This ties into the huddle room phenomena, but goes far beyond it as well. Finding the right combination of tools and services to enable collaboration in these spaces will be a continuing challenge for our IT teams and a continuing growing market for our industry. The users themselves were constantly talking about how their growing millennial workforce insists on working as teams, foregoing the solo cubical experience to huddle up in any available common area. What really got me excited was the fact that it wasn’t just vendors talking about huddle rooms, trying to promote their latest offering. (I heard estimates of over 170 attendees.) Aside from the designated session on huddle rooms, the topic kept coming up in session after session. Simon Dudley‘s IMCCA session dedicated to huddle rooms ( iTunes, Google Play, Soundcloud) was standing room only. The discussions at InfoComm confirmed that user interest in huddle rooms is off the charts. The term is so heavily used in marketing, that it’s starting to feel like the next “telepresence”. Over the last year, some of us in the analyst community have started to question the huddle room buzz. Hopefully the current movement towards consolidation, simplification, and roll-ups will help these vendors. Very few organizations are finding success with one UC solution that meets all of their collaboration needs. While this may be an extreme example, I heard similar anecdotes throughout the sessions and in my conversations on the show floor. His “unified” solution included big players, like Polycom, Cisco, BlueJeans, Pexip, as well as a handful of smaller vendors. Instead, I saw a slide listing over a dozen individual vendors. I expected the slide to identify one of the many unified communications offerings on the market, whether it be Microsoft, Cisco, Mitel, Avaya, etc. During one session, an end user from a large financial firm shared a slide laying out his UC platform. Rather than summarize each session, I thought I would share some of the common trends. I noted several common themes throughout the event. I attended several IMCCA sessions and, as always, enjoyed hearing directly from the end users. The lesson here could be to track the success of individual teams and show your entire workforce how teams that use the tools get results. The winning strategy was to show the doctors the implications of compliance vs non-compliance. One method, the carrot and stick approach, has problems as doctors learned to game the system to avoid punishment and get rewards. Stephen then went through the hospital’s various attempts to improve hand sanitation compliance. So lesson #1, we need to take a good look at how we gather our analytics to make sure our adoption numbers are valid. One of the biggest issues in AV is ensuring high levels of adoption to achieve ROI through productivity. However, when the nurses were tasked with reporting on the doctors, the numbers didn’t look so good. When the doctors are surveyed, they self-report very high levels of compliance. Stephen discussed how doctors need to sanitize their hands between visiting every patient to avoid spreading germs. For example, Stephen’s first story was about gathering analytics and changing behavior in a hospital setting. It may not have been obvious, but I do think there were lessons to be learned. The presentation was engaging and entertaining, but left many attendees scratching their heads wondering how it applies in any way to the AV industry. Dubner, the co-author of the Freakonomics books, took the stage for this year’s keynote. The opening ceremony was in a packed room and started out by honoring this year’s award winners. Below are some of my big takeaways from this year’s exciting show. This year, 38,883 people attended InfoComm to receive training, see industry thought leaders, learn about the latest trends, and play with the newest gadgets – including me. This year’s show had a record number of exhibitors showing off all the latest technologies and attendees showed up in big numbers to see them. InfoComm is often considered a must for anyone involved in North American AV and it’s easy to see why. Let’s Do Video is pleased to bring you our coverage of InfoComm 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada.