SCN: How long have you been with this company, and what are your responsibilities?
Jamie Trader: I’ve been in the AMX family for 16 years, having performed many functions across the business. Today, I’m responsible for HARMAN Professional’s Video & Control portfolio. This means aligning teams and resources around tomorrow’s growth strategy—and empowering really amazing people to go build the spectacular things this brand was meant to build.
SCN: AMX is wrapping up its 40th anniversary. How has the company celebrated this milestone?
JT: Aside from the obvious people celebrations globally, we’ve launched 40 new products this year across the entire portfolio—solutions that begin the foundation for our next 40 years.
[Executive Q&A: Change of Plans]
SCN: After touring your booth at InfoComm, it almost feels like AMX is reinventing itself. What is the company’s new philosophy?
JT: First, I’m thrilled you noticed that something seemed different. You weren’t the only one. Every visitor to the booth, at some point, stopped and said, “This is different. Really different. This is the direction I’ve been hoping this industry would finally go. What’s going on here?”
What they’re responding to is the culmination of years of R&D investment where we’ve been reimagining the role AMX will play in the industry and for our customers.
Today’s AMX takes standards adoption to an unprecedented level in our industry—and opens up capabilities to our partners and end users that they simply don’t get to experience anywhere else.
But to your question, I wouldn’t characterize it as a reinvention of AMX, or a new philosophy, so much as a return to the philosophies that began this business and an investment into the brand to do the right things.
The AMX mission, dating all the way back to Scott Miller’s garage over 40 years ago, has always been about simplifying the way people interact with technology. The way we see it, the business of simplifying human interaction with technology hasn't really changed—not because technology hasn’t, but because people haven’t. People want the same things today that they wanted 40 years ago. They want to get their job done. They want to be able to go into a room, interact with other human beings, share and express ideas, and solve problems.
They want to have meaningful experiences, and sometimes technology can get in the way. And sometimes the physical environment can get in the way. So, the business of automation has not changed. You're still trying to synthesize human behavior with digital information and the physical environment surrounding you for the sake of simplicity.
[AMX by HARMAN Receives JITC Certification for 66 Products]
So, while the business—or the goals—of simplification haven’t changed, the focus on which friction to eliminate has. And you can’t eliminate the friction by doing things the way our industry does them today. You have to look at standards adoption differently. You have to look at our customers’ talent funnel and their workstream differently. You have to look at the supply chain differently.
This is what people are noticing as different with AMX today.
We’re telling our customers that today’s AMX product outlook is about “embracing your tools. Your skills. And enabling you to work the way you want to work.”
Today’s AMX takes standards adoption to an unprecedented level in our industry—and opens up capabilities to our partners and end users that they simply don’t get to experience anywhere else. We believe the products we’ve released in 2023 along with what’s coming in the near future is aligning AMX to solve these issues head on.
SCN: What are AMX's strongest vertical markets?
JT: While adopted across a very wide market spectrum, AMX continues to find its greatest adoption in government, education, corporate, and hospitality markets.
SCN: How is AMX moving beyond its control roots?
JT: AMX has decades-long expertise in advanced video solutions. Between our early AutoPatch solutions, which brought the market its first-ever digital video switching technology and first fiber video transport, to the current Enova digital video platform, to the industry’s first networked AV (AVoIP) platform, first 4K streaming solution, first AVoIP 4K video window processing, and so much more, AMX has continued to invest in making video more useful for people trying to communicate.
In fact, we’ve just launched SVSI’s next-generation secure, enterprise-grade AVoIP 4K60 4:4:4 products. This is a premium performance platform that we’ve built and positioned to be price competitive with our competitors’ bottom-tier solutions. But the advancement is not just about great video at a great price. It’s also about actually being able to do more with your investment in networked video, such as simultaneous multi-streaming (MWC, H.264, H.265) with independent USB2.0 routing and MJPEG Live Preview.
We will continue to invest in video technology advancements, not just in the AVoIP space, but the overall spectrum of video technologies, in all formats.
SCN: What is AMX MUSE, and why is it so important for AMX?
JT: AMX MUSE is HARMAN Professional's powerful and secure next-generation automation platform. Going beyond the traditional capabilities of AV control, AMX MUSE simultaneously processes multiple scripting languages, supports No-Code/Low-Code capabilities, simplifies routine development tasks, and opens up the possibilities for technicians and IT managers of all skill sets to deliver advanced automation easily and quickly in a modern era of complex, data-driven technology.
[Viewpoint: Pioneering the Future of AVoIP]
And it does it all without a single proprietary tool. Your IDE, your tools, the languages you like (use any or all of the three we support at launch). And for those who don’t like to program, leverage MUSE’s native support of the most popular, most capable No Code/Low Code platform on the globe. Built for you to be able to leverage a global developer community and to have your diverse team all participate on one platform simultaneously—MUSE is built to inspire your possibilities.
The AMX MUSE platform will first appear in dedicated hardware controllers that include modern embedded processors and rugged, industrial storage. But that’s not the only place you’ll be finding this technology. AMX MUSE is one of the first new platforms delivered as a direct result of our strategic R&D investment to unify our electronics portfolio. AMX MUSE is more than just an automation platform, it’s a gateway technology able to communicate across ICSP (legacy AMX), HiQnet (legacy HARMAN Pro audio), and HARMAN Pros’ new Open-API protocol: HControl. That means you can expect to find this across a very wide range of HARMAN Pro solutions and much more.
