In 2005, I had the amazing opportunity while working for Avidex Systems LLC to be introduced to Pacific Interactive (PI). Avidex was the AV Systems Integrator for the nearly 40,000 square foot renovation of the Cisco Executive Briefing Center in Milpitas, CA. The project was extensive, complex, and the audiovisual systems were state-of-the-art. Think energizing LCD panels to display projected images on opaque surfaces and then shutting them off to offer a clear view into an extension demo core of Cisco’s latest products. So, this type of AV system had to have a control system that matched the level of sophistication.

Pacific Interactive was the control system manufacturer for the project and my first experience with IP-based control systems. It was amazing to see control system software running on standard Cisco-servers like you would any other data application. I was able to control any device, from any room, on a single control panel. And, that control panel could be my laptop, smartphone, tablet, etc. Long before the days of this being common practice, PI and Avidex were installing these systems in real-life business environments. I had the privilege of interviewing PI’s CEO, Jonathan Stroum, who shares with us one of our industry’s most influential and best-kept secrets.

Jonathan, thank you for taking the time to talk with our rAVe [Publications] readers about Pacific Interactive (PI). Tell us about your company’s history and how you turned your vision into the reality it is today.

The pleasure is all mine, Jennifer. Thanks to you and rAVe [Publications] for your interest!

Pacific Interactive founders met in the late 80’s working on the earliest stages of interactive multimedia with crazy creatives in Los Angeles. IBM and Apple were providing seed funding and our prototypes ultimately helped IBM justify a big investment in founding their Atlanta-based Interactive Multimedia division – these were heady times with money flying. We created ground breaking works at a furious pace in a high-pressure environment, not unlike the film and TV production from which we’d come.

PI was an offshoot, forming in Santa Monica in 1992, continuing to collaborate with IBM, Disney (who tried to buy us), Electronic Arts and Microsoft – creating computer driven interactive experiences. That eventually led to one of the earliest versions of digital signage featuring full motion video, first realized commercially for MGM Grand and Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas in the mid 90’s and then for Caesars Palace, Bally’s, Paris and The Palms. Those installations often required integration with environmental systems controlling lights, lasers, hazers, water pumps, etc. Because no solution existed at the time, PI was forced to write its own control platform.

In 1999, PI was chosen to provide the control infrastructure for managing Paul Allen’s (Frank Gehry-designed) Experience Music Project in Seattle including 400+ devices and 70 channels of video. 2000 and beyond saw PI’s presentation systems installed at Microsoft’s Executive Briefing Center in Redmond, a coordination system for incoming audio transmissions at NBC’s studios at Rockefeller Center (since grown to several of their production facilities) and another installation at the Gehry-designed IAC headquarters in New York. Cisco’s EBC in Milpitas and a host of other installs followed including the Seattle Art Museum (also done with Avidex) where PI supplied its first combination of board room, meeting rooms and digital signage.

Each of these pivotal projects created opportunities to push PI’s control and automation solution forward and create more powerful and broadly applicable capabilities. Because of our extensive work in the hospitality business, especially the casino and conference center markets, we saw a deep need for a more integrated approach to Room Information systems that could better interact with Microsoft Exchange, various EMS products, control systems and digital signage in a coordinated and centrally managed way.   We’ve recently introduced PI’s new Room Info & Scheduling product. It’s based on touchscreen displays installed outside meeting and conference rooms that provide the ability to book the room ad-hoc, find other rooms nearby that match a desired schedule, display the room’s status, availability, schedule, meeting info and organizer if desired, meeting length, etc. In conference facilities, the system can include a central display for facility schedules, wayfinding, messaging and marketing. Even our small displays can be configured to rotate between room scheduling and messaging when the unit or room is idle or after hours.

And, as usual, PI has a unique approach. I say it’s unique because our perspective and trajectory was borne of computing, networking and IT. Our vision has always been to centralize intelligence and make it available to devices and processes, no matter their location. We’ve focused on flexible systems that account for change management and allow anything to connect to anything while still respecting network standards, protocols and security, which help our products fit naturally into the world of IT.

