This morning I attended the opening of the inaugural GovComm show at the Washington Convention Center. The show is presented by InfoComm, the trade association for all things audiovisual. My client Polycom is exhibiting and their CTO for public sector Sean Lessman gave the opening keynote speech.
Sean started by talking about how far collaboration technology has come. He showed some slides of the shortwave radios used by troops in the Vietnam era — so large they came with their own hand cranks! Compare that to today, when there is a 99 cent app for the iPhone that overlays a compass and exact latitude and longitude on any image you wish. That’s the kind of power and mobility the federal government is looking to harness.
Sean made the good analogy that consumers are demanding mobile video just as they adopted mobile voice in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He also defined the terms standards based vs. interoperability, and how they don’t equal the same thing. With organizations increasingly moving to cloud-based architectures, true interoperability is critical for Unified Communications and HD VTC. The central role of interoperability has made Polycom a software company, not a communications product company.
The GovComm exhibit hall was well attended and bustling, with almost 70 companies participating. The last few years have been hard on industry trade shows, so kudos to Infocomm for launching a successful new one in 2011. As shown by news like the VA deploying tablets to thousands of its employees, the federal market is rapidly adopting collaboration technology. There should be a lot of exciting progress to discuss at GovComm12.
Ribbon cutting to open exhibit floor