For those who haven’t been barraged by coworkers to participate in the annual “for entertainment only” office pool related to the annual men’s college basketball tournament, the phenomenon known as March Madness is officially upon us.
While we certainly can’t claim to be experts on college hoops, we like to think we’ve got our fingers on the pulse of what’s going on in the integration space—and on what the future might bring in that space. Some of that comes from attending conferences like the NSCA Business and Leadership Conference, while in other cases we learn from those in the trenches through CI Summit panel discussions.
Although there are surely plenty of money-making trends that didn’t make the cut here, we decided to keep our tournament to the elite 8. That means you won’t see embeddables (sorry, George), 3D printing or virtual reality among our matchups. We urge you to vote either here in the comments section or on Twitter for your favorites and tell your friends—or even your enemies—to do the same.
Let the games begin!
For the first elite 8 matchup, we pitted top-seeded content creation against fourth-ranked drones on one side of the bracket.
Content creation, not just for digital signage but for all video screens, has become an area many integrators see as a differentiator for their business. Even CI’s 2015 Integrator of the Year, Yorktel, say they’re working to bulk up their content creation capabilities at a time when they’ve mastered managed services (foreshadowing alert!) and are seeing more installation opportunities.
Drones have been featured in pavilions at InfoComm 2015 and Integrated Systems Europe 2016 and will likely be buzzing over your head in Las Vegas at InfoComm 2016. There’s some momentum and push to incorporate them into AV installations, primarily from Stampede president and COO Kevin Kelly, but many integrators are unsure about all the logistics at this point. Still, there’s a chance drones could…ahem…take off in 2016 or beyond.
Vote in our comments section or in our Twitter poll and we’ll reveal the results next week.
our other 1 vs. 4 matchup. Will we see an upset?
