying to me %HESITATION and really more about how do the various layers of technology soft and hardware design and intention come together are designed outward behavior in a space space that has behavior or a list behavior %HESITATION and %HESITATION treating gauge where I could do something really vague to and %HESITATION purely emotional in an art piece or it might be really didactic an informational %HESITATION or it might be more about a brands just trying to evoke a sense of themselves in their physical spaces that they greet both gas and being part of the branch unity it’s excellent that’s a good description I like the way you put that so it’s a dumb it really depends on the outcome it’s it’s really the user experience or even the stakeholder experience like if you’re trying to get your brand of costs across so that kind of clear things up for me can we dial it back in %HESITATION tell me a little bit about yourself and and how you got started in analytical AV but this this kind of area is kind of an industry yeah and really it’s it’s I need your sectional kind of place that we live in where at this intersection of experience design which is a term that need to be unpacked Leslie %HESITATION and software design and development and systems and hardware design and and %HESITATION integration so those three things coming together %HESITATION yes we do have a foot and what would be typically known as the street arm my background really %HESITATION sounds a little eclectic but %HESITATION it all comes together in the end I went to school for music and music composition and released on myself increasingly writing music for contemporary cartographers and dance companies led me into here where my idea pieces were getting really more sound design oriented shows that more more complicated and I realized that I could write software that would help %HESITATION actually show control even increasingly complex a complex productions and you know but in the late nineties that turned out to be very useful to folks building theme parks are your I was finding ways of making things talk to each other to exhibit design behavior are collectively show well that’s really if we think about that early uses of experience show in experience design it kind of really came %HESITATION into market first in those explicitly being then Byrom but looking for a little bit more cultural ovation brought in %HESITATION you know the areas where we could apply the are these insights bills we started to really support museum designers so here again folks calling themselves storytellers looking to use digital layers to expand their power how they could express Sir engage their audiences now a days %HESITATION we really think of story telling us something that everybody in some way is doing %HESITATION in order to position themselves or explain themselves or invite others to understand brand institution are you a piece of architecture %HESITATION and %HESITATION we can support artists who are rather you know in their own way %HESITATION using the same mix of of skills and techniques to create the work very interesting that there comes again music is a gateway drug to some kind of a V. design or career in technology and I think there’s something to that like you mentioned sound design when you’re working on a piece of music learning an instrument I think there’s a lot of similarities with that and taking a technology apart and and figuring out how to use it in different ways and it sounds like you had an interesting career path and you brought it back to the thing that ties it together being storytelling and %HESITATION I really like that concept I had Ryan Howard on the podcast a few weeks ago and he wrapped it up to that as well saying that even you know your most basic conference room somebody’s start telling stories that’s the intention of the whole thing can you dig a little more deep into that yeah and a and I think they are you know writing %HESITATION is the super smart guy and I think you really understand I’m again the why of these types of installations are initially we think about %HESITATION and later in the conversation I hope we’ll get to talking a little bit about how these things come about and what what are a why are we are we were turning on the stakeholders investment and %HESITATION so that is an intangible are why and it really needs to be %HESITATION bolstered by an understanding of these more measurable engaged right and so it’s fine to use them %HESITATION I’ve been may be and I have a cultural story to tell and I’m really thinking about immersing myself in their culture and then figuring out what using out all the important threads and then finding all these ways of %HESITATION growing %HESITATION these threads into a sort of full blown understanding and and and not my audience your imagination that might be true of a brand as well who decide that they really want to have their gas in their visitors to their corporate headquarters %HESITATION game %HESITATION fuller sense of who they are possibly gauging where and your business where your arm it might be a visitor news a perspective shot employee who wants to get excited about and understand more about the company that there I’m about to team up with so it’s really an opportunity to engage with more senses are in a left wing near %HESITATION region casual way but show me don’t tell me I’m Bob Greenberg job who runs RGA award winning major agency had the opportunity when %HESITATION recently moving their offices consolidating from a number of buildings into one grand space that overlooks the Hudson yards in New York City we had an opportunity to look at how they engage with their visitors and his insight dial down almost a triviality but his insight was no we bring these people into our spaces we drag them down a hallway into a conference room and we must file a power point and we start to run down this linear lose run capabilities and deputation and so on and really %HESITATION what his insight was making it it’s something that bears out were up for many of us is that actually are conversational engagement or taking a walk around the state were introducing some folks are working on interesting things ended up resonating much more gas so they actually just went and took the whole thing and turned inside out created a media ribbon and that flows through the entire two story space and is this constant sort of bubbling up of the things that are important to the agency that things are important to their brand clients of the work that they’re doing %HESITATION and this allows leadership to meet specs or clients both on the marketing side also on the H. R. side of tracking talentless that %HESITATION walked in space and as they’re walking through the space will come up to a work group that might be doing something interesting and there’s some headlines or some older viewers and then sighed about what they’re working on and it sparked conversation and so really I think that kind of taking a walk through the story as opposed to sitting down and having it played back linearly is just a a great example of what we mean by storytelling usable space and in that case in almost very clean cation all are still has a very pragmatic outcome that they’re looking for but they managed to run package from this one mode and bring it out and use the whole state that sounds like a really powerful thing to do and I like the way you started it right we drank people down the hall instead of doing that the moment they walk in the building you can start telling your story and engaging those senses ends really just branding yourself and so I would see something like that and if there was no content on it I would call it digital signage right and for a long time digital signage was just menus and advertising and if a company says I want to digital signage installation well you just throw a couple screens on the wall and that’s about it right now they’ll figure out their own concept but with your approach it sounds like there’s a lot more work up front to find out what the real goals are and then the technologies is almost secondary yeah I mean I think the secondary chronologically for sure at the end of the day this is a very technical practice and and having a real rigorous technical underpinning to all the treat your body is required otherwise what we’re doing is putting things out in the world that can’t really survive the rigors of operational life that’s gonna work yeah rockets out of work and it’s not a work up toward the designed for the desired end users right so we might have a different folks that were engaging in when we’re designing the dams were actually the operational users and that I think is when we say experience design we have to always remind our clients that actually we’re not just designing the experience for their gas than their end users and their their visitors were designing the experience and the tools and the work flow their operational teams are actually going to be engaged with her you know in a in the case of most of our permanent installations three five to ten years in the market show I’m going to go back to %HESITATION or the question %HESITATION just around this thing ability of these approaches right so if your an RGA or Victoria’s secret or one of our commercial real estate finance are worn architectures trying to create a space he’s kind of behaviors you’re absolutely right %HESITATION people see %HESITATION displays in a public space coming certainly from an A. B. R. she and there’s also I suspect we’re gonna see that as digital signage elation I’m one of the things that I try to distinguish is some %HESITATION first form factor and the way that the technology into the architecture so I’m you know our process which really is to lead %HESITATION design workshop with the stake holders on the client side their architects and designers and their story tellers and maybe an agency or maybe it’s an internal storytelling communication marketing brand function getting all those folks in the room at the same time %HESITATION is actually turned out to be revolutionary %HESITATION and it’s starting to happen more and more and so that allows us to really understand why are we doing this whose needs to serve one of the considerations in terms of the physical space out of the space unfold as we walk through it where the opportunities to add digital layers and then one of the materials that the architects using we take any cues off of those materials %HESITATION and forms and %HESITATION then design the way the technology in the space so you know getting ahead of the architectural process enough so that what we’re doing collectively doesn’t end up as high as architects caught affect any extra special equipment to get packed on the building afterwards this stuff really needs to be integrated capitalize integrated %HESITATION and then on the softer side of the project the the storytelling that becomes a software that creates behaviors it’s the same thing we’ve got may be yellow or communication Joby P. R. who’s trying to Gage with their particular audience I’m we already know from all the other channels that they communicate and that %HESITATION activating multiple sensors are often times more effective than %HESITATION then sort of just holing somebody down one input or the other and so %HESITATION they also have other channels they communicate and maybe they are in Trantor there and broadcaster their on line %HESITATION they have a big social media program there are all kinds of ways channel call these folks are getting it and the channel that we’re working into the new one we’re creating it as we go as a as an industry practice %HESITATION that really helping them understand that the the raw material that they’re already working with have a light in the unusual campuses arm but that it’s not necessarily a place where you want to just play your thirty seconds thirty second spot from your commercial campaign broadcast we can talk a little bit about why that %HESITATION necessarily translate directly but it didn’t it does go to the operational sustainability right I’m gonna have an appetite at the client for an architectural scale unusual side huge resolution requirements installation what’s gonna be out in the world for twenty four hour day installation nine thousand hours a year somebody’s got to reduce content or Chambliss that might be you know seventy times each day are that’s got a run for nine thousand ours year and be engaging more relevant on brand ecstatically %HESITATION and %HESITATION mostly that means it can’t be static can’t be some looping clay list it really has to take a different approach and I do the underpinning of our whole approach is this idea of evergreen media and what we mean by that yeah sounds like a huge undertaking many different stakeholders that you need to deal with to come together and come up with a plan you you also have the structural part that the mechanical part where early in the process putting your screens and really integrating them into the building which I’m sure is no small feat because that’s that’s got to be almost custom every time and then at the end there’s the contents where you’re actually taking all of that storytelling and %HESITATION are you providing the content as well and maybe tell me more about that idea ever been constant yeah well look to find content right because we think about content from a typical %HESITATION standpoint we think that that %HESITATION stills and job maybe audio stream Josh or in your video %HESITATION and if we say that that’s what content is then a content system is just there to take that existing static he produced and shove it in the play lists and play it back at the right time and that’s simply unsustainable especially if you want your scale to the enterprise reading %HESITATION one installation that takes that approach is may be painful for the operators but it’s it’s going to be something that they can meet the challenge you start to create dot the elation and you really need to find other ways software to find ways of describing what you want the behavior to be played display that play more of this play less of that in this market during this season when these people are in the store or these executives are visiting head quarters the rule based scheduling and we have to loosen what we mean by by content and everything that we previously described this content we actually start think of it so if content is the finished thing that you’re expecting to serve the meal assets are really the ingredients and %HESITATION in our systems what we’re trying to do is we’re using software that algorithmically generated Li uses those assets those photographs of those video clips of the brand might have combine them with data and that could be datasets that we’re divisional Ising in dynamic ways or could be data about what’s going on in the ecosystem of the brand or could be data about how people are behaving and moving and using physical space we combine those into a procedural Jenner there algorithmic visual engine that that we then say well that’s taking those assets and creating new dynamic content and the dynamic content can be %HESITATION most often in our projects being generated in real time and the fact that it’s real time generation means there can be responsive in real time server sensor feedback loops between our guest in the in the canvases can happen so all of those sort of ways of describing what we mean by evergreen %HESITATION in terms of the operational or content strategy I’m or the kind of responsiveness that you can expect are one way to think about it another way to think about it is that we’re going from a budgetary standpoint if you know invariably one of our stakeholders in the C. suite is gonna be the CEO %HESITATION hero and somebody who’s responsible for the real estate operation plant of the enterprise and they’re gonna need to know about how this thing physically goes into their world and how they’re gonna pay for it typically in their world on the other side there’s the storyteller and %HESITATION maybe he knows that he has a certain amount of marketing %HESITATION objects that can go against a campaign let’s say or an initiative imagine annualized budget so even figuring out how to get these projects funded sometimes interesting creative exercise because we might have to take %HESITATION you know the CEOs %HESITATION capital budget and the marketers %HESITATION objects budget and say well we have to find a different way to stitch together let’s go to the CFO and she can look at it from a bigger perspective and say oh I see if I shift a little bit more of our funding in this year into the capital budget for the research team I can think of what we’re installing is more of a class or an investment in the platform because if you do take the evergreen approach that we propose then what you’re doing is you’re saying I’m invest little bit more in this platform I’m gonna build content generation tools into this platform that my end users can create content on behalf of the brand where and then I’m going to find that I’m not spending all that marketing backs year after year after year feed the beast and that’s primarily you know really but the main question for us about about evergreen content approaches is how do we feed the beast and how do we design systems where we’re being responsible to not just the client was going to be thrilled with us on opening day but the client was gonna turn to us eighteen months into the engagement state this is amazing I want to scale to the enterprise I really think it’s important that last part about budgeting and that sounds on it that was really enlightening about because I think it gets back to the storytelling right what what’s the bottom line of that story telling white why are we doing this at all and that’s how we started is what is the why bottom I’d I’d like to talk a little bit more about that evergreen content I really think that’s an interesting thing and you described it as a mix of assets whatever they are images audio video and then adding data into that and then the output of that is real time content so I two questions can you give me a really simple example of that in real life and how the heck do you test something like that okay so an example %HESITATION actually give you two examples one which is %HESITATION an evergreen system that for all kinds of good design and and budgetary reasons %HESITATION couldn’t actually %HESITATION be realized as a real time system and yet we had to maintain the benefits of of evergreen for the client and then something that’s a little bit more %HESITATION directly us you know kicks off all the boxes so to speak it being a podcast I’m gonna wave my hands and described the images Stickley things that that you just can’t see how your listeners catchy but out in the web looking fine examples of this our work for Cadillac house so interestingly enough catalog moved their headquarters well years ago to New York City and specifically downtown into a very creative and vibrant %HESITATION part of of downtown in the Hudson street corridor and in moving they really wanted to engage with this new audience are not you know I’m not the car straight too much junk on behalf of them they do a good enough job of storytelling but there were not your grandfather’s Cadillac anymore were designed gripping and has always been this design group and innovation that really did create design objects that happened to be cars in that job and now I’m really sort of be understood that way and so they decided that they were gonna create this your experience based on their retail are grounds