As you may know by now (but it’s OK if you don’t — I’ll explain it anyway), rAVe [PUBS] has partnered with AVNation with the goal of growing the AV industry. Through this collaboration, AV Buyers.Club — our publication arm specifically for technical end users, in-house integrators and similar roles — is working with AVNation to create more content tailored to those audiences.
Recently, Tim Albright produced a videocast exploring the Sony ecosystem, and I wanted to share a few thoughts on it.
First, if you’d like to watch the full videocast, you can do so below:
This time, Albright interviews Kianna Pompa, product manager for Sony’s BRAVIA Professional Displays. As you might have guessed, the two discuss ecosystems. When it comes to Sony, that means delivering an end-to-end experience for customers rather than singular products. That occasionally means partnering with other industry brands.
“We know you might not have the full end-to-end Sony solution,” Pompa said. “So, we really believe in creating an experience where the end user can pick.”
For Sony’s control partners, that means brands like Crestron, Extron, Kramer and Q-SYS.
The goal here is to ensure the customer is taken care of within the ecosystem as well. Like Pompa said, not every customer has the end-to-end Sony experience. But the products they do have should still work — and work easily.
Pompa also mentioned that Sony provides a lot of support to customers using both Sony products and Alliance Partner brands.
“I think the ecosystem is never going to be only Sony,” she said. “But I think the beautiful thing is that it’s the customer’s choice and you’re backed up with the Sony service and support.”
Of course, we’ve talked about how Sony works with other brands — but what about Sony itself?
Pompa explained that one of the best tools Sony offers organizations that have standardized on BRAVIA Professional Displays is the Device Provisioning Tool, which makes managing and deploying displays much easier. You can check out a video of how that works here:
Another thing that makes life easier on the AV/IT end-user side is proper training. Sony has sales support engineers across North America who can assist on-site. The company also offers a demo program with loan periods so customers can try out Sony products before committing. Finally, Sony offers Tech Tuesday educational training sessions to help customers feel comfortable and supported using the products.
So, as it turns out, an ecosystem can mean a lot of different things.
Sony even views its ecosystem as an open one. The company publicly posts its cloud APIs for developers and integrators, and many applications can run directly on the display itself — eliminating the need for a separate set-top box in many deployments.
So that’s about all from me this time. It takes a village — or in this case, an ecosystem — to make products and systems work together.
To learn more about Sony’s full ecosystem of products, go here.
