The interview — the power of the spoken word, the real sense of expression and feeling when one gives you direct response to something that you’ve been thinking and/or wondering about. In blogs previous to the last two that I’ve done on the title subject of AV/IT be they cloud, BYOD or cybersecurity, it was mostly about acquired knowledge-base as well as maybe a little bit of research to finish painting the big picture.

One day though, at the behest of a friend in the industry, I decided to interview an executive of his company — my first foray into a blog interview format. Felt comfortable with it though, actually pretty jazzed. Did the interview, put the whole thing together, examined and reexamined to make sure it all flowed right, then submitted to rAVe. Not knowing what to expect, I looked at LinkedIn and what did I see? Sure enough it was posted right there on the homepage and then continued on in social media. Some validation for the work? I guess in essence it created the impetus to make it a regular thing.

However, what’s the next step? Continue with the integrator interviews or take a side step into the vendor world? At that moment, an idea came to me. I’ve been reading great stuff in LinkedIn lately in the AV oriented groups, especially those devoted to video conferencing. Really great stuff. I couldn’t help but to participate in them, put in my two or three cents along with the others until it turned into pages and pages of commentary, essentially never ending threads. Every time I looked at my email, half of them were from these groups. I was making friends left and right — who knew there were so many out there living in the same space and seeing a whole new realm of communication and collaboration like myself? While there are those of us who are taking it all in, there are still those out there that won’t let go of the hardware (like pry it out of my cold dead hands) and who refer to this technology, almost grumbling, as out and out disruption.

Disruptive forces. It’s a phrase we’ve all been hearing for quite some time now and we know which realm of the AV industry that this phrase mostly refers to. The long-time industry standard bearers have now given way to companies that produce solutions that you can’t touch in a lunch and learn. I had to wonder about some of the first sales meetings these guys walked into and the mention of cloud and virtualization. The reaction in the room from the sales staff? That’s an interesting question. These days there is a certain amount of savvy in the industry but I have to wonder, is the industry still more about the technology touch and feel or is this new bold technology in video conferencing and unified communications really seeping in? Are they telling clients to forget about Skype or Go To You-Know-What and take a look at some real commercial and enterprise applications?

Following this will be a series of blog interviews with vendors in the realm where these “disruptive technologies” exists. From the cloud to robotics, different companies will have the opportunity to discuss their company and culture, solutions and strategies and even get to paint outside the lines a bit. So watch for the upcoming series entitled “Disruptive Forces in AV/IT,” I think (hope) you’ll all like it…