NetSpeek’s Potential: Growing the whole pie of the AV/UC industry

By Spencer Wise

There’s a moment in season 4 of one of my favorite shows, The West Wing. “Never doubt,” the fictional president says, quoting Margaret Mead, “that a small group of thoughtful and committed citizens can change the world.”

Why am I opening an article about the AV industry with a reference to a TV show that aired 25 years ago? Indulge me, please. We’ll get there.

The breakthrough-to-mainstream for AV is actually possible now

Those who know me would probably tell you I’m not prone to hyperbole… and it’s likely some would say I’m not even naturally inclined to optimism… but as we’ve hit our stride here at NetSpeek over the past few months I’ve increasingly come to believe that we can do what I occasionally dared to let myself hope for when I joined ~5 quarters ago. It’s not just about NetSpeek… if you’re reading this it’s probably at least a little bit about you.

If you’re not familiar with NetSpeek, we’re a software company building AI-powered tooling to help organizations run meeting spaces at higher reliability and lower operational cost. We describe what we’re doing as “orchestration” which is different from traditional “management” in important ways.

I genuinely believe NetSpeek has the right mix of talent, timing, technology, partnerships, and independence to help grow the size of the entire AV and collaboration industry; that we can be the rising tide lifting all boats. Let me tell you why.

AV’s Persistent Scaling Problem

As an industry, we’ve made major advances in many ways - displays are clearer, cameras do intelligent people-finding, audio is crisp even in challenging environments, UC platforms have become increasingly sophisticated and feature-rich, to name just a few. All of that is legitimately great.

But it’s also mostly irrelevant if you zoom out far enough.

Estimates vary, but there is broad industry and analyst consensus that ~50-90% of meeting spaces are still not technology enabled. Those numbers have fluctuated a little over the past couple decades, but not much, and the industry has been chasing the promise of outfitting the same empty spaces for as long as I can remember without ever actually getting there.

Why? Because the core constraints on reliability and usability, and the degree of care and feeding from a limited pool of experts required to address those challenges, have always imposed a natural ceiling on how much it’s sensible for an enterprise to invest in collaboration technology.

Scaling a collaboration estate, if you want it to work, has also meant scaling a team of technology-specific operations staff who understand not just the array of technologies in your spaces, but how they interact with each other, and the UC platform, and more. Beyond even that, everything is a moving target all the time as development across the industry progresses.

That complexity, and the associated cost it carries, has been the primary bottleneck on how big our industry can be, and we’ve needed something radically different to move the needle on a constraint this fundamental. 

Why AI, and why now?

The pre-AI (meaning, pre-Large Language Model) era of software development in our industry, and the deterministic management tools of that time, will be remembered in many cases as being pretty good considering their foundations. But those systems were (and those currently in use still are) constantly presented with AV and collaboration challenges that don’t fit neatly into predefined rules, so they can only create endless queues of tickets about issues human experts have to actually fix.

Modern LLMs change what’s possible. The kind of tooling the AV industry has always needed to scale must be able to interpret structured and unstructured technical information in a variety of formats, tackle a completely flexible set of acceptable problem types with an infinite, open-ended set of resolution paths, and do all of this without laborious anticipatory programming or setup.

Now I’ll ask you to read the previous paragraph again, thinking about all the pre-NetSpeek tools you’ve used to support and troubleshoot AV and conferencing equipment. I suspect you’ll conclude, as I have, that all the tools with foundations from before the LLM-AI era feel too brittle and rigid to address the fundamental impediments to scaling the industry because they are.

Bolting a chatbot (or even an MCP gateway!) onto a traditional deterministic software platform is not going to help the industry finally outfit the millions of meeting spaces that have been tech-free for decades.

Why a neutral third-party is necessary, technically and politically

One common misunderstanding we encounter at NetSpeek is the expectation that we will be viewed as competitive by the hardware manufacturers and UC platforms we partner with. This usually sounds something like “I can reboot my VendorX gear from their management interface, and you use their same APIs, so do you compete with them?”

We complete their management story. We do not compete with it.

To start, we provide a tangible way for customers to see the strength of these vendors’ clouds and device APIs, and we’ve been near-universally embraced simply for that reason.