for our of the office building that they were moving into and are working with games where and they mean she sort of designed their medical space that house a processional Colin nodded takes you inside it has an almost fashion runways feeling and media %HESITATION layers are all over the place now we wanted to know you know how do we express ourselves on the line usual I mentioned seventy six times each D. R. was the worst actually the resolution of this campus so in order to create that kind of blaster at the high quality and %HESITATION again nine thousand hours of unique programming a year you start to understand very quickly that there’s no way that a marketing budget is going to support the branch agencies producing bad amount of your content at that resolution and die and get right so we started to introduce them to the idea of evergreen can we get along the way was we discovered that they had this treasure trove of database of photographic design details from everything that they’ve designed and produced over the decades really loving detail so you know hubcap Rome details and stitching on leather and the way the man the sheet metal would bend around %HESITATION the the the rear bumper of a car gorgeous %HESITATION examples of their design abstract this you know making cars so we found that this was a your troubles I sort of raw materials and that if we could add meta data should those are that photographic material we could actually call it up into little front end systems that we created that allowed them to make these kaleidoscope so these Mondrian ash patterns or or or %HESITATION and so we created a series of zero modules generative software models that took those raw materials and by bringing certain expressive you know her amber’s really can better knobs out chewed this non technical non design trained and user at Cadillac then they can sit there and call up certain color tonalities or certain %HESITATION really just filter by by meta data to get down to a pool of content that feels like the raw material and then she’d that into the generative algorithms so I’m doctor system where we really are taking what we think of as latent asset latent asset but are kicking around the brand and that goes for the video content as well so publicist was out %HESITATION in so ho shooting the the broadcast campaign on the cars going through so ho beautiful architecture cobbled streets well we don’t want to and really can’t in a reasonable way %HESITATION but back to Marshall in into this architectural campus it wouldn’t work however if we ask them first and be role we first ask them to start shooting at four K. that we ask them first and beer all and what we end up with is more raw material that again is in line with the brand and the way the brand is communicating today so if I am on %HESITATION in front of the television is rare but I hear your Cadillac commercial and I see this beautifully shot environment and data it makes an impression on me now I’m walking down and I go by three thirty Hudson and I look inside and on the columns are moving into the space I see some of the same %HESITATION from the same material not edited the same way which clearly are the same made of the same stuff as without all of a sudden makes the connection that reinforces our whatever it is that I like to try to get across so that’s kind of the idea I’m not actually end up being somewhere we designed a what we call just in time rendering so we wanted all the benefits of being able to create content on the fly but the budget simply couldn’t be justified to say we need this to be real time because we actually wanted to be interactive in anyway so we created something that would %HESITATION all the benefits of that algorithmic creation but do it off line and then deliver media just in time they’ve been freshly baked %HESITATION into a more commodity does digital signage in part to kind of best of both worlds keeping you know all the GPU money that would be needed for all the hardware in the basement and %HESITATION minimizing that while giving them all the flexibility of the that sounds like a really fun project what was terrific yeah yeah I can imagine so I guess once you designed these projects and you’re ready to start acting on it you must internally have a bunch of different members different ways of making sure that just for example the programming works so I’m guessing you’re using more modern programming practices you’re running unit tests on certain functions and then at the end you kind of hand over this very complicated thing can you talk a little bit about that process yeah absolutely so I think everything that we deliver can be understood really as an ecosystem ecosystem of services tied together by communications or singles are API call them right and in the aggregate ecosystem that is actually doing the work of creating you know treating this media and exhibiting behaviors space and paying attention to our %HESITATION occupants in gas and clothing the feedback loop so %HESITATION you know even our software stock is a little a collective great so we have maybe what our guests are mostly perceiving is the output of what we think of as our front then are you combination of generative and %HESITATION and I’m gonna Torio play back systems and those are specialized to be very robust and handle ridiculous numbers of output are in you know hardware strange saying and it’s also where all of the %HESITATION you know maybe we’re using a I style transfer techniques to take us use of images and bring them into a certain difference that I could maybe we’re using including commodity video and using our computer graphics techniques to make them look like water colors in motion or were taking a data set and general I you know visualizing it and using a particle so that’s where all that work man behind that is %HESITATION %HESITATION obviously are middle where which we called in doctor if you think about it really is an air traffic control real time non blocking I owe based messaging platform it’s also parsing all the logic so if I have input from our sensor fusion system which is what we used to pay attention to occupants in arbitrary scaled spaces well then I when I say oh well when it when all the people walking into this commercial buildings lobby in the morning I want to know how many they are where they’re going and how much they’re lingering versus going straight to the elevators so that I can doctor is able to take that real time input and the rules that have been taken to %HESITATION a content management system and choreograph all these are all these activities across the system and then below that we get into %HESITATION no I guess in some ways more the commoditized side of the stock which is I would pretty database agnostic your client has something for proscribed or or or wants to be an Mongo our house we can effectively work within any of those environments all of our stuff on top so you said testing and I think before there can be testing of anything there needs to be clarity on what it is that we want to do when it’s working right and so we tend to model these things a lot %HESITATION everything we’ve built %HESITATION in ninety percent of what we build will never be seen by us or the client until it your all on site all be different stranger coming into the station but I’ve been traveling on different paths for months and months so if we think about our responsibility to manage your client’s risk in taking a chance of doing something new are in the built environment which is you know that’s just a recipe for and it’s our responsibility to manage it we do so by prototyping and mocking up and the increasingly were using pre visualization so you know what but taking three bears out of bed here’s a rendering of what this might look like all the way ju eighty working has doubled the integration test of how these things are working out all explain that so we might start in %HESITATION with the model of the space arm just architectural massing model make sure that into a game engine and put ourselves in our clients and goggles not everybody can read plans well even if they do it doesn’t dimensional space necessarily so we can move through this prostration let’s understand how this based on old where the opportunities are %HESITATION what scale feels right what different view viewpoints are in vantage points are in the future and then let’s start what canisters into that game engine virtual twin of our of our project so now we can start to see how media might play in the race but it’s still just you know Karen textures on a yacht on the surface within the model %HESITATION so then we can start a well %HESITATION we can use the game engine to actually introduce game characters who behave like our users are going to behave and we can track them and then we can see that %HESITATION does blogs are that info into the generative system and actually feed into real time %HESITATION textures does the visual products do not you think about it we created a whole feedback loop between the space the sensitivity to the occupants and the generation of media but we’ve done it all virtually so we think about that as a sort of like %HESITATION that model is almost a digital twin of the ecosystem that we’re gonna create %HESITATION and now that we have these facsimiles of the building and of the campus and all we can actually test all of the other software pieces %HESITATION in that virtual eyes against bad virtualize difficult when and then obviously because we’re in physical reality eventually we’re partnering up with the integrators and going to their shops and bring all the tests that need to happen %HESITATION to ensure that all of this early risk management actually bears out %HESITATION but it starts it starts there and it does allow us to do testing on is that in that have to connect to one another in order to do the job but that what actually need each other over on site well sounds pretty amazing %HESITATION it’s the idea is great but the years somebody who actually executes on it takes out the goggles put something in a game engine even simulates the people will be using the space that it sounds like a lot of fun do you think there is %HESITATION what what kind of a scalable projects do you need to have to do that much testing in front and work all of the amount of testing I think the process scales up and down yeah I mean look bizarre everybody’s talking about divine thinking right so it’s the you know if we think about and I’m thinking well it can be applied to %HESITATION creating at a city or can be designed for treating are used to treat a room or you know it’s really %HESITATION it’s really more of an approach and so object that has the intersection and the risk taking meaning innovation desire right so the issue if if the client and the project team have an innovation desire and their intersecting these kind of storytelling in pure creative with software with with systems then the same techniques apply you may need do less of it %HESITATION we’re not just doing it for fun we’re doing it because we actually want to be in that end up being a kind of fun but we’re not doing it for fun we’re doing it because it helps us be responsible in our clients in in in in commercial projects and I think a lot of your listeners will resonate with this I mean they’re putting us six seven eight years of capital at risk sure %HESITATION and so are we’re going to survive and thrive in in business is going to be because we took responsibility for that rest and so this is really just a way to manage that that risk in search for %HESITATION when you don’t have something to play with or test against being creative and using internet design techniques is really tough you just have to kind of gas and hope that you did what they did they did a good job and that’s not what this can work even on a on a on a smaller project to work on a project that doesn’t even have quite as much %HESITATION I don’t know is that this is really just another way to do right a software defined by a reality are you working on anything interesting that you’d like to share with us now or in the future yes are the first part know anything about what I can share I think I think you know what else what else stays best %HESITATION there are opportunities that we found %HESITATION and I think you know a lot of your audience are unstoppable occurs %HESITATION maybe show control or our supervisory automation system programmers are working within an increasingly software divide decide to find %HESITATION environment and %HESITATION one of the things that you’re trying to be right now and yes we have some incredible %HESITATION %HESITATION client work about to launch and I bite the come check out our website but I think what one of the great love to touch on is I’m so creative does it mean that you’re being inefficient in terms of how you’re building your own tools because one school of thought as well custom custom custom custom custom all the time first of all it’s gonna be very expensive second of your wallet gonna be very inefficient folks who are actually doing the work whether it’s an individual coder or a team or a larger company %HESITATION how are you going to retain some of that intellectual property in that some that know how and actually build usable modular tool kit that allows you to yes you something genuinely creative and new and responsive to the needs of any particular quiet but it doesn’t require you and your team to start scratch %HESITATION at every step so I think that that’s something that we’ve been exploring that I’m super excited about a little under the hood but it’s really about the sort of optimization of are a lot of the work that we’ve been doing one example there is a platform that we’re calling sensor fusion and %HESITATION you know if you go and take a look at our work you’ll see that were instrumental in the spaces are typically with a combination of light are thermal imaging cameras are an act I will not connect anymore but were back and %HESITATION and then getting into legislation energy positioning systems will be can just try to be sensitive to how people are using the space that might be a public environment might be retail it might be a show room %HESITATION we’re just trying to be sensitive to how people are using space of the band low so we realized that we were using all kinds of different sensors we would have a large space where we needed very low resolution understanding of the behavior we might throw a light are up in the air and cover you know ten thousand square feet but Dan in certain areas were really looking for a little bit more granular detail and are these people facing the screens are they looking away are they using their arms to try to interact with us Sir and then down at the finer grain you know things like we have motion incentives like that %HESITATION allow us to understand what fingers are doing if we put a good people and you transponder into space now we can actually track individuals phones or %HESITATION or are so deep Bob’s effectively passion %HESITATION dad were handing out the centimeter within the space so all the different scales what’s called from %HESITATION we try to synthesize into one model so we now have this %HESITATION %HESITATION this platform such as using the devolved over you know two or three years allowed just because of the company we are you know we keep doing that let’s figure out a way to really do it well and to create a tool that allows us to keep going back to that well and every project we recently did a project which is when we added the Bluetooth low energy layer because we’ve got all this is all great but I need a unique identifier so let’s add this layer and all these different layers who were you know light are you know berries acronyms all coming to this one %HESITATION coherent world model of the digital twin again I’m I’m very fond of that term these days a little twin of the way that our people needs spaces are behaving and it really active service so earlier when we talked about section the other systems and how you catch them how you boy %HESITATION center fusion of the service and I find %HESITATION he’s a friend and talk with us looking to know about generally speaking are most people moving into the space or moving out of the state without asking doctor also he can doctor can you tell me what center fusion has to say about this scale behavior but if I’m an interactive that’s over in the corner and I need to know how that individual standing two meters away facing me is just regulating with their arms I’m gonna ask the doctor the past means that you’re fusion us your whole skeletal tracking model for that user in that part of the space really does kind of create an obstruction layer across across all the different I’m sick and that you know a little under the hood but from right technical and intellectual property development standpoint I think that might be interesting to some of your ideas and the from the sounds of it perhaps in those tools will be available to other companies some day H. interesting I mean so far we’re kind of making dog food for ourselves round and %HESITATION just making sure it’s tasty and and the and the Christians but absolutely right you start to think about them well first of all it means that we can start to engage with clients in something other than a %HESITATION %HESITATION no ownership model or everything starts from scratch is really something we can license that into our are quite work we’ve done some more development actually on our own are what we call our message is this remote monitoring system that allows all our systems to phone home and tell our out managed services spoke about how things are going and %HESITATION these are all things that are distinct unit of functionality and could absolutely be making those available to our %HESITATION allowed collaborators or to the market in general solution that people can use just haven’t thought that far into the go to market yeah it certainly sounds interesting %HESITATION I hated to use a term like this but it sounds a lot like what I. O. T. promises or one of the things that I would see like a good application of it in the real space I would argue the mother would be tricky words I think that you know gas so I think you know I I turn on the of the internet you know %HESITATION and and what are they and how do they behave individually %HESITATION the idea of decentralizing the functionality interests wrinkling %HESITATION a layer of technology into space and organizing it software defined way so that it can be used for a particular purpose %HESITATION is absolutely in line with this thank you are and in stock if you think about you know the way building management systems are also a version of I got all these centers and thermostat in occupancy and there’s not any other we’re trying to understand the behavior of this building so that we can tune canticle lexical it’s whatever it all those systems are often times a service that will actually plug into so if we can work with you know %HESITATION let’s say we’ve got you know amazing engineering firm on the project traits Arabs and they’re working on an interesting building management system and we say Hey folks that is there a way that we can pay attention to your occupancy sensors because if we can bring that into our world we can integrate them into our understanding of how people work were moving to the states so knows those kind of I guess I would he bothers I achieved borrows from internet in that everything is designed to be interconnected and that is the aggregate behavior of interconnected things