Pure AV CommUniCate19 event success

Pure AV’s CommUniCate19 showcase brought together over fifty delegates from business, higher education and healthcare to explore the latest tools in business communication.

Hosted at the Pure AV offices in Preston, the event combined exhibition, seminar and live demonstration to present visitors with the opportunity to experience how technology can be harnessed to manage communication and build stronger connections in the work environment. 

The event is a reaction to the changing environments in which we now work, as Pure AV marketing manager, Erica Whittle explained: “From remote working to informal huddle meetings, the ways in which we work and interact with our colleagues, customers and suppliers have evolved and to make the right technology choices in response to those changes is a challenge for many businesses. CommUniCate19 was developed to help customers, and prospective clients explore the latest tools and technologies helping businesses to communicate and collaborate more effectively”. 

The afternoon event followed a morning of training for the Pure AV technical and sales teams; providing the twenty participating vendors with the opportunity to share their solutions with the team ahead of the customer arrivals. 

It is a format enjoyed by suppliers as Howard Algar of Crestron confirms: “To have focused time with the sales and technical team ahead of the arrival of end-users is invaluable. It is an excellent opportunity to update the whole of the Pure AV team, and I believe improves the customer’s experience of the event, as their hosts are fully up to speed with the solutions on show”.

This is the second showcase hosted by Pure AV at their offices, the first held last year to celebrate the organisation’s 15thanniversary, and it comes at a time of acceleration in demand for communication and collaboration solutions, as Pure AV managing director, Peter Sutton, explains: “Twelve months on from our 15thanniversary, and demand for meeting room and video collaboration solutions just grows and grows. The need for tools to support successful communication is nothing new, it has been at the heart of what we do from our foundation, but the rapid change in the ways that we do it and expansion in choice has left organisations in need of guidance. In hosting the event, we wanted to create the opportunity to hear about best practice, and experience and compare a range of the solutions now available.

Sutton continues: “The success of last year’s event proved there is an appetite for this kind of showcase in the region and we wanted to open up our offices again and invite existing and prospective customers to explore how we can harness technology to bring real business benefit to their organisations. Listening to the feedback from our customers and suppliers, I believe we have succeeded in that objective."

New for 2019, the afternoon also featured three keynote presentations from leading industry figures, including Greg Jeffreys, who, representing AVIXA, delivered a popular seminar on how to deliver successful workspace design by incorporating essential standards in AV. 

It was Charles James of Crestron, fresh from Microsoft Ignite, who opened the keynotes. He talked about the journey many organisations are now taking as they transition from Skype to Microsoft Teams. The packed seminar space was a clear indicator of the high levels of interest in this topic. The final 20-minute session delivered by John Vickerage of Ascentae tackled the subject of flexibility and productivity, and how to provide the flexibility the modern workplace demands but still maintain a successfully productive organisation. Videos of the sessions will be available soon thorough the Pure AV website. 

Alongside live demonstrations on the exhibitor stands, delegates were also able to view fully installed systems in newly refurbished meeting rooms. Each room themed to represent a location from Pure AV’s development. From the early beginnings in the garage of the founding directors where various UC accessories could be tried, through to time at the Docks with a Poly Studio and a small industrial unit on Talbot Road featuring Crestron Mercury, before arriving at the largest of the meeting rooms, The Summit Room equipped with Extron and Logitech Tap, (named after the current location on Walton Summit). 

The rooms offered the chance to try live calls and equipped with acoustic panels, enabled visitors to see first-hand the impact that changes to the physical environment can have on the room user's experience of the technology.

Matt Bolton, senior audiovisual technician at Keele University, was one of the event attendees: “We decided to attend the event due to the number of projects at Keele looking into remote working and collaboration. We are also due to make a move to Microsoft Teams in the coming months so looking at technologies integrating this platform were of interest to us. The exhibition was excellent, and it was great to see products demonstrated which were relevant to our needs. The meeting room set-ups also provided great examples of UC technology in action. We came away from the event with several products we want to know more about and will look forward to following this up in the new year.”

Group sales manager, Aidan Crowe said: “We are delighted with the reaction to the showcase. The combination of live meeting room examples, exhibition stands, and seminar sessions proved extremely popular. Our sales teams now look forward to continuing the conversations started at the event and helping attendees explore how to translate what they have seen into their particular work environments”. 

CommUniCate19 took place on the 21stNovember at the Pure AV offices in Preston, additional photographs and highlights from the day can be seen here