Kramer Electronics is a global company that designs, manufactures, and distributes signal management products for analog and digital video signals, audio signals, computer graphics video signals, and control signals which are used in the professional AV, broadcast and production, and residential AV markets worldwide.
Marc Rémond, President APAC, Kramer is a seasoned international business executive and entrepreneur, with 23 years of experience in selling and marketing IT and communications solutions and services to enterprise, government, and education institutions. He has extensive experience in the AV and collaboration field.
During an interaction with Express Computer, Rémond shares how Kramer makes it easier for organisations to excel in the new hybrid generation.
Some edited excerpts from an interview:
- What are some of the key trends with respect to enterprise collaboration?
The pandemic has transformed the way we live, work and learn. For the past two years, people have been buying things online, using OTT platforms for entertainment. Education has moved out of the classrooms. The laptop has become a very important tool for anyone in the pandemic world, for business or leisure, and it is only going to get amplified. The pandemic has resulted in creating a new hybrid generation and because of the pandemic, the expectation to work and learn has shifted to both local and remote.
- What are the demands of the emerging hybrid workplace and how can technology help?
Pre-pandemic was every meeting, the class was physically held, but as we move forward we believe that every meeting will be hybrid and need proper infrastructure and technology to provide an equal level of engagement between local and remote participants to function efficiently.
Kramer makes it easy for the people, by equipping any meeting space with the right technology diagnostic by design. Our products can connect to any platform be it Microsoft Teams or Zoom, we are multi-platform, and we have monolithic solutions based on our customer needs.
In addition, we also provide multiple cameras in the group with multi screens for more engagement and interactivity between the remote and local users providing creativity, collaboration, and innovation, regardless of the location of the people.
- What are some of the biggest opportunities for your organisation in India?
Kramer’s portfolio is very broad, which creates a lot of opportunities not only for Kramer but for our channel partners in India. We are currently linked to many MNCs and enterprise segments but also Indian conglomerates venturing around the world. These are the two biggest opportunities for Kramer to address the enterprise market and help them re-look at their hybrid workplace strategy.
The government sector and smart cities create new opportunities for us, being an enterprise as well, they need the meeting, and training spaces, and post-pandemic, we have seen a rise in encouraging work from the office. City governments are also really concerned about the environment so we do see a lot of government agencies moving away from the centralised way of doing things.
Satellite offices are also created for people so they don’t have to travel every morning, as a part of urban planning. Smart cities include public security safely and the ability to monitor infratustruce, Kramer works closely with government agencies, making it easy for them by ensuring they monitor their operation and detect incidents as quickly as possible, but also communicate with the people in the field in crisis-like situations.
Apart from these, we also see opportunities in the field of defense and education, India has the largest education system in the world, and the hybrid opportunity in these fields post-pandemic have increased for Kramer and its partners.
- Can you brief us on some of the interesting use cases in different sectors (education, healthcare, manufacturing, etc.) that you see in the enterprise collaboration space in India?
Talking about enterprise, we see many organisations trying to improve their communication. We see them hold town hall meetings on a large scale, where huge gatherings are difficult to accommodate. Hence they are asking us to help them organise their own event in a hybrid mode within the organisation, streamed live and recorded- it will be streamed to every meeting room, every floor, every building in the country, and each room will be equipped with Kramer’s technology making it easier for the employee to attend the communication sessions. This use case is turning every display into a media player during the pandemic hour, the same display can be used as digital signage for regular employee communication. We can quickly change from digital signage to a real-time display event streaming application. The same equipment can be used for a local-hybrid meeting as well.
- What according to you is the future of AV in India?
Kramer aims to be the bridge between the pro AV world and the mega software giants, companies providing the network infrastructure, as well as companies; manufacturing prosumers. We believe the future of AV is IP, discussions have been going around about the convergence of AV and IP for the longest time, but I strongly believe that now we are at a point where every audio or video signal can be transported over the IP network. If an organisation wants more scalability or flexibility, Kramer can provide solutions using the IP network just like we do it with voice; the right voice over IP, video conferencing, video streaming, and all audio-video signals can be transported over IP.
We believe that every AV device will become an IoT device in the future, meaning connected to the network so it can be monitored and centrally managed by the IT team remotely and provide the ability to extract analytics in order to assess the health of the AV infrastructure and detect incidents as they happen to report immediately causing minimum damage, as most of the IT infrastructures are doing today.
The growth of AV is moving forward at a rapid pace and this represents a huge opportunity for IT companies, network integrators, and companies providing security solutions, to create a new stream by providing end-to-end AV solutions from Kramer.