🔶Crestron's Legacy and Innovation: Hear from Dan Feldstein about his 30-year journey with Crestron, from a software engineer to CEO, and how his engineering background influences the company's innovative spirit.
🔶Cutting-Edge Video Conferencing Solutions: Discover Crestron's latest advancements in video conferencing technology, including the new features of Automate VX and intelligent video solutions.
🔶Open Ecosystem and Customer-Centric Approach: Learn about Crestron's commitment to an open ecosystem, enabling seamless integration with various UC platforms and their focus on putting customers' needs first.
🔶Sustainability and Social Responsibility: Explore Crestron's initiatives around sustainability and social responsibility and how they engineer products with a longer lifespan to reduce environmental impact.
Whether you're an IT manager, a business leader, or a tech enthusiast, this episode is packed with valuable insights on how Crestron is driving the future of workplace technology. Don't miss out on learning how these innovations can benefit your organization!
Or tune in on your preferred streaming platform:
Craig Durr
Hey everyone, this is Craig Durr..
Craig Durr
Chief analyst and founder of the Collab Collective and we are here direct from the Expo from Infocom 2024. I'm excited to bring my next couple of guests to share some insights with you from the company. Crestron. Joining us is Dan Feldstein, CEO of Crestron. Dan, how are you doing?
Dan Feldstein
Good Craig. Great to be here.
Craig Durr
Thank you. And Brad Hintze, EVP of marketing for Crestron. How's it going?
Brad Hintze
It's great. So so thank you so much for having us, Craig.
Dan Feldstein
I appreciate it. This is going to be a great conversation because I have an opportunity now to share with this audience some things I already know about Crestron, which is the people behind the company. And that's an important element for me to actually have people understand because people wind up doing business with people and it's an important part of this here.
Craig Durr
Let me start off with you, Dan. You have a long history with Crestron. Yeah, it's 30 years, you told me. And this is working through the company all the way from working as a software engineer. I understand. Tell me a little bit about your history.
Dan Feldstein
Yeah, absolutely. Well, for 30 years, full time, some child labor issues. But yeah, so I started. I went to college for computer engineering following in my father's footsteps. He was an electrical engineer, and I spent my first eight years at Crestron as a software and firmware engineer working on things like simple Windows, Viewport for those who remember that and and the two series control systems.
Dan Feldstein
And and then I started to move out and get more into the business side of things. I helped the organization implement SAP back in 2003, and I, I was a good person to work on that project because of my history with the company, my knowledge of the company and my technical knowledge, I was able to sort of manage that project pretty effectively.
Dan Feldstein
And from there I became what I like to call the VP of things my father didn't like to do. Okay, so that included H.R. I.T. accounting and facilities, things like that. So he could focus on engineering at that time. And i was handling more of the operational side. And then then as time went on, I started to get deeper into it.
Dan Feldstein
Unfortunately, when my father got sick and and then passed, then I stepped up and I took more of a leadership role.
Craig Durr
I have to share with our audience the story of When I first met you. It was at ISE a couple of years ago, and one of your employees said, Hey, I want you to come meet Dan. And I walked over and said, Dan, how are you doing. Dan, good to meet you. What do you do at the company? At that point in time,
Craig Durr
it was a story that was really embodied to me, besides the fact that I was had put my foot in my mouth and I didn't know if that you were the CEO at the time because you just took the role. It was new at that point in time. It really spoke to me about the accessibility to you in that company.
Craig Durr
Here we were on the show floor and you were out there with customers. I know you had important meetings, but in between those meetings I saw you come back out to the show floor, shake hands, talk to people and have these conversations. And you didn't have to do it as CEO. You just wanted to do it to hear those conversations.
Dan Feldstein
Well, sure. And it's something I had done for a long time before that. But as being more the operations side, I was a little more behind the scenes. Yes. So a lot of people saw me in the booth and possibly didn't even know who I was. But yeah, I always like to talk to as many people as I can at the trade show.
Dan Feldstein
It's such a unique point in time for us where we're there with our - showing our best wares surrounded by so many people in the industry. So just to maximize every second of it is, is the only way I know how to do it.
Craig Durr
Now, with your anonymity unveiled, you're still out there doing that. I really appreciate that. Hey, Brad, let me ask you a question now. So with Dan's history, he's really integrated into the innovation fabric of the company. Talk to me about this idea of what Crestron is doing in the world of innovation. For example, you and I are passionate about video conferencing, and that's a great area to start with.
Craig Durr
What's taking place in innovation? How Crestron is bringing that to bear?
Brad Hintze
Yeah, I think it's really clear from the way Dan showed and talked about his history. This is an engineering company and always interested in building really great products. I think that we have this really unique position in the market where we are bringing together our legacy and experience around control, audio and video and content distribution and then of course, video conferencing and really now too, you're seeing a lot of innovation within intelligent video in a lot of our products too.
Brad Hintze
And so it's great to see the way that we can bring all of these technologies together to solve some really important customer needs. And so some of the big ones that we're showing off here at the show Automate VX, We have a new a new release of the engine there. Really great new visual AI features follow the conversation around very naturally.