that gives us the desired functionality I’m so totally in line are you absolutely spot on yeah cnet networks of things have been around for a long long time it’s it’s actually nothing new it sounds like we’re gonna have to follow up in a year or so and then see what happens with us sensor fusion and conductor and how that all works out in the vaults and if anybody would like to get in touch with you how they go about doing that well are absolutely %HESITATION more than happy to %HESITATION connected strokes and I’m on the very spot forms you can find me on the day and %HESITATION and I’m not really responsive and %HESITATION %HESITATION should be an email and David at the V. dash controls are excellent David thank her being on the podcast really appreciate it great chatting for anyone on your staff ever considered themselves just in eighty programmer join the club that’s how I used to feel I was just an amex programmer just Crestron program or whatever language of your choice is whatever it may be there’s generally this feeling in AV that we’re not capable of using modern programming languages and it simply isn’t true sure there’s a learning curve but once you get through it all other languages become easier to learn and it just expands the amount of options you have when designing a system it’s not an either or decision you don’t say I won’t be using these manufacture tools anymore it’s just you have a broader palate to choose from ends here’s what market day founder of idea box had to say about his experience with the online courses at learn eighty programming dot com you know Patrick it’s funny how the smallest things can sometimes be the star of really big ideas %HESITATION before I took the learn ATV programming dot com courses I was in that Terry I’m only a control system programmer kind of mindset rate %HESITATION when he came to new technologies or current technologies like Java script error or things like that for some reason I thought that was different from what I’m doing and what taking your courses flipped for me was not so much what I learned technically taking the courses it was the mindset of well wait a second I’m already doing ninety nine percent of what some of these most of modern programmers are dealing I just have to learn %HESITATION you know the other one percent and that’s really what I did so it’s really been kind of a big change after taking the course %HESITATION and I would really recommend this course to any integrator not only will obviously help their skill set but more importantly it might change their whole mindset %HESITATION which is more important and and and really show them new opportunities open the door so they kind of see problems through a different lens %HESITATION I gotta tell you one of the biggest changes for me was as soon as I become myself HTML CSS javascript and solve the you guys that I can make with those technologies I just couldn’t sell a %HESITATION Crestron touch him again mark is a great example of somebody who takes new information and really applies it I know that mark still sells a lot of Crestron equipment but for him for his company for his customers for his business he needed a better you why he needed another option for user interface and modern programming allowed him to do that so the question is how can you use modern programming to improve your business please go to learn AV programming dot com and wherever you see a sign up button go ahead and sign up and you’ll get some free information to get a feel of my learning style and what kind of information is available and of course it would be an honor to have you in role in one of our courses and help you upgrade your skills and take this industry to the next level thanks for listening software defined survival I hope you found it useful and maybe it inspires you to try out something new this week if you have any questions does software defined survival dot com and click the appropriate I’d love to answer questions on the air and if you’d like to help spread the word please subscribe comment and share it with thanks

this is a software defined survival where we explore how software defined systems are changing the business of IT today software defined survival it’s not just designing in ATV architecture or ninety architecture it’s actually working with the end user to go through an accreditation process to ensure that our two pieces that you’re connected to their network are not to introduce any vulnerabilities there’s very few manufacturers out there that actually take the time to provide a secure means to deploy their network long gone are the days of Hey we’re just appointing a standalone network if you’re going to get into the federal space in the market I you can’t just tell me a commercial integrated that those in and lives in the commercial retail space winning a government project and taking it works the same way and has the same processes is going to be in for a rude awakening hello there my name is Patrick Murray and welcome to software defined survival today’s guest is a veteran of the US marine corps and has over twenty years experience working in government and military systems on multi level classification videoconference systems command the control and operation centers ads really interesting stuff and he is currently V. P. of federal practice at unassailable solutions and this is a niche of the AV industry that I think is interesting for a lot of people so I’m really looking forward to this discussion with Jason your ski chase and welcome to the show a better things happen is there anything about that interrupt the introduction that you’d like to correct we’re done sounded us on on point so I like to start out by hearing about the origin story because AB is kind of this niche industry and people don’t normally grow up saying I want to be an AV so tell us how did you get started in a very yeah sure Hey I I think I have a kind of very interesting story and I I definitely grew up not saying I want to be a navy %HESITATION so interesting path about and I got the marine corps in nineteen ninety nine and round two thousand I was working for the defense threat reduction agency and they had a requirement to build a intelligence reaching into briefing center as well as a security operation center on the director the counter intelligence director came came down to me looks at the time I was the physical security engineer and said Hey can you build one of these on I said yeah sure should be should be possible and long story short I went to the evaluation of different control room solutions which included %HESITATION Barco in Jupiter and I found a company called active you are not and it was a software defined controlling solution and evaluated it and it met all the requirements that we had a so in two thousand I built to operation centers support the defense threat reduction agency and then I took a six year hiatus from the AV of industry I was in the counter intelligence he feels I was working as a skip accreditation officer and I was craving a skiff in a government facility and there was an active you a solution in that facility ana came under my purview to accredit that facility and the systems that were in it and so I was working with active you to make sure that their system was deployed in those environments for signal isolation and things like that and then they ended up making me a job offer and so in two thousand and six I handed in my government credentials and got into the control room an operation center market where with active you are standing up their federal practice here in northern Virginia and that that’s how I got into it like said the only from the street in counterintelligence field into the control room market and that’s really where I’ve been focused since then nice story the technology in general has a lot of acronyms but I think once you get into the military side of things it’s %HESITATION times one hundred so help us out here what’s what’s the skiff how sure skip is a sensitive compartmented information facility it’s a facility used to process intelligence information all right ends can you maybe give us a like a brief overview of what that first system you did with activity was like wait what what does a an operation center means you and somebody says build me an operation center what are kind of the core elements of that yeah well it can be a lot of different things and is very mission specific %HESITATION so there’s you know there’s never one one means to to solve every missions requirements are so for me in in two thousand that very first system how it was pretty simple the district operates the center really wanted to be able to display video from their CCTV system and at the time it was all composite analog video shows a bunch of composite capture cards built into a video processor for displaying those up onto a video wall so that the officers industry operates centers was a leadership to get quick situational awareness as do you our facilities within the national capital region of the Washington DC are so that was the main objective and goal of that a system and then the counter intelligence briefing the briefing center I had a very different role I really was for displaying dossier information on threats these two agents deploying overseas that supported the defense start reduction agency and to give them information about those threats and to do brief them on the way back out is to what threats they may have encountered why they were deployed overseas %HESITATION and gather that information so it was more about displaying information on individuals and on locations a Jew spatial locations from a mapping application standpoint once again it was fairly simple not too many windows going out same time so that was those are the first to operation centers right I have to overall with any operation center they though they all have very different missions in the objective usually is to gain situational awareness and in most operations centers nowadays are you the main component is gonna be a video wall some sort of but even that is starting to change to some degree so having your a large scale video wall to display information and so leadership can gain that situational awareness and now with the %HESITATION high resolution desktops you’re seeing more and more aware operation centers being deployed where the video wall is for your leadership to view from afar gain situation where it’s without impacting the operators on the watch for and the desktops are being used to support situation one is to the operators they can bring up you know six seven eight ten twelve videos on their on their own personal desktop monitors instead of having to you and you have a dedicated piece the video off for each and the mission that may be inside a an operations center that sounds a pretty fascinating a personal video wall at the resolution is getting back good where yeah you could kind of shrink all that down and still have enough detail for it to be useful so you mentioned situational awareness a lot I’m guessing video cameras things like that street cameras of maybe some TV feeds what what are some other things that might surprise us what what might be included what kind of sources might be included in there and what are the challenges on displaying them yet so of the cameras and in nowadays more more the camera feeds are coming you know to us we’re ingesting them over the network so he said to sixty four streams we offer those systems etcetera so those come from video management platforms are not coming necessary directly from the camera that you’re having to interface with you are interfacing in some cases with overhead assets such as drones are UAVs to bring an live feeds sport near the war for applications in other cases I even drone feeds us supporting our local law enforcement is is coming more more a standard are the other type of feeds on it would be like any I guess I say again because I I do so much but your applications that reside on a different PC with an operation center where that beat logistics whether that be our overall situational awareness type applications geospatial applications intelligence applications where that piece again are you man things that nature’s just static images being brought up into the video wall and in other yes source files being you played directly on the video wall verses of playing them on a PC and then your sourcing the PC to the video wall on it and more more you’re seeing where end users want D. of remote access to their PC so instead of having all your PC’s under your desk and in the military government application a lot of times there’s multiple classifications are so they can rack and stack all their PC’s in a data center in use a remote KVM functionality either through a network based solution or through a fiberoptic based solution like I think logical or something like restaurant in the annexe or a Matrox XTO things of that nature are you kind of more more of what platforms you’re seeing within the operations center so I’m you mentioned earlier the term signal isolation and I think this has a lot to do with what you’re talking about now we just described is easy to understand if the the rack room is is in that room next door but I imagine that’s not always the case it may even be in another building some time sometimes so what are some of the challenges of managing that on the network and making sure it is secure and %HESITATION doesn’t really touch any other networks that may not have that security sure what is the real challenges is that no two organizations %HESITATION menacing isolation the same way I sewed the method that you use for organization a may not be the same that use organization be even within a larger organization yeah you’d say you know the army or the marine corps the navy you would think if you went from one army installation to another army installation that they would follow the exact same guidance right and there are some very specific guidelines out there for separation of signals between classifications of what they call it red and black but not everyone implements and the same in every organization has the ability to use their own jurisdiction as to how they’re going to die there is a guidelines so in general there’s a people I use use the three foot rule for processing so PC’s anything with a processor in it need to review the separation between them on and then there’s a signal isolation on the cabling and that varies between what type of keeping your using and where it runs and how has to cross each other whether that’s fiber or whether that’s copper and you’ll find your should different organizations will use different methods my my safeguards when I’m designing a multi classification system is to always use fiber until the customer tells me that I don’t have to and then you will discuss the parameters of how that’s going to go about and bring the right people into the mix because early on with any government implementation do you wanna start talking about information assurance and system security I so those involved different people aware that the the the CIO or the Cisco or there is so I saw it is always the information systems security officer what the rules are going to abide by and and so those can be the RMF which is the risk management framework for how systems are yeah told from a security standpoint like the operating systems on different pieces and how they go about implementing RMS in in the different networks so that’s that’s all a big part of what we do it’s not just designing an ATV architecture or ninety architecture it’s actually working with the end user to go through an accreditation process to ensure that the parts and pieces that you’re connecting to their network are not to introduce any vulnerabilities and and that’s been a big part of where I’ve always felt the AV industry has fallen fallen down on others very few manufacturers out there that actually take the time to go through information assurance processes and to provide a secure means to deploy their their solutions onto a network because you’re long gone are the days of Hey we’re just applying a standalone network I’ve been deploying enterprise AV system since two thousand five two thousand six time frame and more and more that’s what the customers are going to it’s not the standalone so they want to make sure whether it’s a control system whether it’s a switch whether it’s a display on that are all connected to the network that when they run a scan on that network that they’re not gonna find any bone abilities are and if they do they want to know that they can be mitigated are so yeah that’s that’s part of what are the challenges that that I faced on a daily basis and I go back to manufacturers and say Hey we did a scan on your box right maybe it’s a Dante box and you know I go to a terror attack and say Hey you know I found that you’re using an old version of SSL or TLS yeah I need help and I will that’s nine are on a road map how do we get that done or I go to your view on I say Hey guys yeah we stand the software we found you know saying we found these list of vulnerabilities in how we go about maybe getting them and and I give those examples to the real world examples from a customer for command center that we’re working on right now where they need those %HESITATION bone abilities that were found to be that’s a really interesting perspective and %HESITATION I’ve heard this on this show before that most AV equipment really doesn’t meet the security requirements of %HESITATION many enterprise networks maybe a silly question because you listed a lot of them but what are some simple things that a manufacturer could do too well to help you out more yeah sure what I we still manufactures when I’m talking to about the government market is too hard in their box their their piece of equipment you prior to it going out to the market and and provide some documentation and as to how you went about Harding that piece of equipment and did you use a third party testing company to go through it versus yourself and can you show me that if you’re a switch that you have signal isolation if you’re if you have a network interface can you prove to me that when I run a scan I’m not gonna find in a bowl vulnerabilities or if I do do you have a secure configuration implementation guide that I can use because there are now some devices that are on the network I’ll use one for example the MDX I just did it and the X. deployment had like seventy NB exes honor and and they they have the ability to to be secure but you have to know how to set the to configure the unit so that they are using a secure settings where they’re using encryption on SSL and TLS are that their passwords are protected and the password to meet the guidelines that they’re getting updated that are part of active directory all these sort of things can really help me so I I encourage the manufactures the all the AB manufactures that have any sort of network interface to engage a third party I information assurance company and help them out locked down and harden their products in a before releasing them and then provide a secure configurations for the integrators to use are so that they have some level of assurance that when they deploy them on a customer’s network I’m not gonna introduce any bone abilities and once again with a set distance every single customer has a different set of guidelines or or interpretation to guidelines of how they’re going to implement security you’re never gonna have a fool proof means and I always tell manufactures is if you’re going to get into the federal space and then the federal market are you