CI: Offices and office meeting spaces are changing – what does WyreStorm offer for the modern corporation?
JM: Over the last year many offices have sat empty. Now that people are getting back to them they’re going to be very different places. They’re going to be a lot more spacious because many corporations are not planning on having full staff back at the office at all.
They’re looking at ways to introduce touchless meeting spaces. The whole world got used to talking remotely and working remotely, and we see a trend as people return in hotdesking. That means that unified communications are going to be really important.
Wyrestorm launched our first product into this space during the lockdown. It was ideally timed. We were planning on launching for a long time anyway, and it just landed at the start of the pandemic. It couldn’t have been a better position to help a lot of customers get online and start communicating either from home orf rom workspaces when people were able to come in.
We were thrilled by the success of that product. The whole way through the pandemic we’ve been focusing on R&D. Many of our customers weren’t available for us to be communicating with and doing all of the normal events that we do so we doubled downed on innovation and development.
We’ve got a whole new range of products coming for unified communications for new meeting spaces. They’re going to go under the Apollo brand name – Wyrestorm Apollo – and they’re going to include everything someone would need from a device in a huddle space or meeting space in order to have the best possible communication, presentation, and collaborative experience.
Those products are going to be launching very soon, and we’ve got a whole range of cameras to accompany that. We’re just really excited because we know how many of our customers are going to be looking for these.
We’ve done a lot of our AV-over-IP products in offices leading up to the pandemic. We had many corporation moving to AV-over-IP and seeing the power of information sharing around the office to everybody. With so many looking to get information to all of their staff all of the time, Wyrestorm’s network HD was a great way to do that. Now we’re going to be helping them communicate a lot more and I think it’s going to be really exciting to see the combination of those product categories together.
CI: Do you see any trends in audio distribution that integrators should be aware of?
JM: We’ve been seeing in video the trend to moving from traditional AV signal distribution methods to IP, and the same is happening in audio as well. We’ve been working with Audinate who make the Dante standard for a long time and we’ve started to roll that into products now. Our Network HD 400 series was the first to have that added and customers love that. Latency free IP distribution with a very simple setup and configuration, Dante just really ticks boxes for presentation solutions but also the corporate space as well.
We’re going to see that roll into more Wyrestorm products. Our SDVoE platform will be the next to get Dante and I don’t think we’ll stop there, I think there will be many more in the future as well.
CI: There is a big industry concern over security. Are WyreStorm products secure?
JM: We’ve really taken security seriously. We’ve always had the basics covered. We always had the basics covered. Where many brands just had Telnet, we had password protected Telnet. But our customers were telling us that’s not enough. As everything now sits on the network everything needs to be secure.
Earlier this year we protected all of our web interfaces. We made sure that passwords were not sent unencrypted over the network. We were using secure HTTP. We’ve now launched a huge update to the whole of Network HD so that all of our internal communications are sent using SSH. We have protected and encrypted all of the communications internally. We’ve even moved our preview streams over to secure HTTP so that those are not accessible to any third party.
It’s been a very long time in development. We’ve been working on it for a few years, but introducing these standards is absolutely critical with the kind of customers that Wyrestorm is attracting today and the importance to them to know that their data and information is secure on their network.
That’s available now. It’s a free update. Wyrestorm’s really focused on having any software improvements free of charge for all of our customers.
