Having postponed its event that was scheduled to take place in Barcelona in early February, 2022, ISE is laying the groundwork for the event that won't disappoint on May 10-13, 2022. Below is the press release from ISE. 

ISE teaming up with IOT Solutions World Congress

ISE is joining forces with IOT Solutions World Congress (IOTSWC), the largest international event devoted to industry transformation through disruptive technologies. The two events are teaming up at the Fira de Barcelona in May to present an unparalleled ecosystem for digital transformation to professionals from many industries.

The joint celebration of the two events will provide a unique opportunity to explore the crossroads between two different sets of disruptive technologies. Alongside ISE’s experts in audiovisual technology and systems integration, IOTSWC will bring to the table leading experts and companies working on Artificial Intelligence, Digital Twins, Internet of Things and Quantum Computing. The goal of this co-operation is to highlight the common ground that offers new ideas and inspiration for attendees and exhibitors alike.

The agreement will allow each show’s visitors to access both exhibition areas, at no extra cost, whilst attendees registered to any of the ISE conferences will benefit from a 50% discount on the IOTSWC congress programme – and vice versa.

Directors’ Viewpoints

The directors of both shows are enthusiastic about what this co-operation agreement promises for attendees.

"We are very excited about this agreement. At IOTSWC we believe that some of the key technologies we have been showcasing such as Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things have an incredible transformational potential for the professional AV industry and likewise the AV and systems integration industry can help to develop disruptive new solutions for the digital transformation ecosystem," said Roger Bou, director, IOTSWC

"AV and IT convergence has been the single most important industry trend at ISE over the past decade and the inspiring innovations happening in IoT take this to another level. With our two events now happening at the same time and place this May, it is very exciting to be able to work together and explore even more areas of collaboration. The exciting world of pro AV and the inspiring innovations in IoT make all sorts of possibilities a reality," said Mike Blackman, managing director, Integrated Systems Events

What is IOTSWC?

IOT Solutions World Congress is organised jointly by Fira de Barcelona and the Industry IoT Consortium (IIC), which was founded in 2014 to accelerate the adoption of the Industrial Internet of Things. The IIC “ focuses on driving deployments of innovative technology solutions that digitally transform businesses”. For the 2022 edition—its sixth—IOTSWC is taking the title Game-Changing Solutions for Industry Transformation.

The event identifies four key types of end-user within its visitor profile:

The congress programme at IOTSWC is structured around five themes: Business Optimisation, Artificial Intelligence, Connectivity, Security and Customer Experience. Also taking place alongside IOTSWC is the Barcelona Cybersecurity Congress, an annual event co-organised with the Catalan Government.

A Smart Collaboration

Bob Snyder, Content Chair of ISE’s Smart Building Conference and Smart Workplace Summit, is excited about the co-operation between ISE and IOTSWC.

“The AV and IT industries have been coming together for over a decade now – and the technologies championed by IOT Solutions World Congress, such as the Internet of Things, Digital Twins and Artificial Intelligence, represent the next step in this progression,” he says. “Just about any kind of ‘smart’ technology environment – such as smart buildings, smart cities, smart workplaces or smart homes – is built around solutions on show at IOTSWC.”

There are compelling reasons why the audience for each show should visit the other, he adds: “ISE attendees should come to IOTSWC to find out what is going on in their key verticals, and get ahead of the curve rather than behind it. IOTSWC delegates should attend the Smart Building Conference, which takes place the day before both exhibitions open, and learn about the latest developments in this important market. Then once the show starts, they should explore the ISE show floor to find the latest smart technology solutions. ISE is the leading show in Europe for smart homes, smart signage and much more besides.”

The global mass notification systems (MNS) market is expected to reach nearly $20 billion by 2025, with end user requirements changing with the technology’s increasing adoption.

“There are several factors contributing to this market growth ranging from increased crime rates that lead to political pressure for policy reform to business growth needs driving new ideas for optimizing communication in the workplace,” explained Justin Young, general manager at AtlasIED.

[The Technology Manager's Guide to Command and Control]

Market Trends

In the healthcare market, facilities are looking for ways to couple legacy business procedures and processes to new communications technologies, noted Young. “With the new technology solutions available, healthcare administrators can now begin to optimize workflows within their organizations to leverage the new technologies, as opposed to designing around shortcomings in their existing system. Now, we see business processes that use new ideas and solutions to provide the critical communications where and when they are needed. So much of a healthcare ecosystem relies on mass communication, with situations ranging from nurse call stations to patient queuing systems, to name a few.”

But the most dramatic spike in demand for MNS stems from the tragic events of mass shootings in schools over the last 20 years, according to Young.

