Episode 22: Dave Hatz on Next Level Service & Creating Revenue With AV Data Analytics

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