can’t just dip your tone it it’s your all in or nothing and it’s not a a once and done there’s no one time get get a approval and forever your product you meets all the requirements it’s a continuous updating because as we know there’s constant owner bill is coming out two for security technical security from a signal I intend to standpoint as well as in very much more so from the information assurance and over the network standpoint you know addressing viruses and malware and things that nature so I am I want manufacturers to to jump and stay and have a a a person at the manufacturer that knows how these church the great work and have that person be yeah the point person too in interface with that third party testing company to ensure that the there are deploying a a solution that’s going to meet the government’s needs thanks for that that was a really insightful ands yeah I like the way you didn’t put too fine a point on it that it’s it’s hard work if if you want to be involved in this space and I’d imagine the same thing would hold true for integrators as well that they’d have to really dedicate themselves to being a part of that industry that niche yeah very much so you know you’ll find that there are integrators out there that know the federal market and you can only know the lingo on they know what to look for they know how to in its you from a from an integrated standpoint they know the contract vehicles used to get partnered up to win projects but then they know your D. security protocols for it for just getting in a building a commercial integrated that does and and lives in the commercial retail space winning a government project and taking it works the same way on and and has the same processes is gonna be in for a rude awakening it does not work the same and it does take a specials a set of skills to operate as an integrator in the end the federal space and what you’ll find is in the the integrators who are successful in the federal marketplace a lot of them have previous military it as their employees are they came out of the government space that help them navigate in that in that federal market %HESITATION and and I think we we talk about before we started the recording is is having clearances right so you have to have your people on your staff to have a clearance you have to have the company itself cleared and it’s that’s a process in itself so yeah very much so integrators that have a federal group and that are focused on the federal market know the lingo know the requirements for information assurance TA compliance straight compliance on not used in many cases you’re not allowed to use the products are manufactured in China because of the threats and and because the trade agreements that are in place so you know those are things to know %HESITATION and and it just accessing those facilities what’s expected of you at those facilities insecure environments and knowing operationally a lot of times in the command center space we going to an operation center and start working to either update upgrade expand the TechTV technology that’s in that space arm and real world things start happening that require us to get out right then and there regardless of the clearance level that we have and you’re a an integrator that’s fairly focused is used to those sort of those disruptions is Hey mission comes first and when eight a real world scenario happens in that operation center get stood up and activated and things start happening you got leech and that you may leave for ten minutes you may leave for ten hours you merely for ten days on how long that is activated for until they can basic give you back here at the space to start working again us who you’re dealing with the the destruction that comes with with in the operations center space is also part of that and it’s it can be very frustrating I talk to you companies and some choose because of the frustration not to get into the federal space and I told you get it because either like said you’re in or you’re out you can’t just get your tone it interesting I really I’ve got two anecdotes about that I mean the example you gave was was pretty extreme that when something happens they need to use the rooms for a crisis situation but %HESITATION I remember I was on a project once and we needed an escort to work in the room we were working in and the first thing is you can’t take your phone in there so if one of your technicians of your smartest guy is working on that project he is offline you cannot get in touch with him for that day or days that he’s there and one of my colleagues went to the bathroom by himself one day and they didn’t like that at all that he just got up and took a pee on his own accord so %HESITATION yeah is very practical things that you need to be aware of and it’s a it makes a big difference on on on how you can approach these projects yeah I think that’s a great point did the just the simple fact is that a lot of people ask me why I carry a note pad there like Hey you know we all use iPads we all use tablets to do our work and like that’s great but in the space is not going to I can’t have my phone I can’t have a tab I can’t bring my PC and you know it’s it’s it’s an old fashioned tape measure in my my notepad and that’s how I that’s why I go to meetings because of the restrictions on secular technology or any in some cases you I would you guess watch I can’t even bring that in or a fit that all every all your electronics have to come off in that just goes with the I guess for me I’m so used to that have been doing it my entire career become second nature whereas a commercial person focused would probably you walk into an back home I got AI I thought I was gonna build a bring my laptop I thought I was going to be able to bring my phone I have these applications that I need to use a lot of times when we’re talking with our customers in a in a secure space yeah we start talking about those things early on is a are you going to provide us internet access inside your facility are do you have a laptop that we can use to connect to your network or multiple laptops if it’s a multiple networks to talk to you know for programming purposes or for configuration purposes know your DSP files your configuration of your encoders and decoders and control applications so yeah those are all good points that you it which makes it more difficult they’re they’re a lot more time consuming to implement he inside of a secure facility because you don’t have access to the people or whether there is kind of a it’s kind of a dark hole yeah interesting so on the one hand you’ve got all these limitations and restrictions put on you but on the other hand I’m sure that the latest technology is also what wants to be what they want to use and take advantage of so %HESITATION can you tell me a little bit about how maybe the role of software and networking has changed over over the years these kind of spaces yet one for me coming from active you a which is a software defined control room solution that’s where I got my start and they are a pure software solution they develop software and deploy it on me standard servers standard PC’s and they don’t label rand any of those so for me I’d and they’d have their own control software so much late in a U. tele Gee I thought active you was doing what you tell you did twenty years ago they’ve always had their own earn software defined control platform that ran on a PC that you can act from from an access the web browser that we just based on simple visual basic scripting also that that’s all I really ever knew prior to leading active you and coming into the the rest of the eighty market you for me a lot up there has been a whole lot this change I’ve always liked that model and I’ve tried to continue to use that model to use the the network to use the enterprise to integrate solutions into active directory are and to not be the standalone stove pipe solutions there are many more and a software defined control systems now I imagine you tell you because I’ve done a few deployments with them and I love their model it makes a lot more sense than happened that that black box that the customer has to call in it a programmer to support whenever they want to change versus Hey I can go into a web browser I can add a new device I can remove a device that can change devices I can change the look and feel of the user interface and I can do that on my own with my own ID guys that that I have on staff so that’s where I I do think things are starting to change %HESITATION more so within the industry as a whole on for me like said I’ve been doing that for a long time and so I’m glad to see that people are are catching up that’s interesting that’s so funny take so what it sounds like is on software defined systems for you just means more flexibility absolutely not being tied down to a single manufacturer and and not being tied down to an integrator either where I have to rely on them every time I need something changed so yeah I have a having that flexibility is huge and you might my first you tell your point was just that I had a customer who was an army customer and they said Hey look we have a restaurant system and had no issues with Crestron itself but they found it hard to obtain the funding they needed to make changes to their control system when they wanted it and they said Hey do you do you know something else that we could use that wouldn’t require any programming and I kind of scratch my head and I remember I I talked to a friend of mine give a shout out Shane Myers on he had told me about you Telek you said I could remember the name of the platform so I called the chance of Hayden was named a platform you’re telling me about the din requiring program and so he told me about you tell you so I gave Frank offer a call and he was very skeptical of me at first my my intentions I think he thought I was trying to get some information out of him but my intentions were true and we ended up deploying the first my first system within the government are with you tell G. and it’s still there today and it’s it’s working fine and so yeah it gave them a total flexibility they have to AV support technicians on site are they got trained up on you tell G. and after the deployment they continue to support it and maintain it interesting here Frank’s a great guy he’s been on the show before and a big advocate of software defined systems what I like about that story is that %HESITATION it goes back to this whole process isn’t systems and understanding how the federal space works they couldn’t get the funding to send a guy like me there to change the programming yep and and that’s where the softer so wasn’t really the technology itself was just really the the the you know the steps to getting a change done is is what was holding them back and was the argument for something software defined yet yeah exactly are you are you working on anything interesting enough now or in the future that you’d like to share with us I am working on things that are interesting own unfortunately because of the nature of the work we do on which is also a downside there’s not a lot of marketing I can I can put out there about what I’m working on a currently you know I I had a lot of times in federal contracts there’s a clause of of no marketing so you can’t necessarily go out and say I worked on your customer ABC’s your system and here’s what we did without getting permission from the end of the legal team at whatever organization that you’re working at so a lot of times any marketing is very generic in nature saying we did a DOD deployment in this general region of the United States or overseas and we use these general technologies because yeah they don’t they don’t want people to know exactly what technologies they’re using our wider using them and who they’re working with us so yeah unfortunately I’d I’d love this year I’ve done some really great projects and for me it that’s the reward is the frustration is there but the reward at the end is knowing that you’re actually help keeping people safe is huge your help and you know so I still have plenty of friends that are in the military employ your friends and our government other put themselves in harm’s way every day in knowing that you know I’m providing their leadership an operations center to help you know provide them better information to make better decisions are that hopefully will help keep them safe and keep him and protecting the assets of the United States is as awesome that that that’s a great thing is yell out I can’t tell people where the system that put him but knowing that they’re doing great things is is pretty rewarding excellent that’s great stuff I really think that a that is %HESITATION something that keeps a lot of people going is is seeing their systems in an operation and knowing that they they have a real world the fact it’s not just a meeting room that %HESITATION that collects dust somewhere it’s it’s something that is used and actually yeah in this case helps protect people and keep them safe so we’ve mentioned a few times in in this %HESITATION in this interview here how how complicated and difficult it is to navigate navigate this federal space where would somebody go or manufacture an integrator if they were interested in maybe just looking around and seeing if this is for them how would they go go about get starting with doing that where could they turn to for some help yes we offer an answer unassailable solutions we offer business consulting services to manufacturers and two other integrators that want to get into the federal space they know it’s alphabet soup they’re trying to figure out where all these acronyms are they want to get their products accredited where do they go to get a credit what accreditations they need how they go about that process word of the third party lab that they can go to to get their products tested in the Bible waited and who didn’t need to talk to the government to get their products approved for any true products list so yeah we’re we’re happy to help we’ve offered our services numerous times different manufacturers to get them started and where to go to get those services as well as where to find %HESITATION cleared people that want that can support the the federal projects %HESITATION and the class by space so it’s it’s not always just about you know understanding it but also needing and having the people the resources that can support customers want you do get into the market is there a if somebody would like to get in touch with you how would they go about doing that the best you know I’m a big guy linked in user I’m on there all the time so they can always looking up only ten you can also go to our our company website which is unassailable solutions dot com that’s it’s a company that’s run by a might my wife and I saw the you can look to see kind of what were our main focus is in when where where where we’re doing business excellent Chasin thank you so much for being on the show thanks Patrick if you or anyone on your staff ever considered themselves just in AV programmer join the club that’s how I used to feel I was just an AMX programmer or just Crestron program or whatever language of your choice is whatever it may be there’s generally this feeling in AV that we’re not capable of using modern programming languages and it simply isn’t true sure there’s a learning curve but once you get through it all other languages become easier to learn and it just expands the amount of options you have when designing a system it’s not an either or decision you don’t say I won’t be using these manufacture tools anymore it’s just you have a broader palate to choose from ends here’s what market day founder of idea box had to say about his experience with the online courses at learn AV programming dot com you know Patrick it’s funny how the smallest things can sometimes be the start of a really big ideas %HESITATION before I took the learn ATV programming dot com courses I was in that Terry I’m only a control system programmer kind of mindset rate %HESITATION when he came to new technologies or current technologies like Java script error or things like that for some reason I thought that was different from what I’m doing and what taking your courses flipped for me was not so much what I learned technically taking the courses it was the mindset of well wait a second I’m already doing ninety nine percent of what some of these most of modern programmers are dealing I just have to learn %HESITATION you know the other one percent and that’s really what I did so it’s really been kind of a big change after taking the course %HESITATION and I would really recommend this course to any integrator not only will obviously help their skill set but more importantly it might change their whole mindset %HESITATION which is more important and and and really show them new opportunities open the door so they kind of see problems through a different lens %HESITATION I gotta tell you one of the biggest changes for me was as soon as I come myself HTML CSS javascript and solve the you eyes that I can make with those technologies I just couldn’t sell a %HESITATION Crestron touch him again mark is a great example of somebody who takes new information and really applies it I know that mark still sells a lot of Crestron equipment but for him for his company for his customers for his business he needed a better you why he needed another option for user interface and modern programming allowed him to do that so the question is how can you use modern programming to improve your business please go to learn AV programming dot com and wherever you see a sign up button go ahead and sign up and you’ll get some free information to get a feel of my learning style and what kind of information is available and of course it would be an honor to have you in role in one of our courses and help you upgrade your skills and take this industry to the next level thanks for listening to solve find survival I hope you found it useful and maybe it inspires you to try out something new this week if you have any questions does software defined survival dot com and click the appropriate I’d love to answer questions on the air and if you’d like to help spread the word please subscribe comment and share it with your friends thanks

