Biamp is an innovative audiovisual manufacturer producing solutions for many vertical markets. Their product lines cover the needs of the most demanding clients from corporate, retail or education environments, to houses of worship or entertainment venues. With over 45 years of presence on the market, Biamp solutions empower intuitive connection in every space.
It is my great pleasure to welcome Rashid Skaf, CEO of Biamp, to our interview today. Rashid is a well-known figure in the pro AV industry, with an impressive track record dating back to 2001. His experience and successes are undeniable, and the journey he has taken to reach his current position is filled with inspiring moments and challenging obstacles.
Before joining Biamp, Rashid played a key role at AMX, where his management skills and strategic thinking helped develop the company and take it to a new level. Since taking the helm at Biamp in 2017, Rashid has faced further challenges, including the global COVID-19 pandemic. Despite these unfavorable circumstances, under his leadership, the company has continued to grow and succeed.
In our conversation, Rashid will talk about his beginnings in the AV industry, what inspired him to pursue this career path, and the challenges he has encountered along the way. We will also discuss the impact of the pandemic on the AV market and the future plans and strategies for Biamp, including innovations related to AI and the development of the Biamp City ecosystem.
Kacper [AV Tech Magazine]: You’ve had a successful career in the pro AV sector for over 20 years. Did you always aspire to work with technology-based companies?
I’ve always been passionate about building great businesses and technology has always represented an outsized component of that passion. My career reflects that interest and throughout I’ve had the privilege of supporting excellent companies including large, established ones like Ericsson, Nortel, and AMX, as well as a couple of startups that we successfully exited.
At each stop, I’ve gained invaluable experience dealing with the many challenges within technology markets, particularly where being nimble and quick is mission critical. That experience included corporate strategy development, product innovation, acquiring and integrating companies, operational excellence, building and managing global sales and distribution systems, through to crisis management. By the time I took the helm at Biamp, all that experience had provided me the confidence I needed to assemble and guide an organization to reach aggressive growth and performance targets we set for ourselves.
In another interview, you mentioned that your first task at AMX was pulling the company out of a difficult situation. Your next company was Biamp, and then, after two years, we experienced a pandemic outbreak. Both companies performed incredibly well under your management. Do you thrive in challenging circumstances?
Crises happen periodically, but eventually the world gets through them. You have a situation where this is a big downturn but eventually, we recover. With this in mind, we didn’t want to make any rash decisions when the full weight of the pandemic and the shutdowns engulfed the planet. Instead, we decided early on that we would take a pause. Like everyone at the time, we didn’t know what was going to happen or how long the shutdowns were going to be. We needed to first try and understand the new world.
However, through this process we never once shut down our factories. Biamp remained in operation throughout. Despite the unprecedented situation, we were confident society would get through it. This enabled us, as a management team, to avoid terminating a single employee’s job. Of course we didn’t know how long that would be, but it was a risk we were willing to take and it paid off.
This was a different course of action than many in the industry took. Those shutdowns led to supply chain issues that affected the entire economy. In contrast, we were able to better manage supply issues than most because we kept our factories working while prioritizing supply challenges, including aggressively procuring the raw materials and components we needed to keep production going. As a result, we had inventory when many of our competitors did not, and we were able to win deals simply by having products available to ship. This competitive advantage has allowed us to achieve significant growth as an organization.
After all, Biamp has a long history of designing products that are easy to use, easy to install, and create high quality audiovisual experiences across a range of venues from a small conference room to the world’s largest stadiums and concert venues. At the end of the day, the confidence our investors had in our vision and ability to execute during the pandemic made it all possible to ride through the tough times and then take advantage of the bounce back.
The pandemic seemed like the perfect time for Biamp’s products. What were the opportunities for Biamp and the AV market? Is the demand for remote solutions still growing?
Yes, that is absolutely correct. Part of the confidence we had during the pandemic came from our understanding of the human condition—we as people are hard-wired to connect. Whether in conference rooms, classrooms or courtrooms, while those rooms were practically empty, people still needed to connect remotely. Sound quality became even more important, and in conferencing we found that people would come into an office and then spread out around the building, which required more connectivity and AV peripherals to do their jobs effectively.
Furthermore, many organizations took the time to upgrade their AV systems from schools to houses of worship, taking advantage of the fact they had few people in their respective buildings.
In the end, we were even surprised at times by the resiliency of the market and we did not have much slowdown in our business, especially on the conferencing side. Even in our sound masking business, we did not see the kind of decrease one might have expected given the circumstances.
As for demand today in conferencing, it is still strong. Ultimately, organizations want to create a similar experience for their workers no matter where they are located, and to do that they need effective conferencing solutions with high quality audio and video. A big focus for us has been making sure our conferencing products work well with the prevailing unified communication tools, such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet, that have emerged as the respective hubs within hybrid work scenarios. Ensuring our products are certified to work with the dominant UC players has been an effective strategy.
