When I was at AVEC last month in New Orleans, AVaaS came up a few times during the panel discussions. I was sitting next to Mark Coxon, and we talked about how our industry doesn't really understand AVaaS. We kept hearing people confuse it with managed services or leasing. AVaaS certainly has its detractors (just ask the
#AVaaSMustDie people), but it's hard to have a real discussion when a lot of us don't even fully understand what it means. Much of this confusion comes from the fact that aaS — as a Service — originally came from cloud-based software (Software-as-a-Service), so industries in which hardware figures heavily into the "as a Service" piece can be harder to understand. This is further complicated by the fact that our industry is in the middle of a transition — AV solutions have almost always been hardware-based, and now some software-based solutions are replacing those hardware solutions, or at least offering an alternative to them.
Mark's article below is excellent at explaining how AVaaS is different from the things it's often confused with, and who might actually benefit from it. It's the best AVaaS article I've read in awhile (and there have been
a lot). I strongly encourage you to check it out.
We also have the second part of Christopher Gillespie's four-part series on the relationship between integrators and end users, which is focusing in particular on their changing relationship with regards to conference rooms. The first part
is here and the second is below.