It’s hard to believe InfoComm 2019 was already almost a full week ago. From the light displays and fog machines, to the sound equipment and accompanying solutions, this mega show for AV enthusiasts had something for everyone—and left all of us at BlueJeans in major awe. How could you not be when greeted by a festival-style DJ booth performing daily in front of the expo hall and impressive booth exhibits as far as the eyes can see? Let’s not forget about the jumbo LED displays put out by vendors such as LG, Samsung and Sony.

But while the Expo hall left everyone mesmerized, the educational sessions truly inspired—and BlueJeans was lucky enough to be included in several sessions at this year’s conference. Here are a few of our favorite highlights from those panels:

On June 12th, BlueJeans VP of product management, Peter Verwayen, spoke about “AVIT Best Practices for UCC.” The overall consensus? There is a huge rush to fill demand in Huddle room spaces, and the usability or ease of use of these spaces is far more important to employees than the impressiveness of the room itself. This means audio and video quality must be up to speed. And while analyst Ira Weinstein argued that “good-enough” audio is all that users really want at this point, Peter highlighted that immersive audio is an incentive to move users off of PSTN and onto a fixed-cost VoIP solution. This is important when you consider that more and more IT personnel are setting up and managing rooms, as opposed to the traditional AV person.

Peter also took the stage on Wednesday, June 13th to educate attendees on the importance of “Using Room Meeting Data to Improve Meeting Experience.” Sitting beside the likes of Intel, AVI-SPL and Level 3, the panelists all agreed that there are many factors that include room experience that are not related to the technology itself, including varying room temperatures, missing dry erasers, and more. Intel promoted their Ignite platform, which has roughly 6,000 installations, touting “time to join” as a main KPI for improving room experience. Similarly, AVI-SPL highlighted their Symphony solution, which is like a multi-tenant Command Center.

Later on Wednesday, BlueJeans VP of product and solutions, John Knightly, participated in the session “Best Practices for Conducting Collaborative Meetings,” where attendees gained insights into how to achieve more inclusive, efficient and productive in-person meetings, while giving virtual participants the same ability to collaborate as those meeting face to face. The panel also explored how to build comfort with virtual analogs for physical collaboration tools, capabilities, use cases, and misuse cases for interactive displays and technical approaches and facilitation best practices for making far-end attendees full meeting participants

Last but not least, closing out day 3, our senior VP of product marketing, Zach Bosin, spoke in a lively session on “Executing Executive Town Halls” with end user perspectives from representatives of Facebook and Zoom. The net-net? Dedicated staff and expensive production equipment is no longer necessary for putting on a successful town hall, as these have been democratized—especially when you factor in that easy-to-use cloud platforms can now support room system interop and WebRTC/browser allows everyone to join from anywhere. Furthermore, most conference rooms are already equipped with top shelf gear. By unleashing those solutions for other use cases, such as events, it enables companies to be more nimble and agile in terms of hosting and managing these types of events so that you don’t need to bring in third party teams with expensive gear to host anymore.

  • To ensure optimal participation, capabilities like Graceful Degradation that react and adapt to network conditions intelligently will ensure that even if video is not capable, audio will continue the broadcast.
  • Engagement is the name of the game, so event hosts and moderators need to implement a variety of techniques to ensure audiences are participating as intended. BlueJeans sees 62% of its events have multiple moderators to support a deeper level of interactivity through polling, Q&A, chat, and video promotion.
  • Successful IT/events teams are embracing the role of the “Trusted Advisor” to help executive teams craft the best agenda, develop the engagement roadmap, and drive the technical requirements necessary for executing a robust and meaningful town hall program.

Did you know that in the last 12 months, nearly, 15,700 events have been hosted on BJN Events? This equates to 26,000 hours, or 50 Events a Day. Find out more about our BlueJeans Events platform at https://www.bluejeans.com/products/events and contact us for your free trial today!

Thanks to all for a successful InfoComm. We can’t wait to see you all again next year!