Many months back, in late 2013 I had a conversation with a friend of mine in the business from Canada. Maybe that makes sense to those of you who have followed my blogs, since my first one emanated from the Great White North as it involved one of the major integrators in the Canadian market. Something, I’m not sure exactly what led us to discuss an interview blog and how the gentleman who led the sales effort for the company would be the perfect candidate. I had actually done an interview blog once before, with the principal deputy of the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (HIT) in a blog titled: BYOD, Telehealth and a Value Proposition. I had approached my interview participant David Muntz after a health information technology meeting (which I was invited to by the National eHealth Collaborative) and what appealed to me most about his discussion was not only about the usage of telehealth and personal devices in the medical workplace – the subject of BYOD – it was his creation of a concept called a “value proposition” as it would essentially oppose the known concept of Return on Investment (ROI)  as a Value of Investment (VOI), or in short a value proposition. Yes, I hung on to that in the conference too and put it down on paper with stars next to it. It hit me after I started talking to him – I had to interview the man, and he readily accepted. A first for me, the interview blog.

Getting back to the story of the actual first AV interview blog, it wasn’t until three months after my original discussion with my friend that I reached out to Tim St. Louis at Sharps AV to ask if he would participate in the blog as my interview participant. I believe Tim took a bit of time before agreeing to do it, he may be able to shed better light on that. Being that it was my second interview blog, I had already built the format and discussed this with Tim. He fully understood how it would work and we got started. Now I will say that I’ve always been very meticulous, in fact some of my interview blogs go through numerous revisions to bring them to 100 percent satisfaction for me. I don’t recall how many this one went through, however I do know that when I finally smiled I pressed the submit button where it goes through the pipe to Sara Abrons to edit, place the images and then publish to rAVe. Sara got in touch with me when it published and yes, the first real AV interview blog was official, Getting AV/IT Business Done in the Great White North. I watched people from Sharps AV go out and share it massively on LinkedIn and couldn’t believe my eyes. I even saw a comment from Gary under one of the posts cheering on Sharps as well. In fact, Sara actually got in touch with me the next day to tell me that Gary wanted me to do more. More? I hadn’t planned on it but why not, this one was fun to do and I was sure that I could put together another, so I looked for another integrator.

What came to me as a next subject was of great appeal to me since this gentleman owned an integration company in India who was also fairly unique in being an Apple partner. As the blog states, I met my next participant Yash Chavan in a LinkedIn group discussions where we then took it offline to speak further about the topic. A friendship began to build and it was pretty natural that I asked him if he would like to be my next participant. He agreed right away and Apple, AV and a Whole New Perspective was underway, it was a bit more challenging than the Sharps AV blog and required much more of my time and numerous video conferences between Yash and myself. However again after the big smile, I hit submit and it published. And to my true satisfaction, it went out there just like the Sharps AV blog, actually even more. At that moment I told myself that this should be a regular thing. I decided to shift focus at that moment though as continuing with integrators would give decent perspective, however moving to solutions providers in the new “disruptive technologies” arena, where I began to associate with, was a natural progression for me. I saw mass innovation all the while being looked at as the disrupters of the industry, always leaving a tall order to “prove” yourself. It was daring, but I decided to make the move and create Disruptive Forces in AV/IT.

The story behind this was actually Virginette Acacio, who handled social media and marketing for the company who became my first subject. I tell Virginette to this day that if it wasn’t for all of her contributions to the LinkedIn groups on hardware vs. cloud video conferencing, as well as the benefits of the cloud, the series may never have happened. I reached out to her to ask her to be my participant, I think she was a little surprised but she agreed to do the first of a five part series – Part 1: Blue Jeans. What followed was an interview with Anders Lokke the next company’s Marketing Fanatic (yes that’s his LinkedIn title description), however with a tremendous knowledge base to the technology. This became Part 2: Pexip. What was great about this one, was the flurry of shares that started happening on social media and that began to make the series well worth doing. It was then on to the third and my choice there was pretty easy. I had been seeing LinkedIn video conferencing groups talking about this company so I decided to reach out  to make them and their Head of Product Marketing Nick Chong the next in the series Part 3 – Zoom.

Now it was on to the next one and this was an interesting story. I had reached out to a few people at this company as I wanted to have them in the series and did not get any replies back. I made one last ditch effort and contacted CTO Mark Blake, a big reach out for a blog but I decided to do it anyway. That same day, I received a reply back from Mark telling me that he would be very happy to have Acano be a part of the series. At that point, I was directed to Larry Satterfield, their Global VP of Sales for Part 4: Acano. What took place after publication was nothing short of amazing. The people at Acano immediately went out on social media and began to do massive sharing, so much so they may have been doing work with one hand and typing in LinkedIn with the other. What is not known to this day though is that I pitted Acano and Pexip head to head at the point that they had almost identical share numbers as I had gotten in touch with my contacts at both companies to tell them the most shares wins. Wins what? I don’t know, just seemed like a fun challenge to throw out there. The winner you ask? Well I actually looked at the current numbers yesterday and Acano shared a remarkable 682 times (and I can only imagine more after this). The next in the series was already planned by me to be the fifth and last part as this is the company that is well known to have started the disruptive revolution. My interview subject was the VP of Strategic Marketing (who also gave me my booth tour at InfoComm) Mark Noble for Part 5: Vidyo. Unfortunately it got a little too close to InfoComm to get out the shares, but hey, consider this the second chance.

The next was both the most passionate and difficult interview blog I have written altogether. The genesis of, as well as the story behind the blog is noted in there and I have to say that it was at times grueling to write, not because of the subject matter but because of just how personal it got as well as the fact that it had to be as close to perfect as possible. I finally finished it (at the behest of many) with possibly the greatest interview of all provided by Penny Sitler of Draper Inc. and I can’t thank her enough for the hours spent doing it, including over the weekend before it published. AV, Women and A Bright New Day was more of a tribute to the great and hard working women of the AV industry than harping on the secondary subject which doesn’t really bare further discussion. The final interview blog which just published recently was done with the CEO of a company that had been what I have called one of the “cornerstones” of my previous days of almost 15 years in integration sales, in mostly K-12 and Higher Education. I consider this company, SMART Technologies to almost be a personal business partner of mine in my AV integration business days and knew many people there, kind of like a partner insider. The whole story is in my final interview blog The SMART (Enterprise) Way to Do Business with a highly pleasurable interview of CEO Neil Gaydon who has assembled a remarkable team at SMART, whose top executives Scott Brown, Jeff Lowe and Warren Barkley are also given mention in the blog.

I also want to give special mention to the others who worked hours with me on Disruptive Forces – Priscilla McCarthy of Zoom, Jean Rosauer of Acano, Kerry Ogata of Vidyo, and the women who also worked after hours with me on Women in AV – Karen Smidt, Gina Sansivero and Victoria Ferrari (who’s paying the OT Gary…?). Writing the interview blog has been a pleasure for me over the last six months and I do hope to contribute more, however I decided to take a bit of a break to just focus on other things for now. I do have a few big ideas for more interview blogs though and we’ll see if they get out there in the near future. For now, thanks to all of my interview blog participants, you’ve been great. In fact, this blog is a tribute to all of you. And to you too, Sara.