CI 40 Under 40 Offers Fresh Perspectives at CI Summit

Lively session features ‘young’ vs. ‘old’ talking about important issues and hashing out how each group can help each other succeed.

For three years running, we’ve highlighted the greatest young talent in the industry through our 40 CI Influencers Under 40 lists. Many of the honorees from the first three years of the list have attended and been featured at the CI Summit.

This year, at the newly named Total Tech Summit, which celebrates the combination of CI Summit with the CE Pro Summit and the addition of an audience focused on security system integration, we’ll bring two of the original 40 Under 40 to the stage with a couple of “elder statesmen” of the industry to present “Fresh Perspectives.”

Aaron McArdle, CEO at Zdi, and Bill McIntosh, founder and president of Synergy Media Group, will be joined by Bruce Kaufmann, president and CEO at Human Circuit, and Brock McGinnis, sales manager at Westbury National.

Those who’ve crossed paths with any or all of these gentlemen know “Fresh Perspectives” could prove to be among the liveliest of the invitation-only three-day event from Nov. 2-4 in Atlanta featuring 100 integrators.

CI has featured all four panelists on its covers in the past five years and the companies have each been included among CI‘s Industry Leaders, meaning these men represent some of the best approaches to navigating through troubled times and emerging on the other end with a successful company.

They’ve been through name changes, ownership changes, issues around working with family and those centered on trying something very few, if any, other systems integration company has ever done.

Moderator Craig MacCormack, CI‘s editor-at-large, will steer the panelists through a discussion that will touch on outdated elements of the industry, biggest opportunities for integrators to grow in the next five years, the best ways to counter commoditization, the impact of reduced margins, the dangers for integrators in seeing technology marketed as “plug-and-play” and appealing to and working with IT professionals.

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The session aims to highlight the different ways company leaders deal with and understand issues that face their companies and the approaches that best help them to resolve these problems as they arise.

Audience participation will be a key part in shaping the discussion, with the panelists getting an opportunity to share their perspectives and audience members welcomed to share their thoughts, especially if those thoughts disagree with what they’ve heard from the stage.

The goal of the session is not necessarily to highlight the differences in thinking between “old” and “new” but more to help audience members understand new approaches they can take to their businesses that have worked for “old-school” leaders and their “new-school” counterparts.

Other CI Summit sessions focus on job-costing, project management, business metrics, customer metrics, Internet of Things, remote monitoring, convergence of AV and security and talent acquisition.

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