Can you elaborate on what sets PI’s business model apart from the more traditional digital signage and control systems solutions we see in the market today?

Our business model has been slightly different from traditional AV in that we design, engineer, produce and sell software, but that’s becoming common in the digital signage business. So, our products are licensed. Our server software is the basis of any installation, which can be purchased as software or fully integrated with Dell or other server hardware. Our UIs can be run on Windows, Apple or Android hardware and, again, we have hardware that we’ve qualified, but, we can work with any hardware platform makes sense for the design and customer’s application. Our digital signage playback devices are sold fully integrated to maintain a single point of responsibility for hardware and software. We find our customers prefer this approach.

Tell us about your technical architecture and what it is about PI’s platform that the future of the industry needs to understand about the AV/IT convergence? What differentiates your products as market leaders in the types of technology solutions that are available today?

PI’s ORCA Technologyforms the basis for all our products and is a distributed application composition framework that allows complex systems to be built out of specialized components called agents.  These agents are bound into meaningful systems through an application server that acts based on a database of interactions and behaviors.  The system is agile and manageable because all applications are described using this data-driven architecture.

In an ORCA-based system, each sensor, device, process or interface is managed by a single agent.  This agent is responsible for all the actions, events and states of the object it controls.  Any agent is capable of executing commands to and raising notifications from its device.  The ORCA Service binds these agents together by associating Events (notifications) with Methods (commands).  By isolating the device-specific behaviors from the inter-device connections, ORCA allows a powerful means of coordinating many disparate and otherwise un-linkable systems into a cohesive management system.

ORCA runs on Windows-based servers and industry-standard hardware.  ORCA interfaces to hardware and software through edge devices (Ethernet?Serial, Ethernet?IR, Ethernet?Relay, etc.) and through open standards interfaces such as COM, SOAP, RPC,BACnet, ModBus, etc.  All ORCA communication takes place over TCP/IP with fully configurable ports.

Because of ORCA’s unique architecture, it’s an ideal platform for creating digital signage, scheduling, enterprise control and remote management systems.  Since each agent is responsible only for communication with its specific type of device or process, and since each agent is able to publish its methods and events to the rest of the system, disparate and distributed devices and processes can seamlessly interact to create complex behaviors.  Any controllable device can be controlled, and since the protocol for each device is completely obscured from the composed application, integration of previously isolated systems is not only possible, but is exactly the same as integrating homogeneous systems.  This makes ORCA an ideal platform for creating the kind of hybrid, integrated solutions businesses require to manage an increasingly mobile and media savvy employee and customer base.

We leverage the network, the cloud and centralized intelligence so managers can make a single, global change and know that the entire infrastructure will change as a result. We seek to enable any and every device to be connected to the network and be recognized, vetted and connected in a way that’s both powerful and safe. Sometimes that requires an edge device (serial, sensor or contact closure to LAN) but these days the majority of products are built with a network port. We want people to be able to walk into a meeting room and log onto the room’s control UI from their own laptop, tablet or smartphone and instantly control the room. No more dedicated control panel that’s a bear to figure out or applicable only to the location for which it’s configured. We’re constantly refining our software so every manner of device can be seen, understood, monitored, and diagnosed over the IT network.

The standard bearers in the AV control business are very smart, very capable and produce excellent products. And they will continue to evolve and become ever more network savvy, but they’ll have a hard time breaking away from the intelligence-in-every-room approach because that’s still at the core of their business.

How does an IT/Network-centric approach fit into PI ‘s overall strategic business planning and what benefits do customers realize from implementing your solutions?

We apply IT and network principles to everything we do. Digital Signage, Room Scheduling & Information, Control and Automation, Monitoring and Notification, Dashboards and Reporting – they all rest on PI’s technology infrastructure. This gives us a tremendous advantage when integrating into the Enterprise, particularly with new cloud-based technologies (private or public cloud). We use SQL Server for all our data storage. We use web standard sockets for all messaging. We support SSL and 128-bit encryption. We can deploy any of our technology directly onto existing server clusters or new virtual machines using standard image files.