More importantly though, we play an interoperability role that all of these vendors need to offload to a third-party. Every vendor has a natural incentive to provide excellent management capabilities for their own products, but it is very understandably not their priority to attempt to ensure a good experience on equipment they didn’t make. This creates a sort of “prisoners’ dilemma” situation wherein all the vendors need the entire room to work well, including the gear they didn’t make, but no single vendor is positioned to take responsibility for the entire environment. 

The real world is heterogeneous - especially if you think (as we are) about underlying dependencies like power and networking. Growing the whole industry and pursuing the betterment of the end user and admin experience is best done from a position of neutrality, without an imperative to drive adoption of any particular device or collaboration platform.

The relationship with vendors is symbiotic - we stand on the shoulders of the observability and orchestration-readiness work they’ve done, and they reap the benefits of a more reliable ecosystem in the form of happier customers and higher sales. It’s true partnership in the most durable and mutually reinforcing sense, because both sides legitimately need each other.

Ecosystem-level reliability improvements make full-estate deployment possible

When the AV and IT personnel that traditionally supported a few hundred spaces have the necessary tooling to support thousands, the win-win-win for everyone is unlocked. Manufacturers, UC platforms, integrators, the customer IT team, the end user looking to find an available and dependable meeting space, and other ecosystem participants all have brighter futures when that reality exists. Tooling like NetSpeek’s Lena creates the potential for a step change in the number of tech-enabled spaces a team can effectively manage.

Some are concerned about the impact of AI on job security, and I believe tools like what we’re building will have a positive impact on the career prospects of AV and UC experts - there will be always be break-fix situations requiring a physical response, but those dispatches should be less frequent and better triaged, meaning those experts can spend more time on design, deployment, and expansion, and less time in the weeds investigating basic problems.

AV and UC can and should be bigger industries

I love the people, and the value proposition, and the environmental impact of this industry, among its myriad other merits. I’ve long felt that this technology can be, and deserves to be, much more mainstream. 

I don’t see NetSpeek as simply another AV management platform, or a novel way to troubleshoot conference rooms. To me it’s an opportunity to remove the primary constraint that has limited our industry's growth for decades - and when that occurs, rather than simply competing for a share of today's market, we are all pursuing slices of a much larger pie.

The work to do, why no one has done it yet, and what it means when we all get it right

Building industry-changing tools for enterprise operations is an ambitious undertaking, and especially so in the AV ecosystem given its uniquely challenging terrain. Doing this right for the market we’re seeking to empower requires extensive domain expertise, strong vendor partnerships, broad device coverage, deep integrations, all the traditional security features and other bells and whistles of a SaaS platform, plus industry-specific workflows. It’s incredibly difficult, capital intensive, and not for the faint of heart.

The underlying technology has reached a point where removing industry-level impediments is achievable - but that doesn’t mean just anyone can do it. Being in the right place at the right time is necessary, but by itself insufficient. The kind of breakthrough I envision only happens if you also have the right combination of AI and AV expertise throughout the front and back of the entire company, and NetSpeek does. You also need ecosystem partners who understand the opportunities that orchestration readiness unlocks - and increasingly, we have those too.

When we as an industry make AV and collaboration environments dramatically easier to operate at scale, it becomes practical to deploy more technology in more places. Everyone is a beneficiary in that scenario - manufacturers, integrators, managed service providers, IT teams, AV professionals, and end users across the entire ecosystem.

NetSpeek is positioned at the ideal intersection of technology, timing, and market needs, and we have the right team in place to make the most of this opportunity, for ourselves and our friends and customers throughout the ecosystem. I’m honored to have the chance to play a part in helping our industry flourish.

We can’t do this alone - how you can help

In that West Wing scene, the president is speaking to a staffer about committed and thoughtful people changing the world, and pauses to ask if the staffer understands why he’s bringing it up. The staffer does.

“It’s the only thing that ever has.”

To see a demo, establish or deepen a partnership, or discuss in more detail the version of the industry you want to help make a reality, get in touch with us via any of the methods below.

To learn more or to schedule a demo:
Visit: www.netspeek.ai
Contact: lena@netspeek.com