Why IT Pros Should Go To InfoComm

InfoComm, the largest professional audiovisual trade show in the U.S., is returning to the Las Vegas Convention Center next week, with hundreds of technology vendors showcasing their latest conferencing and collaboration solutions, as well as innovative display and audio technologies.

While the show has historically catered to the professional audiovisual (AV) industry and AV integrators, the show has recently been making more of an effort to appeal to end users and IT professionals, who are ultimately the end customer of these solutions and services being showcased.

IT professionals not familiar with AV equipment and standards are now being forced to support their organizations’ remote and hybrid work needs, and InfoComm is one place where IT and their end users can go to learn more about the newest innovations in the conferencing and collaboration space, says David Labuskes, CEO of pro AV trade association AVIXA, which owns and operates the InfoComm show.

“The DNA of AVIXA and all of the exhibitors at InfoComm is the application of technology to connect people to people, and the professionals that are having to learn this on the fly and respond and react have a home in AVIXA and have an enormous resource in InfoComm’s education and the show itself,” Labuskes says.

InfoComm’s learning opportunities for IT professionals

InfoComm 2022 has 22 sessions that are “focused on the world of IT and networked AV,” Labuskes says, with topics including AV-over-IP, network security, cloud infrastructure, HDBaseT technology and even a panel session focused on the point of view of IT and end users.

Other sessions will explore cybersecurity implications for IoT, AV and workplace technology in enterprise environments, while a three-day course on networked AV systems will explore the impacts of AV systems on networks.

While the InfoComm show is becoming more IT friendly, Labuskes says AVIXA has been “tailoring its messaging and training to the IT audience for some time,” with newsletters focused specifically on conferencing and collaboration, training courses for AV-over-IP technologies and more.

Presenting that information to AV professionals oftentimes introduces them to IT standards and protocols, but AVIXA is hoping to also do the inverse.

InfoComm provides IT professionals the opportunity to learn more about AV technologies from other technologists that “speak a dialect” of their techie language, Labuskes says.

“The key is not to necessarily take a network engineer and turn them into an AV professional, or take an AV professional and turn them into a network engineer,” he says. “The key is to have them interact with each other and discover the expertise that each of them brings to solving the problems that are faced in today’s enterprises.”

Engage with vendors and solution providers

In addition to educating IT and end users on the newest AV technologies, the vendors themselves gain valuable insight into what their actual end customers need to do their jobs effectively, Labuskes says.

“There’s real impact on product roadmaps that comes out of participating in an even like this—not only from a lead gen and sales promotion, but also from conversations with end users,” Labuskes says.

Notable exhibitors showcasing conferencing and collaboration solutions that might be familiar to IT professionals include HP, Intel, Logitech, Cisco, Sennheiser, Zoom, AVI-SPL, AVI Systems, Dell, DTEN, Lenovo, Nureva, Crestron, Poly, Pexip, QSC, Shure, Utelogy and many more.

Here are some InfoComm sessions IT professionals should check out (click on each to learn more about the session, schedules and participants):