“The unfortunate trend of increased violence in [the United States] has created significant pressures on political leadership to push sweeping changes in school safety requirements, and security budgets reflect that. Education administrators are under pressure to ensure the safety of all children and staff under their care. They also do not want the public perception of negligence stemming from not taking the necessary steps to mitigate an active shooter risk. Today’s MNS solutions can combine situational handling of numerous types of events including active shooter lockdowns, fire evacuations, and severe weather notification.”

New, clever solutions, such as the Safe Zone gunfire detection system, have been devised to deal with situations like this. The automated system provides intelligence to law enforcement, first responders, and on-site personnel within seconds of a gunshot. The system combines detection hardware with cloud-based machine learning capabilities to provide crucial information including the type of weapon, the number of shots fired, and the shooter’s location.

In another market that relies on mass notification systems, the transportation sector has been faced with endlessly-changing CDC recommendations stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Airports, bus stations, and train stations need the tools to allow them to promptly provide the necessary guidance to their targeted audience and their environment, which can be in varying acoustical conditions. The ubiquity of and access to personal technology such as mobile devices has driven the need for mass communication technology development to address the potential for off-premise notifications. Software that ties to email, SMS text, and messaging has created a new level of expectation for the reliability and reach of necessary communications and information delivery,” said AtlasIED’s Young.

Biamp’s Joe Andrulis, executive vice president of corporate development, elaborated on the applications driving change. “Unfortunately, we have learned the hard way that there are more urgent or emergent events than the fire alarm. One of the newest standards is for active shooters, which has become a very common design requirement for many businesses. Weather alerting is always a concern too, and a major concern in some geographical areas. All of these events are part of life safety and are being taken very seriously by the design and consultant community.”

There are four layers to mass notification. Andrulis described the first layer as in-building notifications, including emergency voice evacuation systems, one-way voice communications, visible notification appliances, and textual/digital signage. The second layer focuses on wide area notifications, or notifications outside a building, including high-power speaker arrays, outdoor speakers, strobes, and digital displays. Layer 3 reaches out to distributed recipients with SMS/text messaging, computer pop-ups, automated voice dialing, email broadcast, and smartphone apps. The fourth layer notifies recipients through public means such as TV or radio broadcast, location-specific messages and weather radios.

As we move into a post-COVID-19 world, layers 3 and 4 of mass notification will see significant growth, according to Andrulis.

With more of us spaced out throughout the workplace and many working remotely, mass notification has been forced to extend well beyond a building or campus. Distributed protocols are already being used to spread critical information en masse, which is a trend that will continue to develop, Andrulis predicted.

“Mass notification market growth is global across all verticals, and now encompasses public as well as private institutions and environments. Security and safety issues drive that growth, from natural disasters and emergencies (fire, hurricane, earthquake) to medical (COVID-19 and contact tracing) and manmade ones (riots, gun violence, crimes),” added Bogen director of marketing Randall Lee.

Catering to the End User

What changes can we expect in end user requirements for mass notification systems post-COVID 19? Lee foresees some challenges ahead.

“It’s a difficult question to answer because of the balancing needed between personal privacy and the rapid adoption and expansion of cameras and AI for individuals’ identification via video surveillance. Could public contact tracing for health reasons outweigh privacy rights? Would people find it intrusive to have mobile text messages telling them they came within a short distance of a COVID-19-positive individual when they went out for food? I expect there will be some sort of opt-in service with mobile and email notices in the short term. Different services covering different types of monitoring—for example, earthquake early warning, gunshot monitoring and location detection—will open up APIs for integration into different mass notification systems. or will do the integration themselves as part of a partner ecosystem.

According to Young, flexibility will be a key priority for the end user in the year ahead.

“Two aspects of end user requirements that will change are increased flexibility and more focus on customer experience. Changes in expectations for MNS due to COVID-19 will be focused on flexibility driven by a new reality where customers need to be able to quickly pivot from normal, steady-state operations to a sudden emergency in which requirements can vary greatly. One of the more significant lessons learned from the current pandemic is the need to be able to make swift changes in messaging content as well as where the messaging is needed. This can also require changes in the delivery method, whether it be audible announcements or visual paging.”

Future mass notification systems will need functionality more nuanced than simply providing paging functionality, said Young. “The end user experience is now being considered as a large influence in the decision-making process for procurement. Features that will arise in the future include interfacing MNS to different systems. Integration of wayfinding technologies and visual paging into content management systems will be essential to allow customers effective means of providing key information when it is needed.”

Mapping the Future

Technology advancements in the mass notification market will continue, catering to an ever-changing range of environments.