this is software defined survival where we explore how software defined systems are changing the business of IT and today software defined survival in once I was able to really right object orient my life as opposed to %HESITATION thinking that was one thing in the world which guy are you right because that’s the box integrators get shot we’re not radio box in this is our solution and here’s our front end in the front and sells it writing about the iPhone that’s why that sells it don’t worry about the black boxes that are going to be on the back and that we’re going to and if you’ve got that you’re for and from that you can easily all of those items are easy and now you can get the client really unique user experience that rivals right brown or the reality is no I’m a programmer and it doesn’t have to be out and she could be anything and you’re right most dealers and most integrated are going to take that step a quick word of warning before we get started if you happen to have an Amazon eco or eco dot nearby now would be a good time to go over there and click that mute button because we do mention her name quite a few times in this episode so %HESITATION Alexa stop listening and if you’d like to integrate Alexis with pretty much anything on your network go on over to catch technologies dot com and have a look at catch connect it’s a little piece of software that can run on your windows machine or a raspberry pi and lets you to send commands to pretty much any device through Alexa we take care of all that backs and back end server business and all you do is configure what commands you want to send to what IP addresses and you can learn more about that at catch technologies dot com all right back to the show hi this is Patrick Murray ends today’s guest has held many positions in the Las Vegas ABC from installations sales and programming and since two thousand nine he’s been president and founder of idea box a TV installation design and installation company in Las Vegas please welcome mark day to the podcast mark welcome thanks that you’re glad to be here is there anything about that introduction that you’d like to comment or expand upon no I think you hit the nail on the head %HESITATION the short version is I kind of came up through the industry doing installations kind of as a trade worker when I was twenty in my early twenties twenty two twenty three twenty four caught the programming but my father was a computer programmer psycho watching you it in the can had a natural knack for it from there I started programming for other audio visual company is slowly started graduating to larger and larger systems more complex systems then into commercial work and then decided that most of the problems with our projects weren’t really on the programming side they were on the design side so I thought I could do it better myself and then started idea oxide like early two thousand ten may two thousand nine stuff %HESITATION does a few things there are like about that %HESITATION that you had that influence from your father to be a programmer amber my father taught us a basic course on the weekends at a university and that was kind of my introduction to programming so there’s that influence they are think that a that comes up a lot that that being introduced a program programming as a young child has influenced a lot of people today ends then you talked about how programming isn’t really the problem its design and that’s really I think an interesting thing to because the programming actually easy if the design is right everything just kind of falls into place and you’re told what to do it’s it’s kind of like following a recipe you know you’re exactly right and %HESITATION it really does all star from the design and I think what happens a lot in our industry %HESITATION kind of a common problem is that everything is advertised as being integrated all right so you can see works with nest how are you works with brand axe whatever it is and you know as well as I do that being integrated ball or you know being marketed that way means different things from different manufacturers right so does that mean play pause and stop work or does that mean that I have full access to all the features of the device for example right next is incredible with you can integrate messed with Amazon Alexa but when you go and set it up when you first have set up in the integration was that you got the integration going the first generation of that didn’t allow you to even change modes via your next so you could say you know I like to Alexa set the temperature in the house to seventy five and you do that but if you had to teller to Alexa go to cool mode she wouldn’t be able to do that right so without knowing that your sales guys are gonna go out ingest oh yes nurses integrated well we can we can go ahead and do that %HESITATION when the actual reality situations that it’s not right because you know the API this necklace features open or what not so you really have to understand your data and that’s that’s kind of one of our core design philosophies understand your data and then were able to get that across the customer a really helps us close the sales to %HESITATION you see the same problem with alarm systems you see that you know coming for residential background so you’re right out we hit the nail on the head the design is really were all of the future problems are going to either be squashed or where they’re going to arise from yeah it’s really a great point the messaging of this kind of consumerism in our professional integration space the messaging can be completely wrong at times and %HESITATION that’s something that it’s always kind of a challenge when you’re sitting with the customer to explain what exactly it is what we’re doing without getting too technical I really hard time doing that do you were do you have any go to techniques or tips on on how to have those conversations with maybe nontechnical people you know idea you know what I always do I use the analogy of a person’s phone so most of our clients were gonna have a high end residential system or they’re gonna have a commercial system most of them are going to have a high end android phone or that happened high and even higher and ice on the right and we’re gonna talk about all the cool technologies that the icon allows them to deal with that order and Hoover or order post mates or or whatever it is managed their contacts but then I dial that conversation back to you wouldn’t it be great if the phone just work every time I used it and then I relate that to the system you can kind of relate that annoyance the great customer gets when they’re trying to make that phone call in for whatever reason their home is where they can’t make a phone call from where their offices where they can’t make a phone call from or this one stretch of road in between is where they can’t make a phone call from if you can relate that your design stops that dead zone from happening and that dead zone translated you stopping that annoyance that really helps me kind of sad explain the system to them and I didn’t get technical there at all right now so I really in the cell phone because people have no problem spending a thousand dollars on their phone %HESITATION did you all these you know great things and and and all of us have that issue all the time where we’re trying to make a phone call and we can’t do that which is the one thing that the phone is supposed to have solve great very similar to the cars combustion engine combustion engine works one hundred percent of the time yet still the phone does not work well I like that a lot can you hear me now right yeah exactly exactly as all marketing campaign on that so I like the way he did that it’s like something people are very familiar with it is a high tech products ends you do look for the annoyance and they’re the thing that still doesn’t work that’s familiar to them that everybody is familiar with basically repeating myself ten times but I like the way you did that so I’m gonna steal that one from you if you don’t mind me you know it really works and and to really help with the sales I always kind of bring our competitor out and explained that there are sales center company most companies out there are very stale centric and we’re much more technology centric so we can go ahead and we will design from the get go out of those flaws we’re gonna design outlines dead zones meanwhile a lot of our competitors are still trying to either fit the latest and greatest marketing idea in or or or you know cheat whatever their dealers for in ways were much more concerned with do these devices have one hundred percent uptime and you these devices half full proof communication yeah arm is a few points there so that kind of reliability is going to translate into a delighted customer in the ads and that’s just good for business ends of course sales are important right you need to make sales to us to have the opportunity to show what you can do but when that messaging like you talked about in the beginning works with nest works with this works with that and now I’ve personally been in some situations where you’re in the trenches trying to make something work and sells guys like we’re having such a hard time I was told this will just work and it doesn’t always go that way so finding that a that common ground between the cells messaging and the technical realities I think is that the challenge of the basic John of what we do you know that’s really our job you’re exactly right I’ve been in so many situations where coming up programming and when I was younger you know I would bang my head against a wall to make peace a integrated with the right and they really weren’t designed to integrate with each other and here I spent twenty thirty forty hours maybe trying to get this item to work when it would have been much more cost effective to just swap out the peace even for the project by the time you pay for my labor you could have swapped out the piece for twenty percent of that cost and we would get off their races and done and even at the end of my forty hours I got the piece to work ninety percent as well as the right piece of work in the first place right yeah in the maybe billing for that time is the solution but it doesn’t always apply well you know that and that’s why I started my own company right so it was that was a real as a real thing that catalyze the starting up my own company was was watching the designs the wrong I got it you know to be honest with you that was one of the major flaws that I noticed most of the companies I work for a grant for west problems started at the design so many issues were created that were a completely unnecessary so talking about that %HESITATION sounds like you had a few projects that didn’t go that great as we all do can you %HESITATION maybe recall a project that really did go well and %HESITATION maybe your most successful projects and what made it rewarding for you you know our most successful I can’t think of a project off the top of my head that I would I would of color most successful project %HESITATION I do know that once we once we refined in this isn’t until year for maybe actually your five or six of idea box that we really refined this process of designing the system one hundred percent correctly you know believe it or not when we started right we started with you know our first job maybe was a two hundred thousand dollars or three hundred thousand dollar job was at full blown automation system and that in a private residence and then every job after that you were kind of running and gunning and learning on the way and you never had time to sit down and really design it out as you said you you decided you wanted to we started up in the first place right and I do you actually remember having conversations with that someone might keep people about really going home what would the perfect system look like for you and I went home and I did the same thing not from a technical integration standpoint but from user experience standpoint so some guys would come back with you know I really love you know the vantage like you or I really love the user experience of a kaleidoscope even though it seems like collide skate should be long gone now that you know apple TV’s are out for five years ago out and we can’t took all of that it was only three or four guys that came back and did that and then we chose out of those %HESITATION issues you can have created a chart a hierarchy of what’s the number one most important thing reliability was the number two most important thing integrated building and then user experience on the device so once you took that user experience out of ice and kind of put that in third place I think it really helps because someone says the user experience of a nest thermostat is just so great so that’s what I want to put on the top of the hierarchy well that’s what your sales people are going to sell and that is a problem yeah I would much rather have an ugly you know Crestron or ugly a tiny well thermostat hidden in a room with a temperature sensor because I know it’s gonna work whenever samba time it’s not going to have API call limits so can we rely on wifi it’s not gonna have all these other issues at the end user is not thinking about so once we develop that hierarchy where the boring stuff was more important than that the kind of sex your stuff our systems started going much mood there are labor our numbers went down and the jobs became more profitable so that’s kind of my take away as far as like the perfect job is concerned you know for me as a matter of a thirty thousand dollar job or three hundred thousand dollar job or million dollar you know job used in the commercial world for that matter what matters to me is this can the product coming in can easily set up in shock and once I did we it can I walk away into me that is the mark of a successful project good stuff is there’s a few things I want to unpack there so I really like the way am I like the conclusion of that brainstorming session %HESITATION and I think that might be different depending on what kind of markets urine so you’re in high end residential so reliability usability are the things that came in at the top and data products user interface may not be so important and that might be different in a different niche so but I like the way that you brain storms and you said only with three or four people that’s all you need is a handful of of smart guys too or or people to arm to come up with these ideas and just really take the time to inspect you know what it is that we’re doing because when you start a company you have all these growth in sales pressures and I like the way you took the time and said let’s hit pause and reinvest in design and how we do things and %HESITATION and do that brainstorming and what you came up with really did %HESITATION reap some benefits for you ends at the end you were talking about how that nest or not not the nest we want to pick on them the end you were saying how %HESITATION you want to be able to walk away from a device so you mentioned like a Honeywell thermostat or Crestron thermostat and then if you compare that to a nest thermostat so nest is more like I O. T. where they’re pushing updates all the time to that thing and you don’t really have too much control over it but those Honeywell Crestron ones you are completely in control over what for as the installer over what firmware is running on that so how do you think %HESITATION IOTV affects the devices you select you know I would see is it’s the future %HESITATION and he really has downstream automation you know this for I would argue that this is the first year now two thousand eighteen where anon one percent let’s say customer can have a really functional smart home full bio T. devices that are very that are extremely reliable they are customizable you can’t do a lot of custom stuff but the work I can integrate my my my nest hello doorbell which my Amazon Alexis show %HESITATION and it’s really delightful for customers my garage door application by alarm application all of those items you know they were actually worked really well lot better and that you know two or three years ago first generation stuff but again it’s the integrated believe that that we run into issues where you might be able and that problems getting solved every day by a lot of these large tech companies %HESITATION so you know we’ll see how it goes and we have no problem integrating they can newest sexiest device but it’s got a it’s got a pass that integrate ability test up front before we were really put it in you now so yeah I think IT really is the future I think a lot of these these large companies are going to solve a lot of problems you downstream customers I think that there’s always going to be a space you now in high end in the luxury market college there’s always a space right because it’s more about the psychology of the luxury market and less about the product itself so close your markets always going to want custom right a curse is a person’s a person’s shoes or shoes or shoes matter who you are but you’re luxury customer’s always gonna want to differentiate themselves because they can psychologically and I think they’re always going to want to do that in the high end state so does that mean going back to high end two channel system does that mean %HESITATION giving customers you know different experiences whether it’s BR what or whatever it is the future %HESITATION I don’t know you know we’ll see what the future brings but there’s always a niche in there there’s always a way they always want to differentiate themselves in some fashion stuff I like that downstream customer I mean you see it all the time right what what what is a smart home and it becomes harder to find with all these affordable and easy to get products that can kind of integrate with each other you can use IFTTT so these boxes even talk to each other and you could do some light automation ends for certain segment that’s it’s enough and it’s probably hard to make a business out of that as an integrator and %HESITATION and then it would make sense if you’re in residential to concentrate on the luxury and service aspects of that what term if you had a crystal ball what do you expect I mean you mentioned the aren’t things like that is there anything in this direction that customers are already asking for do you have any ideas of how to differentiate yourself in this kind of a downstream pressured market and stay relevant in the in the higher end systems that’s a good question I think that on the downstream stuff %HESITATION you know we’re looking at homes here in Las Vegas where let’s say customers got a five hundred thousand six hundred thousand seven hundred thousand dollar home normally that wouldn’t have been an idea box customer %HESITATION normally idea box has some are you’re looking more at a residential customer anyway a one point five two million kind of dollar home to where you could take ten percent let’s say in the value of the home and and put that into an automation system being you know like me eight tracks cure all of your kind of distributed audio distribute video access control on the stuff that that that degenerate falls into that smart home automation bubble gum any you know recently in the last year what’s changed is we are getting phone calls and talking to more customers in that six seven hundred thousand dollar home range five hundred thousand are home range because for forty or fifty grand you can put a pretty slick system together but you still need that integrator if if you try if the customer tries to DIY that they just have a horrible experience you know it can be even gone into the Amazon Alexa act for example in you you you don’t quite know the differences between the different kinds of skills how does that relate to the smart home section of the act how do you know when that the products are talking to one another what can the products do you still don’t really know and in the future I’ll tell you right now is is you know Amazon Alexa sending their installers with your local third party guys your house to help you set all that up so that the I. why I just don’t know if that’s ever really gonna catch on for at least for what we do it well art market it’ll be interesting to see you know we love camp setting those systems out but again you’re right there’s no margin so we’re doing as a company is we’re currently trying to it into %HESITATION creating %HESITATION detachment from the tennis front end user experience that customers happy and the back in black boxes are so whether you’re you’ve been using savant or control for or you know Amazon for that that matter or Crestron you’ve always been tied completely into the ecosystem and what’s interesting is those companies were good right at integrating with everything else that that wasn’t really integrating right have Sir real poor on an hour and I are poor and so they allowed you to control those devices yeah one unified kind of controls center