Attention, ISE attendees: Cleanup on aisle … well, every aisle.
No, Integrated Systems Europe 2024 didn't switch gears and start selling mops and buckets in Barcelona last week. But the show felt less like it was trying to dazzle and more like it was focused on the details. Exhibitors weren't actually cleaning up messes; instead, they were refining their solutions.
It's a safe bet that 2024 will not experience a Pro AV paradigm shift. You won't see the likes of the widespread 4K adoption or, more recently, the sudden emergence of videoconferencing as an essential, everyday communications tool. But it might just be remembered as the year where the industry took a moment. And then truly made things better.
In other words, the show wasn't about the Next Big Thing. Instead, it was focused on the little things.
One thing that isn't little is ISE itself. This show just keeps growing. According to AVIXA and CEDIA, co-owners of ISE, this year was the most successful in the show's 20-year history. There were a record-high 73,891 attendees, an increase of 27% over 2023, from 162 countries. The show also broke records with its highest number of exhibitors (1,408) and a show floor that was 30% larger than last year.
And while ISE didn't have the Next Big Thing, there were certainly plenty of big things to see. It's heartening to know AV professionals can still get wowed on the show floor. LG literally stopped foot traffic in Hall 3 with a 20-foot-high digital media art display. The large-scale LED display combined stunning graphics with synchronized moving display tiles.
One booth over, Epson had its own admirers, courtesy of a giant umbrella celebrating its "Festival of Colors" theme. Six WUXGA projectors fed images to six panels of the umbrella, delivering a creative example of projection mapping. Samsung's The Wall has been around for years, but the large-format, microLED display continued to draw in ISE attendees with spectacular graphics. A transparent microLED display positioned next to The Wall attracted quite the crowd as well.
Back to the little things. Joe Andrulis, EVP of corporate development for Biamp, acknowledged an intentional shift toward usability and scalability of the company's solutions. "That's hard to do," he admitted, but Biamp is committed to improving the user experience.
It's not the only company making a concerted effort toward improving existing solutions. Across the show floor, exhibitors spoke of tighter, simplified interfaces and product integration for end users, as well as easier ordering (read: fewer SKUs) for integrators.
When the pandemic hit, there was a flurry of activity in Pro AV—at least until supply chain issues delayed or derailed so many projects. Perhaps it was a response to the corporate market reassessing its post-pandemic workflows and technology options that brought a different energy to ISE 2024.
"In a way, customers took a breath last year," offered Julian Phillips, managing director of XTG, the AVI-SPL Experience Technology Group. His team saw a lot of uncertainty in the corporate world in 2023, a direct result of return-to-office and hybrid workforce challenges. Many companies were simply not making forward-looking decisions, Phillips observed.
AVI-SPL took advantage of that pause to prepare for 2024. That included launching its global Enterprise Managed Services solution in January, as well as refining XTG's service propositions to help companies implement better Pro AV solutions.
The other story, Phillips added, is that customers are now ready to move forward. C-level executives are learning that doing nothing isn't an answer. Employee engagement is a real issue—and with the emergence of remote work, teams aren't functioning in the same way. Through technology, AVI-SPL and other integrators will be working to help the corporate world build better environments and rebuild the concept of teams.
ISE 2024 may have been about the little things, but the oncoming flurry of corporate technology investments promises to be anything but little. All that attention to detail represented across the show floor is about to start paying serious dividends for Pro AV.
