November and December are typically quieter in ProAV news than other months, as you see from this issue. Everyone’s doing their budgets and planning for next year. Manufacturers should be putting as much into R&D as they are into marketing in 2007. This market could be up for grabs.

IT not only wants in AV, they ARE in. Now that so many products are networkable and we’ve reached some standardization, the IT department may or may not even need you to specify and install a variety of AV systems.

So, manufacturers need to step up this year and give the channel solutions, not just products, that the AV channel can call their very own and market profitably. And the channel needs to get completely behind those manufacturers who do so.

Some manufacturers add small touches to make their products AV-centric. NEC is a good example of a small but useful value-add, with the scrolling text feature they added to some of the displays. A dealer can bring that to a client as a solution, not just a box. On a larger scale, Christie was early with the ChristieNET networking, and the company developed it to the point where content on thousands of AV products worldwide could be controlled centrally. Again, a solution, not a bunch of boxes.

And no, adding networking and HDMI are no longer enough to differentiate a product for the AV channel. Those are pretty much expected now. AV system integrators need to have at their grasp completely distinctive solutions not available outside the AV channel.

Digital signage was historically a good example of solution-oriented products available through the channel. Digital signage companies offer solutions in which hardware and software work together to deliver a specific solution. But it took the channel a long time to really adopt it, which was rough on the signage manufacturers in the early years, of which there were many.

Which brings me to the next point: when a manufacturer does bring solutions-oriented products to the channel, assuming it’s a good company with good solutions, system integrators MUST support them. Integrators have to take advantage of manufacturers’ efforts to bring solutions to market. Here’s why.

If you look at how the computer systems market played out in the 1980s, you know that it was a value-added reseller (VAR) playground. The big systems manufacturers such as IBM, DEC and the smaller ones such as Dell, Compaq and again, IBM, well with some exceptions, they mostly made boxes. It eventually got to the point where most boxes were pretty much like the next.

Sound familiar?

Their solution to the problem was that box manufacturers of those days partnered with and relied on their resellers to add the value. That meant the resellers invested a ton of money in developing solutions, usually software, that would let them sell these boxes coupled with their application. Those VARs were basically in the business of developing and marketing specific applications. Solutions.

So here’s the catch: most of today’s AV system integrators aren’t in the business of developing software and likely don’t want to be.

So, in 2007, system integrators have three choices.

1) Develop solutions yourself and become an AV VAR. For some companies, this isn’t actually out of the question. You can identify an underserved segment of the market and develop a VAR-type hardware-software combo to address it. Or…

2) Support manufacturers bringing AV solutions to market. Or…

3) Watch from the sidelines while the IT VARs do it without traditional AV channel members. They’ve done VAR solutions before. You’d better believe they’ll do them again the second there’s an opening which, it appears to me, there could be in 2007.