Crestron’s Touchless Meetings Were Ahead of their Time Until COVID Made Them Essential
Key Points:
- Crestron has seen a major shift in room designs as well as video conferencing technologies.
- As companies redesign their entire office space to accommodate more virtual elements, Crestron has still been able to ship products to their customers to help enable this transformation.
- Supply chain issues have caused integrators to plan their installments around what is available instead of what the simplest set up might be.
Commentary:
We are back from InfoComm 2021! This year, our MarketScale Media Center was the hub for important trends and technologies shaping not only AV, but the way we work, collaborate, and communicate. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have more interviews to drop. While Tyler Kern was at the show, he sat down with Richard Sasson, the Global Director of Training at Crestron Electronics, about the concept of “no-touch meetings.” It was a concept that the company had been touting for many years before the pandemic, but the demand wasn’t there…until it was, skyrocketing last year.
Abridged Thoughts:
One of the really important things that came out of the pandemic was something that we have been working on for many years and have been promoting for many years – the concept of a no touch meeting.
And everyone was like: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no touch meeting, it’s a nice, kind of cool idea.” Then the pandemic hit and they went: “Wait, you guys do no touch meeting. What does that mean? How come no one knows about?”
What we had been doing for many years was now something people really wanted to widely adopt. We’ve seen a huge, as everybody in the industry has, shift in meeting room designs and shift in video conferencing technology to more unified communications technology.
And we’re now selling (of course, we have been for many years) the concept of Teams rooms and Zoom rooms and items along those lines. And that part of our market has gone through the roof, which has brought with it as part of the industry has evolved and office space is gone a whole new direction, there’s a demand that a year and a half ago wasn’t there a year and a half ago.