“Five technologies that we are going to see adopted in MNS in the next few years are: AI and ML, AR, IoT and cloud-based technologies, 5G, and cybersecurity/encryption,” said Young. “AI [artificial intelligence] and ML [machine learning] technologies will lead to better predictive analytics for improving the end user customer experience in the marketplace. An example could be predicting passenger flows in a public transportation setting that can lead to increased frequency of pre-recorded announcements in busy areas. AR [augmented reality] will be deployed in sales tools that can help the end user see future installs and build them on the fly on their mobile devices or with wearable technologies. Imagine being able to build, listen to, and tune a new office space in real time via AR.”

Young is convinced that IoT (Internet of Things), edge computing, and cloud technologies grouped together will leverage the scaling processing power and efficiencies to allow for more decentralized solutions. “This will segregate and share the processing loads of MNS across the cloud and push more processing load out to the endpoint devices. Not only will you be able to process more at the endpoint device, but with increased efficiencies you will be able to take on more features and functions and still maintain your PoE power requirements.”

5G connectivity will allow for greater accessibility to customer systems, where end users currently fight limited connectivity in certain installs, continued Young. “With 5G, there will be reduced limitations on what information can and will be made accessible for performance analytics, early fault detection, and notifications. Finally, with the increased risk of cybercrime, improved encryption and cybersecurity will ensure that emergency MNS data is safe, secure, and tamper-resistant.”  

Sprint and Ericsson have formed a global relationship to build a distributed and virtualized core network dedicated specifically to IoT (Internet of Things), in addition to a world-class IoT operating system. This new environment, which is purpose-built for the future of IoT, is designed to create an optimal flow of device data, enabling immediate, actionable intelligence at the network edge for end users and enterprises.

The global Sprint IoT platform is set to be presented at a press conference at Mobile World Congress Americas in Los Angeles, Wednesday, September 12 at 10:30 a.m.

“We are combining our IoT strategy with Ericsson’s expertise to build a platform primed for the most demanding applications like artificial intelligence, edge computing, robotics, autonomous vehicles, and more with ultra-low-latency, the highest availability and an unmatched level of security at the chip level,” said Ivo Rook, senior vice president of IoT for Sprint. “This is a network built for software and it’s ready for 5G. Our IoT platform is for those companies, large and small, that are creating the immediate economy.”

“Sprint is a pioneer in IoT and we are excited to work together to create a truly disruptive IoT business,” said Asa Tamsons, senior vice president and head of business area technology and emerging business, Ericsson. “Sprint will be one of the first to market with a distributed core network and operating system built especially for IoT and powered by Ericsson’s IoT Accelerator platform. Our goal is to make it easy for Sprint and their customers to access and use connected intelligence, enabling instant and actionable insights for a better customer experience and maximum value.”

The Core Network is dedicated to help provide low latency and highest availability. It is distributed and virtualized, reducing distance between the device generating the data and the IoT application processing it; nodes are distributed right to the enterprise premise, if necessary, to support specific security, privacy and latency requirements.

The IoT OS features connectivity management and device management: Capabilities enable simplified inbound and outbound activity for device connectivity. Configuration and updates of firmware and software are managed for each device. All data is managed securely with world-class security on the chip level.

The IoT OS provides full subscription lifecycle management and monitoring of billing and usage data. It also features capability to ingest enormous amounts of data while delivering immediate intelligence on that data.

At the Microsoft Inspire event in Las Vegas, the company awarded Crestron its 2018 Microsoft Global Partner of the Year Award for Internet of Things (IoT). Microsoft recognized Crestron for providing outstanding solutions in IoT in the form of Crestron XiO Cloud, an IoT-based provisioning and management solution built on the Microsoft Azure platform.

Crestron XiO Cloud is designed to revolutionize the provisioning and management of Crestron’s open UC, room scheduling, AV, and content sharing solutions with up to 90 percent reductions in installation time, improvements in device uptime, and optimization of people, space, and technology.

Powering the digital transformation

As businesses across every industry continue along their digital transformation journey, Crestron IoT enabled automation and control solutions enable facility management and IT staff to control entire environments with a push of a button or click of a mouse, integrating audio, video, digital signage, scheduling, lighting, building management systems (BMS), HVAC, and security systems. The strength of Crestron IoT-enabled devices and systems is their integration in the Crestron XiO Cloud, providing all-in-one monitoring, management, and control from a single platform.

“Intelligent workplace solutions are the springboard for digital transformation- but managing the devices that enable it can be costly and complicated,” said Ted Colton, vice president of unified communication strategies at Crestron. “Crestron XiO Cloud reduces the complexities associated with deploying, tracking, managing, and evolving the ecosystem of IoT enabled devices that make communication and collaboration seamless. Crestron is honored to be recognized by Microsoft for developing game-changing connected technologies that help propel digital transformation at Fortune 500 companies worldwide.”