right are in it that’s changing now you know this is the first couple of years where even we have started looking at the collar Crestron devices or or semi devices or or or have you as the individual boxes themselves and less of a complete solution which race how those companies really want to market to dealers that were the complete solution yeah but that’s a question for example you have a crush on line system yep restaurant sees that you have and if you buy all of this perched on this restaurants that you can have this great system and that’s not necessarily the case anymore you can really kind of decouple the user experience from from from the back end product and say you know I really like restaurants and the X. stuff let me put that into a system let me put a bandage lights into a system let me something sheets into a system and if you’ve got a couple of your friends from that you can easily all of those items are are easily integrated ball and now you can give the client a really unique user experience that rivals right brass or or needed back on their iOS device still controls on those kind of back and boxes and now the conversation isn’t all and Chris are my last house and nothing but problems are a little I have submitted my house or this guy wants to sell me control for arm which guy are you right because that’s the box integrators get shoved into which are you some minor greater or are you a question integrate are you an annex whatever and not and now we’re trying to do is %HESITATION we don’t we’re not any of those where idea box in this is our solution and here’s our front end in the front and sells it writing without the iPhone and you’ve got this beautiful you why that sells it don’t worry about the black boxes that are going to be on the back and that we’re going to control excellent mark this is really kind of what this podcast is about so you get me all revved up here I think the answer to that question is is %HESITATION where design company right we’re not dealer X. dealer why we are design company and we deliver a great experience and I think that’s where everybody wants to be and this idea you said several times detached user experience I kind of view it on a more technical level as decentralized control %HESITATION and you’re even decoupling the U. X. from the control part as well right there’s logic that happens in the back ends without user interaction and then there are you know things that happened from the user and all that comes together in the space to create a user experience can you get a little more techie and tell us about how your decoupling everything and not creating that experience for users sure sure so in our more traditional systems we would run let’s take a crash from control process for example we would run all the code on a proprietary processor and usually utilizing proprietary software %HESITATION and it would all kind of live in that box and so if you wanted to have a kind of touch them experience or user phone experience you have to then use and I’m then use Crestron right now because they are great company there just probably the biggest a range of solutions %HESITATION and it’s really been the forefront in this industry for thirty year maybe it’s forty years now I’m not sure anything really make great products and that they gave they gave dealers that work as technical and the ability to just really rather customer sire I would really love their product on and we license for years and but you were kind of honed in on strictly using that part right what you bought in that was it you were utilizing their products for a Crestron system to control a lutra lighting system yes you know ten years ago you were doing it but now they don’t even support the transcribers right now it’s it’s it’s it’s a nightmare and the harder they made that the easier it was to just say forget it let’s use across online system even though maybe the keypads are as beautiful or you know so again going back to our our kind of our our our mantra that we can’t you know I was six years ago we would always choose the integrated Melanie over the user kind of experience or that that the the beauty of the product right so in a company like Christian would make it really easy for us to do that so by decoupling the why you start you will you start taking away you start using less and less code it that’s going to run on the processor so it does make the whole system much more complicated to understand from a technical standpoint you’re gonna need to have guys on staff who are proficient in more than one specific companies %HESITATION in programming environment right so you might need Java script guys or you need you know questions world see sharp guys %HESITATION you need front end you why designers you need HTML five HTML CSS and Java script again guys and you can start taking that code that you were running on the but secretary processor and you can start school leading that up in just taking all of the user interface stuff so all the stuff you normally run on that touch panel or through the question after my phone show and you can run all of that on utilizing native technologies are technologies that exist for web development or iOS development or you know enjoyed developments where you’re gonna find a plethora of people who are proficient as technologies right that’s would be learning computer science any kind of our outside of that scene box right so so what happens is we take a lot of the code that was running on our proprietary stuff and now we’re bringing that code and were running at multiple please write so we’ve got that and in the state server running on a cloud with Amazon web services we have code running they’re gonna database running there we’ve got cold running inside of our you why logic so now that’s the couples and running on the user’s device we’ve got event listeners on the user’s web event listener something’s star updating without refreshing a web page and you’ve still got code running on let’s say across local Crestron or whatever processor speaking to the local video switcher or audio switcher so it is more complicated to understand a decentralized kind of codebase but if you can do it really opens up your %HESITATION your toolbox and allows you to create user experiences now that are relying on strictly what the manufacturer gives you wanted to compare that to to the question experience kind of full circle you know it when you open that Crestron act it almost feels like on your iOS device that question ma’am is it there because it has to be there because people are gonna have no expectation utilize it on their own but everything from the resolution of the apple logo that pops up the load time of the act already seems kind of archaic and turning into her down in our system over to our customer and giving that their iOS experience when your post made after you download it for free and have a much more beautiful quicker loading animation friendly Micromax chance friendly you why is their expectation and and you’re not able to deliver that so if you want to deliver that you have to be couple it in now also gives you access to everything right you can you can speak to nest now you can speak to %HESITATION just a bunch of third party I O. T. devices because a lot of them have very robust eighty eyes you can integrate with Amazon Alexa directly and you’re not relying on that that can be integration company software as you know when you’re running C. sharpen your writing code in in in C. sharp do you really need stuff with %HESITATION with that with Russia products you’re running visual studio two thousand and eight you know I just tried to upgrade that the other day and Microsoft sunset it in April of this year yeah so just think about that for a moment right the latest technology I can utilize on that with arguably the best integration platform company out there is running on two thousand eight software so it really hamstrings you it really it really ties you can tie you up in and there’s always that played between the dealer manufacturer in and you want to be beholden to as few people as possible you wanna wanna run your own business right you don’t wanna you are to rely on a certain products so much that you you are in control yeah he really %HESITATION summed it all up kind of where the industry is that as far as I’m concerned and %HESITATION that last point was flexibility and agility you really want to be able to use the technologies that makes the most sense for you and it’s like you’re saying idea box is a design focused company and to create that experienced people are used to using more while apps store %HESITATION progressive weather apps on a on a web page and responsive design there just a customs to these very modern interfaces and experiences and to really deliver that you need to make a very specific thing you need to kind of have control over the entire experience and when using something third party that may not always be the case but in the beginning you did mention I mean how our industry is kind of changing and %HESITATION it’s always that integration versus one solution you know in these companies like restaurant a name extorted all they made was touch panels and processors ends up kind of converters so you can turn things on and off that’s where we came from so they did integrate with everything and now the movie is towards being that everything delivering that everything and even closing think something’s off like you mentioned that we tried integration which %HESITATION yet because the thought of a interest because it it kind of goes against that old paradigm of we integrate with everything one interesting point is that you mentions that a company like Crestron provided the tools where maybe not so technical people could create a really amazing experience and I think that’s important to note but at some point that ends at some point if you want to get really deep into a design and have full control over the experience they’re all our there’s a whole world of software out there there is a whole tribe of software developers are just gonna freelancer dot com and you’ll find all the developers you need and %HESITATION I don’t think there are many companies doing what you’re doing that have that kind of attitude but I think it’s important if you want to differentiate yourself like we were talking about before in this changing market where everything’s getting commoditized all we really have left is an experience to deliver so taking all that minds are you working on anything different working on anything in the future that you’d care to share with us you know we are glad you asked we have a %HESITATION you know it’s funny how your experiences in life %HESITATION can everything builds on everything else opportunities come up people ask you how do you do that you know we never had that idea or or or you see people and you wonder how they had a certain idea and I think the trick really is sure an express something can you really understand something then you can see the problems in what you know and cheer person it’s not the field they’re not even going to know to look for the problem the opportunity is not going to arise because they don’t even realize that it’s a problem right so on one hand I think to myself you know should started this or that or or or worked on something earlier on the other hand I didn’t I wasn’t equipped with the knowledge and and so by eight by really decoupling of technology like we were talking about earlier and in movies teaching myself other technologies write a Java script get example %HESITATION getting in touch with the community of the designers right we would always designs that Faneuil and try to mimic whatever maybe apple is doing or whatever Microsoft is doing more or whomever inch in the version we always turned out was a version that was a couple shades worse ray a couple levels worse than now then we guys are doing natively which makes sense right because work we’re working with limited tools and that we don’t know what we don’t know so really the idea is expanding your knowledge and so once we we really sat down me and and a couple of my guys and and started learning some new technologies these doors started opening you started looking at at issues a different way and and some problems in a different fashion and then a new opportunities arise right so you realize that once you become an expert lets it out a mission you learn the systems you find her programs just and you really get yourself through that leads right like I’m an automation right and the reality is no I’m a programmer and that he doesn’t have to be out of me she could be anything and you’re right most dealers and most integrated are going to take that step because very technical staff it’s very hard to teach it to get off your your **** and unions to generally be be interested in doing it what started kind of are out with some of the new stuff we’re working on is is learning that %HESITATION learning new technologies and then realizing wants to learn the new technologies we realized album really candy couple this experience and now the lights third party where are their pain points in the industry so as you mentioned yeah I’m from Las Vegas and the main driver of our industry here is the hospitality industry and it used to be that you walk into a hotel room and they’ll tell room right was like the height of technology height of technology right order movie is I’m talking probably likely each year early nineties your movies you can order room service like it was amazing that you just pick up on anything rights %HESITATION now when you walk into a hotel room of Sally could be the most beautiful I’ll tell you know that the aria or lies year or mean hotel in the technology is archaic what do you mean I can’t stream from my device and watch the newest episode of game of thrones on my on my TV we need a change ordered my food and stuff that take up the phone and talk to you concierge you know as much as I hate the way can’t technology is doing to our society at a social level and I think there’s going to be a kind of a a push against that hopefully %HESITATION it really is creating a generation of people who have a hard time interacting with other people in the want to be able to have the interaction technology and if I go to a hotel the point is to relieve the client of their money as easily as possible the least amount of barriers right that’s what Amazon does one click purchasing I can’t do that in a hotel two thousand eighteen so that’s kind of a problem that that we noticed and we set about building some software to solve that problem and that’s that’s one of our new ventures would work on for two or three months and there’s a lot of again I’m able to were able to utilize our what work experts at right were all our our mid thirties late thirties forties where we expect that were experts at integration that’s worked with that what is a hotel it’s a bunch of systems that need integrated whether that’s back of house with a that’s the property management system %HESITATION housekeeping room service ballet %HESITATION shows I mean there’s just so much stuff they need integrated right players cards customer management and instead of looking at integrating looking at our us as being only able to integrate with audio switchers video switchers what is the difference between switching on audio switching an input on a video switcher from you know input two output for what’s different then requesting from a property management system user name length of stay time %HESITATION %HESITATION phone number there there is no difference it’s all in integrating its all asking a question getting a response storing data in doing something with it and once I was able to really right object orient my life as opposed to I’m thinking I was pigeonholed one thing the world kind of open up and now all of a sudden we second we might deal to create solutions for a mere yeah problems and in our Los Vegas hospitality seem to be kind of a natural one to tackle we didn’t CO a real winner in that space that was doing a very good job arm I know there are there are there are companies that are are are doing can different versions and you think we think we have a solution that is is is really is really unique and and the bills on the expertise we saw the problem and now were were we’re trying to solve it and who knows you know some of that might be integrating with black boxes from third party manufactured for sure it’s going to be ones were familiar with in ones were not so familiar with at the scene of the time at the same time learning these two technologies gave us the confidence to do that if we would have never learned they’ve never had the confidence we had never seen the problem so anyway so that’s one of the that’s what we will see a lot of time on it right now I love that attitude mark %HESITATION if it’s really true once you get to a certain skill level once you start brainstorming and looking at things a little different way you realize that everything with an API is integrate a ball and you become a kid in the candy store and just see opportunities anywhere I like the way you’re focusing on one space that hospitality industry in Las Vegas and I’ve seen some of those touch panels you showed me some of them it’s definitely right for destruction so I wish you all the best with that and I think we should follow up maybe in a year or so and see how things worked out and if anybody would like to get in touch with you how they go about doing that try the best way is you can email me at mark at idea box dot C. O. ID HBO XRCO or mark axle host came O. H. O. S. U. dot I. L. and it’s more with the K. right got it all right thanks a lot for being on the show mark yeah no problem a strategy if you or anyone on your staff ever considered themselves just in AV programmer join the club that’s how I used to feel I was just an AMX programmer or just Crestron program or whatever language of your choice is whatever it may be there’s generally this feeling in AV that we’re not capable of using modern programming languages and it simply isn’t true sure there’s a learning curve but once you get through it all other languages become easier to learn and it just expands the amount of options you have when designing a system it’s not an either or decision you don’t say I won’t be using these manufacture tools anymore it’s just you have a broader palate to choose from ends here’s what market day founder of idea box had to say about his experience with the online courses at learn eighty programming dot com you know Patrick it’s funny how the smallest things can sometimes be the star of really big ideas %HESITATION before I took the learn ATV programming dot com courses I was in that Terry I’m only a control system programmer kind of mindset ray %HESITATION when it came to new technologies or current technologies like Java script error or things like that for some reason I thought that was different from what I’m doing and what taking your courses flipped for me was not so much what I learned technically taking the courses it was the mindset of well wait a second I’m already doing ninety nine percent of what some of these most of modern programmers are dealing I just have to learn %HESITATION you know the other one percent and that’s really what I did so it’s really been kind of a big change after taking the course %HESITATION and I would really recommend this course to any integrator not only will obviously help their skill set but more importantly it might change their whole mindset %HESITATION which is more important and and and really show them new opportunities open the door so they kind of see problems through a different lens I gotta tell you one of the biggest changes for me was as soon as I become myself HTML CSS javascript and solve the you guys that I can make with those technologies I just couldn’t sell a %HESITATION Crestron touch him again mark is a great example of somebody who takes new information and really applies it I know that mark still sells a lot of Crestron equipment but for him for his company for his customers for his business he needed a better you why he needed another option for user interface and modern programming allowed him to do that so the question is how can you use modern programming to improve your business please go to learn a few programming dot com and wherever you see a sign up button go ahead and sign up and you’ll get some free information to get a feel of my learning style and what kind of information is available and of course it would be an honor to have you in role in one of our courses and help you upgrade your skills and take this industry to the next level thanks for listening software defined survival I hope you found it useful and maybe it inspires you to try out something new this week if you have any questions does software defined survival dot com and click the appropriate I’d love to answer questions on the air and if you’d like to help spread the word please subscribe comment and share it with your