When looking at your products, I think of another company that has been creating an entire ecosystem around its products from the very beginning, and people loved it. I am obviously referring to the company with the bitten apple logo. Looking at the Biamp City project, I see a complete set of solutions and a clear vision. Does having a wide and complex offering enable you to access more markets and negotiate easily with partners?
For our partners and end users, developing a cloud-connected software layer that integrates our various products within corporate environments is a big focus of the business right now. Earlier this year during InfoComm we released Biamp Workplace, a unified cloud platform for centralized audiovisual system management.
This powerful new cloud-based platform represents the next stage in Biamp’s unified ecosystem strategy, consolidating capabilities from Evoko Workplace and SageVue into a single, comprehensive software solution for centralized AV monitoring, management, and optimization across the Biamp product portfolio.
Through the unified Biamp Workplace interface, users can review deployed assets sortable by site, building, room, and more. The platform provides data-driven insights into how solutions are utilized, enabling smarter decision-making about provisioning AV resources. Robust filters allow focusing the dashboard on specific device groups, models, or locations as needed. This makes the Biamp ecosystem more powerful and easier than ever to manage for corporate AV and IT teams.
What are the biggest challenges currently facing the AV industry, and how does Biamp plan to address them?
While the pandemic era boom in conferencing and AV investment has slowed and stabilized, unified communications platforms have reached maturity and the conferencing space has entered a period of steady growth. However, there seems to be lingering uncertainty about the future of work inside of offices versus hybrid work scenarios, which may impact how organizations invest their AV budgets. For organizations that have embraced hybrid work, a greater percentage of AV investment is dedicated to meeting spaces, as well as products such as our Evoko room and desk scheduling solutions. Organizations that have mandated a more robust return to office philosophy also need well equipped meeting spaces, but the desired solution sets and product mix may vary.
In today’s world, we cannot ignore the topic of AI. Is this something you are working on and will it be a part of Biamp’s ecosystem?
AI has played a big role in our product offerings for years and will continue to do so. We are always looking for practical AI use cases to improve our products as well as our internal processes as an organization.
In conferencing, our Biamp Launch capability has been a game changer. Biamp Launch technology leverages AI to trigger automatic discovery, configuration, and tuning of connected Biamp devices without the need for custom programming. In addition, Launch provides the user with a full performance report for the meeting space upon completion, making replication across multiple, similar spaces, a breeze. This technology exists in our popular Parlé all-in-one video- and audio-conferencing bars and our Parlé microphones, as well as our TesiraFORTÉ X and Devio SCX devices for rapid conference room AV deployment.
AI is also playing a big role in improving the user experience, including the creation of algorithms for noise reduction. These include the ability to automatically filter out common conference room distractions such as typing on a keyboard or the hum of an HVAC system, elevating the human voice to improve clarity and ultimately productivity while creating an extraordinary experience for all.
In the future, we envision AI playing a key role in our Biamp Workplace cloud-based software that can automate Biamp asset management from a centralized location accessed anytime, anywhere.
When you started working in Biamp, your strategy focused on development and acquisition. What is the current strategy for growth?
Development and acquisition remain key pieces of our strategy. Last year we acquired Evoko, a suite of products including room-booking solutions and desk-scheduling systems designed to enhance productivity and streamline office operations. Evoko enhances our portfolio of collaboration solutions and provides customers with more comprehensive options for managing their meeting spaces by adding room scheduling and more device connectivity options. In addition, Evoko’s innovative desk scheduling system is perfect for helping organizations easily and effectively implement hoteling schemes in their workplace. By enabling this increasingly popular workspace management trend, we are revolutionizing desk scheduling to meet the needs of the hybrid work environment.
And now through Biamp Workplace, we have one integrated software solution to manage Biamp AV gear and Evoko desk and room scheduling services. This makes Biamp an attractive option for creating a unified, networked AV program that can all be centrally managed.
Could you shed some light on your goals in the next months?
Biamp is focused on growing our existing product lines by offering more options, including bringing to market new loudspeakers for more types of scenarios ranging from large, reverberant warehouses to spaces with long aisles or concourses, along with Voltera amplified loudspeaker controllers that package a full Tesira digital signal processor within an amplifier.
We are also providing more options in conferencing with the release of the Parlé VBC 2800, which enables organizations to take the popular conferencing bars into larger conferencing rooms with more robust camera optics.
And then we will continue to focus on building our new Biamp Workplace and Evoko Workplace cloud-based software stacks for more effective remote management.
All of these new products will enable Biamp and its integrators to grow existing relationships and provide for more AV scenarios than ever before.