Celebrating partner achievement

The annual Microsoft Partner of the Year awards celebrate top Microsoft partners who demonstrate excellence in innovation and implementation of customer solutions based on Microsoft technology. Microsoft received more than 2,600 nominations from 115 countries for the 2018 program. The IoT category was judged by a number of IoT stakeholders and leaders from Microsoft Common Data Service, One Commercial Partner, Windows, and Azure. The judges selected the winners based on their commitment to customers, the solution’s influence on the market, and exemplary use of Microsoft technologies.

“Our ecosystem of partners is crucial to delivering transformative solutions, and this year’s winners have proven to be some of the finest among their peers,” said Gavriella Schuster, corporate vice president, One Commercial Partner, Microsoft Corp. “We are pleased to recognize Crestron for being selected as winner of the 2018 Microsoft IoT Partner of the Year award.”

Some people believe the Internet of Things (IoT) is new. While it may be a new concept to the audiovisual industry, this phenomenon began in 1993 when students at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications, a research institute at the University of Illinois, unleashed the first web browser interface called Mosaic, which served as the genesis of the proliferation of the internet as we know it today.

In recent years, the AV industry has caught onto the concept of IoT. The impact of AV and its use of digitized audio, video, and control systems, as data riding on a network with other data, has opened a whole new horizon. To many in the industry, this is not news. To others, this is akin to black magic and upsets the whole balance of the world. Either way, this phenomenon is here to stay.

C-suite and executive-level staff have in large part grown up accustomed to traditional dividing lines between AV and telephony, networks and video, voice and control. The topic of AV on the Network can challenge their core understanding of what a telephone connection offers to users. At one time, that meant either a telephone or a computer.Today there may well be AV systems plugged into the same network or at least using the same cable and connector as a means of signal transport. Further, comprehending that a computer connected to the network may be acting as an AV device (and vice versa) adds yet another perception of complexity that generates potential for error. These users prefer to keep things separate; they want the functionality but they don’t want the headache of having to know how it works. The IoT is driving the next generation to assume every device is a computer and that its use is ubiquitous to functionality.

Non-traditional executives and those in younger generations – including millennials – assume and desire that their computing device will offer seamless access to all the functionality and systems on a network, from voice to video and audio to data. Millennials are interested in understanding the inter-connectedness of the tools they are using and the level of functionality they bring them as a user of "the network." They assume they can log into any device, anywhere, and their profile complete with permissions, search history, and personal preferences will be accessible. Millennials want to push the boundaries of traditional networking; to do so they have to know how and why things work the way they do, and they simply expect that they do, seamlessly and without failure, all at the speed of light.

The fact that traditional AV is catching onto IoT has dramatically changed the way products are conceived, engineered, manufactured, and deployed. Many products, traditionally items that ship in boxes and break when dropped, are turning to the idea they can be managed by software, not physical knobs and buttons. They can indeed be driven by a computer platform and they can communicate with other devices, bringing a level of interaction and connectedness that has been difficult to achieve in years gone by. This whole concept is fast becoming a cultural shift within the AV industry that vastly changes our most common perceptions of systems design, deployment, and maintenance. AV is now a component of the network, and it must begin communicating and interacting with other aspects of communications, such as routers, switchers, firewalls, quality of service, and user interface. Therein lies a challenge for many manufacturers of AV devices, which first entered into the digital network world using proprietary network protocols, which tend to excuse other manufacturer products and devices, assuming the AV device is indeed its own network, and not part of the larger unified building network.

As a result of the move toward IoT, AV technology is becoming more integrated into traditional network technology than ever before. For those who are fearful of change, IoT is a new frontier that is beyond comprehension. For others, this is a whole new opportunity to examine technologies (inclusive of voice, video and data), from the user perspective and to develop new approaches to aid them in every aspect of business and education.

Witness the Microsoft Surface Hub and its interface to allow users to think and perform, rather than worry about how to use the tool. It’s a fully integrated hardware and software solution that largely embraces soft tools to accomplish functions that were once large bricks that consumed power and generated heat while consuming valuable space and required secret sauce (integration) to make it all work. This one device changes almost everything.

Then there was Google Glass, now being supplanted by multiple products providing augmented reality. This technology changes how we interact with computers in the workplace and in our homes. We have now moved from the two-dimensional world into three dimensions of virtual reality, and we have done this at a price point that makes this ability to interact with a computer an everyday affair. The day of the common keyboard and mouse are slowly disappearing as a result of these new methods of interaction.

There are any number of technologies entering the home and workplace today that are all inter-connected, and offer users new dimensions of interface and interaction that are networked. These devices utilize audio, voice, video, and data in a common ubiquitous manner that are currently changing the world as we know it.

Randy Tritz has more than 35 years of experience in the design, engineering, and installation of AV, command and control, teleconferencing, and multimedia systems. He has focused much of his career on education and the development of facilities and spaces that lead critical learning environments.