this is software defined survival where we explore how software defined systems are changing the business of IT today software defined survival he is going to be the next big guiding force for the audio visual industry as to where we going out it gives us the ability to generate the highest quality video picture possible with the lowest amount only standard and gave the AV industry we are really the plastic surgeon what is the number one thing everybody wants to do on every job site hello there my name is Patrick Murray in today’s guest has a long history working with AV manufacturers like audio video corporation and restaurant electronics where he worked as a director for almost twenty years and I remember one of the first restaurant courses I attended in New Jersey it must’ve been around the year two thousand he was a big part of getting to know what the company was all about and how their technology worked he’s currently VP of technology at wire storm a manufacturer pro AV signal distribution and control solutions and I’m really excited to speak with someone with so much experience in the manufacturing and here with their view is on the changing role of software in the AV so Dave Silverstein welcome to the podcast thanks Patrick blood to be here is there anything about that introduction that you’d care to corrects or expand upon no I think you did a great job you think dean is a big help with that so well tell us I like to hear the origin story because nobody really grows up saying they want to be in a V. so how did you wind up in this niche industry okay so what interesting enough you’re absolutely right nobody I think grows up wanting to be in a movie all I actually grew up wanting to be a television producer and that turned me into a sales person selling broadcast television equipment to broadcast TV stations their work for audio video corporation also had a systems division and the systems division was installing three gun projectors and all kinds of fancy stuff into a large corporate project and they were having trouble configuring in setting up something called they get nervous system which at the time allowed you to take audio from a phone call and turned into audio that you could put on a recorder a very calm place in my world because TV stations radio stations used them to do calling radio shows and TV shows honestly ask me go to the site and check it out and see what’s wrong I did a resolve that issue then before I left I said is there anything else that you might get you need help with that I can somehow help they happen to have a production of broadcast production switcher before switching TV shows are that was being controlled by an amex control system and they couldn’t get all the commands to work off the AMX control systems are so I said I certainly know production switchers so I’ll help you out and see what happens on the AMX programmer showed up kind of taught me how to program we resolve the issues that were there and all of a sudden before you know what I was insist I am from there I was just in a being and that’s how liberals interesting so so you kind of step you’re bringing up a you have a lot of memories with CRT projectors and in getting their audio processes which I believe became clear one right right that’s correct and then and then the whole broadcast background I find kind of interesting because there are a lot of similarities in AV but it is a different beast altogether but once in awhile you’ll see like AV equipment like an amex controller even Crestron controlling these broadcast studios and have to wonder why if that’s really the best way to do things you know that that’s an interesting that’s an interesting thought and in some cases it is in some cases it isn’t I’ve built many a broadcast facility our cable facility that used a Crestron system for example or an annex system to run the front and and back in the day you know again I’m showing my age here but back in the day used to take a take a tape of the show that you had to record and all and you would play it and then you would simultaneously take hundred VHS players and put them in record and that’s actually how you made copies to then sell to the community as people used to buy the VHS copy of what they saw yes for example was big deal and that and the issue becomes when you get into a TV station of the guy the guy put in the I’ll tape on the player easy union and once you have union staff load machine hundred machines and unload a hundred machines after our cost becomes pretty expensive in the trend really keeps costs down on these duplications that they’re selling to the community are so for example you put Crestron system on the front and so in non union person could then start and stop the recordings appropriately ought to get something produced so interesting why %HESITATION question I am next front ended some of these spaces but that’s how things slide into the broadcast space traditionally a broadcast world you throw more three more people at it and they sit there and those people just it’s it’s really interesting though the way the automation help to save costs and bring the cost down right but even if you look at today’s broadcast facility you know there’s not there are no camera people anymore all the cameras are robotic and there’s one person driving five cameras they’ve had their own the broadcast industry has had its own level of automation it’s coming up but it’s not been from what their choices and not come from the audio visual community are really you know if I go back in eighty long enough everything that AV did was kind of surrounded around the broadcast community we used to put three quarter inch tape machines in the conference room so people can play back video at a higher quality and the one thing that happened the big bench market changed it was the advent of the DVD player when the DVD player came out it was totally a consumer product nobody in the broadcast industry cared about it touched it used it for anything yet the industry immediately turned to it and said Hey we need to have these in our border and this needs to be part of our solution and before you know it XLR connectors are being replaced by RCA connectors on certain devices are and really what happened was the industry the AV industry started looking to the consumer electronics industry as the guide for what was coming next and where they were going to go as opposed to looking to the broadcast industry if you look at today’s world today were right on the cusp of the AV industry changing where they’re looking again and rather than looking solely to the consumer electronics industry were now starting to change and look to the internet of things if you will of the I. O. T. or the internet as to what is the next big thing where is the AV industry going to go next also for as much as people want to talk about convergence of the two I think the internet and the IT community specifically I own he is going to be the next big guiding force for the audio visual industry as to where we go and how we function that is a really interesting perspective that I never heard before %HESITATION I actually cut my teeth and a a broadcaster systems integrator and we would sit on benches and and solder tons of XLR connectors and crimp hundreds and hundreds of BMC’s and I like the way you kind of said that the DVD player is how the easy industry started taking direction from another place and it even affected the hardware that we use like the connectors changed because of that and then drawing that back to how I would see an IT is directing us into the future I think that’s a really interesting perspective that we can learn a lot from so if you if you take it down so that connector level a BNC becomes an RCA and now it becomes RJ forty five are there any other practical effects that you could maybe comments on that how I would see in an IT is influencing what we do are yeah absolutely so as certainly as a hardware manufacturer we have to start looking at what is IOTV what is I’ll T. how does it work how does it relate to everything else are where the industry is going to try a bunch of stuff we’re going to we’re going to take control systems and put them in the cloud because we think that society you know we’re we’re gonna try some little things like that to fit into the community are the real answer is if you look at the way we build products and the way the I. O. T. community builds product they are significantly different and what really needs to be determined is can we as an industry move into that I. O. T. community and function the way I act the way other I. O. T. devices function or do we have to stay with our own configuration like we are today on and a lot of that is to be determined so let me let me break it down a little better when you look at IOTV and you know I or T. is in essence is somewhat a buzz word for the larger community and people that are buying stock in those kind of things but realistically if we break it down I or T. I don’t use a lot of production line management or system flow management right whenever somebody says I O. T. they always say things like sensors so I’m gonna have a an occupancy sensor that’s going to tell me something and that’s that’s true in the audio visual industry as well as a number of different industries the difference being once IOTV let’s censor just says what it supplies and stayed up and has no other ramifications nothing else to do for most components that come the components then respond and react to that and on and on that Joan the component then executes something like a thermostat for example not only takes the temperature in the room but it also turns on and off the boilers and air conditioning units based on that in an I. O. T. scenario there would be a temperature sensor it would communicate to the larger server or the I. O. T. management platform and then that platform would go to a different set of relays to turn on the heating system or turn on the cooling system so all that inherent logic that we is eighty people build into what we think is a complete component that we can plug in and it just runs really when you look at the I AO team model no one’s going to build an individual standalone complete component anymore they’re going to build some type of sensor or control device and you’re gonna have to rely on the larger IOTV software configuration to dictate what and when that happens based on those criteria interesting perspective right I I would see buzz word but we’ve been doing networks of things for a long time it just hasn’t been an internet right serial I are connecting things however we connected them it was still a little network correct very much so and we’ve had network devices communicating with each other for a long time but when you look at what is the I. O. T. model the things that that IBM’s of the world have set up the HP enterprises of the world have set up all the logic all the commands all the functionality is within their server based in their code and the things at the end point it’s become things it’s the internet of things so these individual things just by their report what their status is or execute when they’re told standalone they they have no functionality at all and that’s different than the way currently than the weight AV components are certainly built right so I’m beginning to understand where you’re coming from where we would make this highly customized touch panel in the event trigger would be somebody pressing a button on that panel now it’s just this generic thing that’s in the room whether it be a presence detector wore a certain temperature that’s reached that triggers the logic so the event triggers are kind of different in the I. O. T. world how do you see that playing out with the systems that we use take a typical conference room for example on the internet the interesting part is from the I. O. T. Porter view things like occupancy sensors motion sensors people counters those are already up readily available in their environment our energy is very easy to execute on things like our individual input where you have to touch screen a touch panel that’s that’s a harder thing for the community to establish and work with us so instead the IT community has moved to voice recognition is again that works in this in the way in a format that they understand where you simply say a word or a set of words and it goes to them and then they go execute on it the whole concept of the touch screen is a touch screen goes to the control system of the control system processes that logic and that’s where the IOTV community can’t relate to the way the the operates dysfunction so I think we’re gonna see a lot of voice recognition coming into the environment for a short period of time and then the users will kind of identify the voice recognition isn’t the right way to start or stop a meeting because it’s much more in the public domain yeah that remains to be seen what that kind of public acceptance is is like right they will they will start moving into that stuff will eventually start moving back to your phone or to your you know internet enabled glasses or whatever other technology is there right now but the first time somebody walks into a meeting room and says you know Alexis start my meeting and Alexa comes back and says sure Dave are you ready to are you ready to start the firing half the company meeting okay and everybody else in the room goes why gonna be a problem for people so to realize that public conversation or open conversation is not necessarily acceptable in there meeting spaces break room and they’re going to want to again personalize that somehow and keep it within their own person out in the entire group right so so the application of the technology will make or break it because %HESITATION I I what I see is there’s a huge hesitancy to using voice control but once there are certain types of people that once they have it they never want to go back but that example that you gave where if you miss use it if the calendar entry if I believe my calendar entry is only for my eyes and then this speaker in the room reads it back to me that’s me using the technology in the wrong way but it doesn’t matter if if that’s even possible then there could be some backlash that’s an interesting take yeah and those those those things are going to happen we’re going to bump into that kind of stuff certainly from my previous life not until people put scheduling panels outside of their conference rooms did people start screaming and yelling that they had to block the name of the conference that was going yeah sure sensitive information so can we switch gears a little bit and maybe tell me a little bit about your most successful projects and what made it so rewarding for you alright so that’s an interesting question that’s why I ask yet so I guess Patrick let me let me break down that question into a couple of different categories of the first one is if I say what was my what is my most rewarding at what is Mike was challenging project and you know what was the most rewarding within my current wire storm environment all I have to say that you know making product is certainly something that is very exciting and very rewarding there’s nothing better than spending you know as long as it takes online in some cases years working through the entire definition of a product to get it operating bringing it to market showing it to people having people accept it and then see it move into the marketplace and work correctly that there’s a there’s a certain excitement that goes with that every time you do it even if you or you know even if you’re just the sales guy promoting that new product that came out or you’re the training guy training about a new product the whole concept of rolling a new product on building a new product you’re rolling in the marketplace is very exciting certainly for me I think it is for most people are and as the P. of technology that’s kind of what I do every day so in today’s world everything I’m doing is very exciting there’s no doubt about it I don’t know that I can pick out a one thing over another thing I do have some products coming in within the next year %HESITATION that are very exciting for me and when I get to a point we’re ready to talk about I think I’ll be jumping up and down and tell everybody about it it’s hard for me to contain myself us so in today’s world a lot of what I’m doing is very very exciting in terms of some of the things I did in my previous life %HESITATION for an interesting period of time at audio video corporation we actually built cable TV stations and I gotta say it was kind of fun to build the cable TV station if you look at the cable TV industry are there are plenty of people that work in a TV station and run the TV station about the head end as well as studios its interests but that is that systems the equipment the spaces they don’t get updated and when it’s really time to say we need a new cable system from the ground up we need a new head in if you will people at that organization don’t have the skills to just build something from scratch us so it only a media corporation we actually went in and built new cable plants from scratch and then handed these people the keys instead no cable station now run it for the next twenty years and I have to say that was very exciting and it’s all about making things in its own special way but building cable stations was there was a pretty exciting part of my life interesting so that the reason I ask that question is because I’m I’m looking for commonalities so that when I start working on a project I could kind of focus on those things so from my perspective as a programmer and a systems designer I’m working on a much smaller scale project basis a big complicated room or a bunch of rooms together and it sounds like it’s the same idea the joy that you get out of it is just creating this thing of course you’re operating on a much bigger scale is a manufacturer or or cable studio but they’re usually elements of that creative process of the project management of getting it up and running that make it really rewarding for people that people look back and say I likes doing that job because of these three reasons those are the things that I’m kind of looking for with that