Where In The World Is AMX?

Michael Olinger, Vice President of AMX International talks ISE, new acquisitions and plans for AMX to quietly conquer the world

 

This year’s Integrated Systems Europe was one of the best shows that I’ve attended in some time and for a number of reasons - the biggest being our success at the show.

Our booth was continually swamped throughout the event with interested visitors eager to learn more about AMX, our solutions and the newest members of the AMX family – our new acquisitions of Endeleo, Matrix and AutoPatch.

ISE is becoming a popular and well attended show. Attendance has grown steadily over the four years since its inception with another record set this year of over 16,000 visitors.

These numbers are indicative of a healthy industry and should provide a good indicator for future industry growth. Having attended other ISE shows in Geneva and Brussels, I can also say that Amsterdam was an ideal host city and we look forward to returning to Amsterdam in 2008.

Global Launching Pad
We specifically chose ISE as a forum to debut the first of our 2007 product line. Past shows have proven that the international stage is an excellent barometer to gauge product interest and this year was no exception.

Some of the highlights included our all-new Intercom-enabled 10” Modero® Touch Panel, a new Endeleo Distribution Hub geared for smaller installations and a new Matrix Distributed Audio zone amplifier.

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We were also excited to announce a new partnership with Planon, which we believe will offer significant scheduling enhancements for our Resource Management Suite® of products.  

From All Corners of the Globe
We found that visitors to our booth were greatly representative of the past year for us but in much higher numbers.  We enjoyed meeting with a cross section of visitors from all over the world but in particular, we saw many more systems integrators and distributors from India, Australia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

New Company Products Enhance Portfolio
ISE also gave us the opportunity to officially introduce the world to Endeleo, AutoPatch and Matrix. The acquisition of these companies allowed us to be able to offer our partners three entirely new families of products and solutions to market and offers our end users one-stop shopping in control, automation, matrix switching, distributed media and distributed audio.

Throughout the show, I was often asked why we chose to acquire these companies. Endeleo, our first acquistion, has become a rising star in the content control sector in just the past few years. By acquiring Endeleo, we could immediately expand our capabilities in content control by providing a way to distribute multimedia content from a central location to many displays.

We also acquired AutoPatch, an industry leader and de-facto industry standard for AV switching. Their employee knowledge base, talent and experience in intelligent switching platforms is second to none and we felt they would move us to the forefront of this very critical area of systems integration.

With Matrix products in our portfolio, we are able to further simplify integration by making it easier for our customers to program distributed audio using our control products. The Matrix line significantly expands our residential offering.

Expanding Our Reach
It’s no surprise that those of us that spend our time expanding the AMX footprint across the globe really love what we do. We attended over 60 world trade shows in 2006 and collectively traveled hundreds of thousands of miles to share the AMX EXPerience with just about anyone we could get a few minutes to talk with.

Simplifying life and business through AMX products is our team’s mission and we look forward to expanding our global reach even further and in several new directions in 2007.