Brad Hintze
You know, as you turn from one participant to another, the camera tracking follows your face and smooth smoothly switches between those, but also into our control system too. And we have a really great demo that is integrating other services and making it accessible right on a touch screen. So for instance, we're just doing a quick demo of you can order catering from within a meeting room, and that's a small example, but that's integrating through rest APIs to another service.
Brad Hintze
And so these little innovations really add up to deliver really great experiences to end customers.
Craig Durr
I love that. Ordering from the conference room. That's perfect, I love it. You mentioned APIs. That's a great segue to another thing I wanted to ask Dan about. From the beginning, Crestron really has taken an approach of having an open ecosystem to be universal. The list of the partners that work within your API network or your hardware is phenomenal, and I don't think enough people really appreciate that or understand that.
Craig Durr
Tell me more about this open ecosystem mentality.
Dan Feldstein
Yeah, so it’s really been since the beginning of, of when we we got into the AV market, we were a very open ecosystem. We were the user interface and control engine, bringing together all these other different technologies from different manufacturers. And now back then we did it primarily through RS 232 contact closures, things like that. But now we've gotten more sophisticated. So really now it's just an evolution and an extension of that where we can, through APIs and through other frameworks, be able to really integrate our technology with other technologies so that the customer can really get the best possible outcome.
Dan Feldstein
A great example of that is that now if you want our control for your room, but you're using a different UC platform, we've worked with the top UC service providers Microsoft, Zoom, Google, and now we can integrate our control into their hardware platform so that way you can get the best of both worlds.
Craig Durr
That's that's the idea that with that control screen there in the conference room, I can just open up a control panel that is that friendly, user centric Crestron interface as well.
Dan Feldstein
Yeah. Now, of course, we prefer to use our UC engine. We think it integrates the best with our systems, but we know that's not practical and we want to give people options.
Craig Durr
You know, that's actually a really good point. The idea that you're putting customers first in this equation, right, the customer centric approach, if that is what those customers need for their solutions, it's the right answer for them. Lean more into that idea of being customer centric.
Dan Feldstein
Yeah, absolutely. We've always tried to put our customers first. It helps as a private company. We we have no one else to answer to but our customers. That's great. So, so it makes it a little easier and to us, while technically our customer might be an integrator because that's the person buying the the equipment from us, I truly feel our customer is the end customer using our products, whether it's an enterprise customer in the commercial space or a homeowner in the residential space.
Dan Feldstein
And it's and it's up to us to work with the other professionals, the integrators, the consultants, architects who are involved in the project to work together more as partners to give the best possible outcome to that end customer. And we really try very hard to listen to that feedback from the customers, understand their needs and provide them with technology that allows them to meet their needs.
Dan Feldstein
A great example of this is our partnership with the New York Giants. So Joe Schoen, the GM of the Giants, had a vision for a draft room so that on draft day, when they have a few minutes on the clock and they have to make the best possible decision that he could have all the information at his fingertips to be able to make to to pick the best available player.
Dan Feldstein
And he talked to his team, Hey, this is what I want to do. Who can help us do this? And they said, Crestron, that's great. And and then we worked with them and everything they asked for. We were able to find a way to deliver. And I think that's what impressed Joe the most. And one of the reasons that led to to developing the partnership further was that we weren't telling you, here's what our product does.
Dan Feldstein
If it works for you, great. We were saying, What do you want to do? Help us to help you enable your vision.
Craig Durr
I love it. Customers first in that equation, it's a great idea. You know, putting other elements first, too, is something else that Crestron is known for. And I don't think you get enough attention for it, Right? I'd love to talk to you, Brad, about your sustainability story, the actions and activities you guys are doing around sustainability, accessibility and similar action.
Brad Hintze
Yeah, It's, it's something that's important to us and we know it's very important to our end customers as well. And so you're starting to see that we're making even bigger investments. We feel a responsibility on kind of three key areas. First, of course, is, you know, how do we as a manufacturer produce products that are socially minded and sustainably minded products?
Brad Hintze
And and so we're doing that. We do that around our packaging, but we also do we also think about it from an engineering perspective, too. We deliberately design our products to have a longer shelf life too, and so our customers can get more value out of it over a longer period of time. You know, a product that has a ten year lifecycle has very different impact on the world, as does a three year lifecycle product, right?
Brad Hintze
So we do deliberately engineer our products with a higher quality, longer lifespan, and you'll see us continue to invest and innovate around new materials. You know, as we go into this ongoing initiative here. The second one is as a corporate citizen, we as Crestron also need to do our part too. And so we have a lot of social responsibility initiatives internally.
Brad Hintze
We have a lot of really great programs, and you can see some of those there. The third one, which is really important, especially when we're here at a show, and that is partnering with our channel to take some of these initiatives to end customers also. And so we are a title sponsor of the SAVE Organization, which is a great organization to help drive education both to end customers and our channel.
Brad Hintze
And how do we go together to meet some of these really ambitious sustainability goals that are out there?