question yeah on a on a side note because among other things because you did a little broadcast and certainly some programming the things we did many years ago that was actually kind of fun was %HESITATION this is I was a cable station a place called independence Missouri I am one of their requirements was you have to think back a long time ago a one of the requirements was they wanted to allow certain people to be able to interrupt programming on every channel on the cable system and put in a special announced and this is before this is before emergency messaging existed there was only emergency broadcast messaging so something happened the broadcast channels would be interrupted with a special announcement what cable programming would still continue because there is no concept of the time of using messaging over cable system so you know they came to me and they came to us as part of building up this plant and said we have to you know if there’s a problem we have to interrupt each feel we have to interrupt ESP and we have to how are we going to do this so you know I’m a big challenge if you will because it’s not normal to interrupt cable TV programming the good news was in this particular design we happen to bring everything in and break it down to baseband video and switch it in a two hundred fifty six by two hundred fifty six router then pushing and then re modulated push all back up the other side so the end result was I don’t know if you know this company but I use something called Chiron Cody at a Cairo the current coding generated the full screen messages age like choosing change which ones I want to use the restaurant control system at the time it was called as GM asks that’s how long ago was when I use the telephone interface card so that somebody could call and they had to enter a password and based on the four digit passcode they entered I knew who they were I then proceeded to pick the right slide on the Chiron Cody and I took the audio from there from the phone call and routed it and did a route to current Cody video audio from the phone and send it to every output on the switch memorize the entire position of the switch before I did it and then pulled the tire once the call was done dumped everything back to the position that it was in before monitoring it any switch commands that occurred in the middle in case I had switched programming and had to switch to a different channel as I went so kind of challenging especially for us in a mass but that’s how I pulled it off and they seem to be very happy they’d seven people the mayor that fired the police chief the fire department chiefs that separate separate all call and there was one guy in particular the seventh guy his name was Fred and the the current coding slide said this is a message from Fred and ultimately it turned out friend lived on the west side of town on a little hill and Fred had the best view of when the tornado was coming so friend would just call in and say I see the funnel cloud coming everybody high now which was really the issue I think with the system and so even though we’re building cables cable TV system there was a lot of other stuff that went with it on in those individual little pieces become very exciting as well as a large scale eight cable TV system have a nice day I like that story a lot it has a a lot of the elements that come up quite a bit it was a a challenging projects you have to come up with a clever solution which %HESITATION put together all these different bits and pieces and then at the end there was this real world effects where many people know that a tornado is coming we just kind of a ten X. is the cool factor of the whole thing right anything but the end result was it works so well cable company had to resort to finding this city for using it too much really yeah because the the the head of the buildings department to call in and say Hey there’s a water main break on fifth street nobody drive on fifth street and it was eight fifty nine P. R. eight fifty five PM the last five minutes of whatever that HBO show was that everybody was watching that’s funny the cliffhanger would get up to date and then what happened and then what happens is people call the cable company ask for a refund on their HBO subscription yeah interest interrupted so they end up putting in a policy you know to stop that basically from from nonsense interruptions right yeah so so that’s kind of the user experience what is what defines an emergency when are we allowed to use this thing so %HESITATION shifting back to wire storm I know that you’re depart of the S. T. V. O. we alliance can can you talk about more about the STV reliance what it means to is a manufacturer what you’ve wife joins and what kind of means for your customers for integrators sure so let me start with the STB alliance in its basic form it gives us the ability to generate the highest quality video picture possible with the lowest amount of latency on a standard ten gig Ethernet that’s the reason why our storm look didn’t looks into it and takes it as an as an advantage that’s why the other forty some members of this state STV alliance are looking to the solution now once we say okay we’ve got the ability to do this really the software defined it video over over Ethernet alliance which is where stevia he comes from is really about if you will the API or because it is software define now everybody in the alliance all works together it all operate they all operate within the same environment so much like the I. T. world operates everybody who’s STV we can talk to each other we already know the commands because there’s a common API thread as opposed to just Hey we bought the same chip and put something together there’s a common API that we can use with each other are so high it what if I out where storm and where some transmitter for example and I wanna and somebody wants to connect it to a Barco projector Christy projector that has an STD over the receiver within it are they can can not only can they communicate to each other but they can control each other and send messages back and forth appropriately and that’s a real differentiator compared to some of the other platforms and they’re out there let’s use let’s do HD base T. for example HTPC certainly has anything that path to pass data back and forth it has to turn to Pat has the backing for it is I Arthur pass I our data back and forth but has no API it has new standard just state what is each each device gonna do any jazz estudio we brings that API standards to the platform so everybody can operate evenly across the board and that’s really why you see automate joining the STV alliance because just like Dante components can all talk and share data back and forth if you’re Dante andante everybody’s good STV a week kind of follows that scene methodology and I think as the GOP and Dante together are going to make it even stronger program trip sure the moron the more standardized we become the better it is for the end user and that was certainly one of the shortcomings of HD Beastie is that all right it was kind of the same technology but everybody did in their own way so the hardware wasn’t compatible and it’s the same thing with any kind of proprietary solution you’re kind of %HESITATION walked in to that solution only and if things go down the line maybe you for whatever reason you just don’t have that flexibility to combine different solutions and that’s a great benefit for the end user what are some benefits for integrators well the the benefits for the integrators ultimately become very similar in terms of they do have compatibility between manufacturers now that they didn’t see before us simply from a picture quality you point of view the ability to deliver the highest quality picture as well as the lowest latency of any solution out there means that you can actually move to an IP based deliver a bold platform a lot and we don’t have to rely on dedicated wires from place to place as we did in the past and that really becomes important because we don’t at some point someday somebody’s gonna want to put something else there you don’t want to have to abandon that old wire and say okay we’re all done by the teacher and its Ethernet let’s get on that network and and let it roll so to speak so as you know as four K. gets exhausted and we moved to sixteen K. and thirty two K. and who knows how many came before it’s all over we need to have the in the you know the interest we can be changing the infrastructure every time we move in space and that’s part of the beauty of estudio he is all we can all get on to a standard tanking Econet network which is standard for everybody years and when we get to you know a case sixteen K. whatever that same network is going to be the structure there were some of the other things Kovacs for example to Kerry STI signals as we all know we’re starting to exhausted the ability of that cabling structure %HESITATION now I need to cables I need five cables also moving from our from a dedicated path even an HT based to pack which is kinda odd tapped out where it is is these resolutions got more and more we need to be able to work with something that’s going to be consistent across the board either answer something’s gonna be consistent across the board yeah definitely %HESITATION you hit on a few points there that up a network his designs to handle many systems at the same time so this idea of having our own little AV network is kind of going away and %HESITATION also upgrading right the infrastructure that is kind of future proof I’ve heard stories of cat three cables still existing and working quite well in buildings today it’s it’s funny but you know thirty years ago this cable was installed and if it still works because it’s standardized it’s it’s a place where we have to move to and I think that was pretty clear and I see this this past year probably Infocom which it intends that everything is moving to %HESITATION IP so do you have any feedback from integrators on how they’re dealing with this this change about getting on the network and in working more with the I. T. department I am back isn’t interesting statement this is good because all the way back to that whole conversation of convergence and everybody seems to think that AB and I. T. are converging into one I don’t necessarily feel that way I think a V. still has a very unique place the difference being in any industry in the IT industry is pretty large so if you look at the IT industry today there are people that build server farms that’s all they do their people the right data bases and that’s all they do their people to build web pages and that’s all they do their people the right middleware to make things communicate with each other and that’s all they do because the industry is so large no one no one person can know everything about the industry and that’s true with any industry is that as they build and grow right by you long established industry go look to the medical industry you know of course there are general people but right now everybody is a specialist you need all these different specialists in their special categories are because the medical industry is so large and so I like to use the medical industry as a great example and the simple answer is I would never hire a heart surgeon to do my plastic surgery and I would never have higher a plastic surgeon to do my heart church and if we look at that in the same way AV industry we are really the plastic surgeons of the I. T. world we make we make people look good we make people sound good that’s what our job is to make that experience at the end the best of it is possible for the people that are seeing it and because we’re addressing that experience we are really the plastic surgeons let’s not think that we’re going to be a heart surgeon what’s not say on the AV guy and I’m going to come in and rebuild your entire router and server farm that’s not our place that’s not where we should be we should concentrate on the stuff that we know best now the other side of it is doesn’t matter what your specialty is your still a doctor you still need to know how blood flows how air moves through how long’s work you need to know all the basics of the body regardless of what your specialty is and that’s the one small piece that I think we’re missing in the world we need to learn more of the basics of I. T. so that we can communicate with the other people in my tea and function with all the other people in nineteen once once we get to that level we don’t need to be I. T. experts we don’t need to go that far we need to know the basics of the I. T. body and then we need to be the plastic surgeons and we need to be experts in our field that makes it’s different than everybody else the I. T. world are experts in their it’s a really great explanation and I really appreciate that analogy of us being plastic surgeons but we’re still a doctor I’m tempted to ask what you think are some basic things that Evey technicians engineers should be doing to kind of bone up on their IT skills but I think it’s kind of obvious maybe could do CCNA take some Cisco courses there are tons of resources online I wonder if they’ll be any kind of official thing for Evey to say okay I know the network basics and I still see some kind of resistance to a to moving this direction can you comment on that at all I yes I do see some resistance to all this I think it’s ill founded I think part of the problem is we say things like all yeah just go just go get a CCNA or go get Cisco certified and without a path without a direction for people to go and get those kind of things it’s hard for them to start they don’t know where where where do I go become CCNA you know that that’s what that’s where people get stock is how do I do that so I certainly look for opportunities where that kind of content that kind of information exists are certainly in today’s world on a learning over the internet is a very powerful tool and believe it or not linked in has a whole learning section that you can sign up for women that learning section you can learn all your CCNA as well as many other subject matters all but they do a great job with overall on the basics of Ethernet switching direction it’s a trend that that is very clear and concise and and probably a good place to start if you say Hey I don’t I don’t know anything about networking for example I found linking has a ton of content there that’s available it’s been vetted intestines so I’m not just looking on the internet and as we all know the internet is full of every truth in every lie all the same time it’s up to you to that which is which I think when when can is doing that setting for us to make sure that we’re getting clear and concise information so I would certainly encourage anybody and everybody to look to that direction for some basic knowledge and you can build all the way through as far as you want to go the resources really aren’t the issue %HESITATION I just wonder if it’s the motivation sometimes but I guess as these solutions get specified that’ll be the motivation in itself you can install these systems and make them work without that kind of knowledge right right and many and many of us in the many of us in the industry are trying to make it as easy as possible for our eighty people that might want to move into the IT environment also works for example in the STV a wee world %HESITATION next here now has four different switches that are available all you have to do is buy the right model switch the switches all pre configured for STV a week so you just plug in your studio devices and they work and that way you don’t have to know how to configure switch or why you’re configuring switch if you will also we’re certainly trying to make it easier we aware storm as well as many other manufacturers are we can we will go ahead and configure switch offer somebody will take a Cisco switch will go through it will write down every step that you have to do in order to configure that switch to get it to work are will also then take that configuration file and make that available so if you want to just dump our configuration file in your switch will run but if you really want to go through every step and see what what you’re clicking and why we have that document that out for you we also have a generic document that says if you have a network switch you need to turn this on for this reason you need to turn this on and set it in this format for this reason are so you can kind of go and learn what are the what are these things in the switch why you turn them on why do I need them you know I GNP or on the other kind of things there and and why do we need with video and we don’t with audio eccentrics after us so we’re trying to add some education there as well as some guidance us so that people can broaden their horizon as they start learning these I keep that up but you know everybody has a job they want to get it done are and like I said everybody what is the number one thing everybody wants to do on every job site world sign off and the answers go home helped write and if by Anna switched it’s already configured get you to go home bias which the thirty configured sounds good to me alright so are there any plans for the future that you’d like to share with us yeah sure so at where storm I just like everybody else are you alluded to it earlier on the concept of having that easy network by is really kind of going away even even devices are really going to become part of the network just like everything else is part of the network are there are some challenges with that in terms of you know switch configurations and those kind of things there isn’t there even some challenges in device requirements and how they operate suite where storm are certainly working on a whole collection of security stacks so they are when we are put into a large corporate type network and there are large security requirements we can meet those requirements like everybody like all the other I. T. devices that are on the network and most of us have you guys been hiding behind some manner hiding behind a router somewhere and I think you know that’s that cards kind of going away so we have to like everybody else get ourselves into the security world and make sure work compatible with I also see whether it’s Dante are a S. sixty seven or whatever it is now that we have video going on to the IP network audio is bent on an IP network for a long time all but now we’re kinda converging together also that one device that one encoder needs to be able to make both video streams that are appropriate for video devices and audio streams that are appropriate for audio devices I think you’re gonna see a lot more of that use STV Opie and non Dante joining the alliance is a great example are where now we got audio and video on the same network the switches then get in turn determine and help guide what goes where I am again we don’t have to be told separate wires sounds like a nice road map to wrap things up with if anyone would like to get in touch with you how would they go about doing that I yeah it’s pretty simple are you can certainly find me it’s David Silverstein on linkedin Twitter and you can always email me it’s David dot Silverstein where storm back Dave thanks a lot for being on a podcast thank you for having me it’s been great thanks for listening to software defined survival I hope you found it useful in maybe inspires you to try out something new this week if you have any questions does software defined survival dot com and click the appropriate button I’d love to answer and if you’d like to help spread the word please subscribe comment and share it with your friends thanks