It’s a marriage that both sides need to work on: the uniting of a company’s audio-visual team and its computer network mavens.
“We just feel that it’s leveraging the two in concert, and effectively in the planning phase, that allows the best amount of productivity and efficiency,” said Jeff Volpe, the president of Brea-based ViewSonic Americas, a provider of LED monitors and other visual display products.
The privately held company, which relocated from Los Angeles County’s Walnut to Brea about five years ago, is estimated to do more than $1 billion in sales from its U.S. and Taiwan hubs.
Last month, his company distributed a “white paper” report on the need for convergence between AV and IT teams.
Volpe notes that his company’s large-screen, interactive displays, when connected to a computer network, are “taking on a lot of IT characteristics,” while allowing collaboration with employees or students who bring their phones, tablets and laptops to work and school.
“The audio-visual team and the IT team need to be in sync with the security parameters of how these personal devices are going to talk back and forth with these screens in a networked environment,” Volpe told the Business Journal.
Convergence Needed
Merging the two sides in a satisfactory convergence has become a major topic.
“The real customer value of AV/IT convergence is in simplifying infrastructure,” the SDVoE Alliance, a nonprofit consortium of technology providers, said on its website. “Having a single network to install, manage and maintain has huge implications on a system’s total cost of ownership.”
ViewSonic’s Volpe said millennials entering the workforce “are expecting a technologically based and flexible work environment that is best in class,” pushing businesses to be fully coordinated internally.
Despite the challenges, Volpe also acknowledges that the boundaries between the AV silo and the IT silo “continue to blur.”
There’s no view that “IT will replace AV or AV will replace IT,” he said.
ViewSonic’s products include LED monitors, interactive commercial displays, touch displays, projectors, and smart displays, ranging in price from under $100 to more than $1,000.
“The digital transformation of today’s workspace is dependent on experts in AV and IT, whether internal or third-party, joining with technology providers to design and implement systems that merge best-in-class solutions,” Volpe said.
“You can do audio and video conferencing on your phones, your laptops or your tablets. You’re no longer restricted by your choice of device. So ‘low-tech’ connecting to the high-tech is one of the areas that I’m referring to,” Volpe said.
He noted that connecting these devices to the display screen is a “significant part” of the conversation on convergence of audio-visual and information technology.
Founded in California in 1987, ViewSonic moved up two spots to No. 6 in the Business Journal’s latest list of consumer electronics companies in Orange County, which is ranked by employee count.
It had about 816 employees companywide as of earlier this year, with 186 in Orange County.