Dan Feldstein
Yeah, and I think also our technology can be used in a lot of a lot of different applications to help with sustainability efforts. Our commercial lighting products, for example, a lot of our sensors and other things that we do can allow a space to be much more eco friendly than if you just have light switches on the wall.
Craig Durr
And, you know, you have such a strong presence in the European market that already has leaned very heavily into the sustainability story. And it's really it's really rewarding to see that North America is also becoming very aware of that. And you've got some practical examples that you can bring to bear to show how to do this.
Dan Feldstein
Yeah, it was interesting. I was in Sweden a couple of years ago visiting some customers and they were asking us about sustainability and that time we met all the regulations and all that and they said, you know, for us it's not about meeting the regulations, it's living the lifestyle. It's really embracing it, it's really taking it to heart and, and, you know, and I took that to heart.
Dan Feldstein
And and we've done a lot of things since to really embrace that effort and to move forward.
Craig Durr
Hey, you know, talking about customers and visiting customers, we are in Las Vegas. This is the heart of hospitality. And you guys have some really signature deployments here that I would love for you to share with the audience.
Dan Feldstein
Well, some signature and quite a few. Over two thirds of the major properties on the strip use Crestron equipment. So we're very proud of that. I think for us, hospitality is a great market for us, mainly because it it's not a singular market for most companies. It's a combination of multiple technology markets and it fits in perfect with our major strategies.
Dan Feldstein
So you have commercial AV, in the common spaces. Sportsbook sports bar, you have residential type products in some of the high roller suites and then you have commercial lighting throughout all the spaces. So so for us, it's a perfect synergy of everything we do all coming together. So one great example is the Circa resorts and casino. They they have one of the biggest sportsbooks, I think anywhere in the world.
Craig Durr
I think in the world, you're right.
Dan Feldstein
It's unbelievable. Hundreds if not thousands of displays everywhere. And they use our NVX product to be able to distribute any possible game in any possible continent to any possible display. And having the scalability and flexibility of a platform like NVX means they're not going to get up to 16 TVs and say, now we're done. They can just add pretty much infinite number of displays anywhere in that facility.
Dan Feldstein
And our NVX platform will be there to support it and help it grow. So so I think Vegas in general, because of just the scope and the scale of everything they do here, fits so well within what we do because we we really don't like to put limits on our customers. Right. And again, and one of the things I really love about this town in general is you see certain things that it's not about money, it's the limit of people's creativity.
Dan Feldstein
Yeah, what can we do? And, and again, similar to the Giants story being there as a technology provider to not tell them what our product does, but to say what is your vision? How do we make it a reality?
Craig Durr
That's interesting. I love that. This concept of no limits, bring in Crestron. I love that idea. It ties it all together. Hey, but we are here at this Infocom show and there's a lot of great opportunity for people to actually see these experiences firsthand. And Brad, you've done some phenomenal things in the booth. I call it the experiential booth.
Craig Durr
What you got? Share with me some of the things that people can see here at Infocom.
Brad Hintze
So they can see most everything that we offer, which is really always a great thing to see. But one of the things we're really proud about is the high impact space. And so Dan mentioned the draft room with the New York Giants, and so we actually demonstrate many of those capabilities. Obviously, we can't build the whole thing right there, but we've got many elements of it.
Brad Hintze
But more importantly, we also demo how it is that you can take the same concepts and the same technology, apply it in education, apply it in a courtroom, apply it in enterprise. Right, Because it is the same technologies just applied in these high impact spaces for any organization. The visual AI and the intelligent video capabilities we were talking about earlier, we have a really great tools to design a highly customized multi-camera solution.
Brad Hintze
And so we're showing that off. AirMedia. It's really growing quickly. And then the other one is we've taken the multi camera solution from 1 Beyond and we're taking it to large and medium rooms without a big complex server, two cameras back and forth connected right to the video conferencing system. That's a great demo as well. So lots to see.
Craig Durr
Those are the IC cameras working together, right?
Brad Hintze
Yeah, that's right. The intelligent cameras, the I 12 and the I 20 in that room. And then of course, a lot of our control solutions. And NVX, you know we have a small representative sportsbook like the Circa one that we're talking about. But then you can see all the great innovations happening with NVX, you can deploy it with hardware, software.
Brad Hintze
We have an SDM demo so you can slide it right behind the display there. So, so much is really in the booth for everybody to get their hands on.
Craig Durr
Well, this was a great conversation. I appreciate the opportunity for us to understand a little bit more about Crestron the human side of this, as well as the opportunity to experience some of these solutions and hear about them. Where can someone go to learn more about Crestron and the solutions. Brad?
Brad Hintze
Yeah. Crestron dot com is a really great place to see everything that we offer.
Craig Durr
Right, and plus you guys have a very extensive partner network as well too. So I'm sure out there within the world there's someone close by that can introduce them to Crestron. Right? Everyone this is Craig Durr from the Collab Collective. We're here live direct from the Expo from Infocom 2024. Be sure to check out the Crestron booth and we'll bring you some more information soon enough.
Craig Durr
Take care.