The AV business is largely hardware driven, the majority of products being sold with some software capability. And even though the accompanying software may be fine for that individual product, integrating it with others in a meaningful way that operates and scales within an IT environment is critical to its effective use.

PI decided quite some time ago that software was our real business so we have carefully chosen when and where to offer integrated hardware. Our real focus is to be the best intermediary and management tool so that those who deploy, manage and create value from these systems have the best chance of succeeding. And, when that system needs to change to make it better, our system is flexible in a way that will not hinder these technologies’ most effective exploitation for creating new solutions that would be prohibitively complex on other platforms.

For example, at a large site in Seattle, we are integrating data from:

• Microsoft Exchange
• Dean Evans EMS
• PI Dynamic Digital Signage
• PI Room Information Displays
• Crestron Room View

We’ve created an integrated information gathering display, reporting and monitoring system. Making all these elements play together seamlessly without PI’s platform would be daunting and expensive, if not impossible. We see this sort of tight integration becoming the expected standard with the AV/IT convergence our industry has been undergoing since the turn of the century.

PI does sell fully integrated hardware/software solutions but we also promote utilizing whatever hardware/technology/software/process will ensure the installation sings in the right key. And, by leveraging existing products (tablets, touchscreen displays, industrial servers, android, windows, iOS) we can keep the cost down and the usability high while taking advantage of the tens of millions of dollars spent in product/industrial design.

Your customer base is broad and exclusive, including companies such as MGM, Microsoft, Cisco, and NBC. For AV professionals who may not be familiar with PI’s extensive reach, tell us about where PI’s fits in the AV market and your thoughts about the AV/IT convergence we see happening in the industry?

There’s no doubt we’ve been fortunate to have our products chosen by top-tier companies. That they’ve entrusted their most precious facilities to our products is something we take very seriously. There’s an obvious upside to having folks embrace or resell your technology, products and approach. While we’ve had direct relationships in the past, we like working with AV integrators because they’re a creative bunch. We look forward to them getting more comfortable with networks. While our technology is network and standards based, realizing an installation is still a creative endeavor that we feel is better suited to the AV integrator.

To date, PI has relied on word of mouth and reputation but we’re starting to step out, wanting to talk to a larger audience. As far as sales efforts, I’ve been a fan of spear fishing rather than casting a wide net. My speculation about Extron’s recent decision to not attend futureInfoComm and ISE tradeshows tells me that perhaps they’re also looking to the spear gun approach — and maybe that’s just a case of me projecting PI’s own philosophy. I favor targeting business partners, mostly because I know the PI approach is not for the catalog browser who needs everything to come from one source. We’re better suited to those who are confident in their ability and willing to go out of their way to create the right solution for the customer and installation.

Pacific Interactive is unique in its ability to provide AV Control, Room Information & Scheduling, Digital Signage and Monitoring & Notification and Reporting on a single technical platform. PI’s vision is to push automation and control to the point of transparency, where it’s an expected part of the environment – to make interacting with systems straightforward and natural, allowing new end points and points of control to be created without the painstaking programming processes required today. We see this bigger picture approach as a way for the AV community to become better aligned with their customer’s business process and objectives, leading to closer alliances and ongoing industry growth.

PI’s network/data-centric approach creates opportunities for designers and integrators of these ever-more-powerful combinations of technologies to more easily knit them into a cohesive platform, while bringing greater visibility and insight into the interaction, utilization and efficiency of each device and the AV installations as a whole. AV’s tremendous power is coming into its own again and the transport mechanism is the network and data is our friend. My advice is to jump in and be prepared to take advantage of the great wave coming our way.

For more information about Pacific Interactive, contact Sales at 206-443-6644 ext. 105 or info@pacint.com and visit www.pacint.com

Jonathan, we appreciate your taking the time to share with our industry PI’s products and services, thank you for your consideration! So, what do you think everyone; is this a wave our industry can afford to miss?