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9 minute read
Summary
On this episode of Direct from the Expo the Collab Collective's Craig Durr talks with Jason Moss, SVP of Marketing and Ecosystem at QSC, and Christopher Jaynes, CTO of Q-SYS, live from InfoComm 2025. This engaging follow-up to their previous ISE conversation dives deeper into Q-SYS’s evolving full stack AV strategy, newly launched products, and the value behind a cognitive cloud approach.
Their discussion covers:
- AV's Strategic Role: How AV can deliver experiences and data to influence hybrid workplace performance
- The Full Stack Explained: The foundational architecture behind Q-SYS’s cloud-to-edge integration
- Cognitive Cloud & AI: How AI and machine intelligence are driving real-world outcomes in physical spaces.
- Activate Product Launches: Details on Designer 10.0, Core 24f, Vision Suite, and their software-driven update model
- Customer Success & Ecosystem: Real-world deployments from Zillow, Indiana University, and others that showcase scalable, platform-driven AV.
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Transcript
Craig Durr: Everyone, this is Craig Durr, Chief Analyst and Founder of the Collab Collective, and I want to welcome you to a special edition of Direct from the Expo–InfoComm 2025. And we've had some return guests. These are some people that we spoke to a few months ago in Barcelona at ISE. So we're going to have a moment to catch up with Q-SYS and understand what they've been doing since February.
Joining me, we have Jason Moss, SVP of marketing and ecosystem, and Christopher Jaynes, the CTO of Q-SYS. How's it going, gentlemen?
Christopher Jaynes: Great
Jason Moss: It's great. It's busy, but great.
Craig Durr: This show is already phenomenally busy. I'm excited about it right now. But you guys have been really busy, too, since we've talked to you in February. And I want to dive into some of those great announcements that you had, some new product releases. But before I do that, let's take a step back. Let's kind of look at this from the big picture, Jason, you know, Q-SYS has been redefining its whole vision of what it thinks the AV market should be, and you've been executing on this over the last year or so. Talk to me about this vision.
Jason Moss: Yeah, so maybe just thinking about it, just a year ago, we did a keynote and we kind of introduced this vision of a full stack AV platform, right? And when we introduced that, it wasn't about the technology, it was about the potential of what can happen out there.
And really an interesting question that's out there is, I've heard it a couple times… we did a panel earlier this week, too, where a gentleman asks the same question–how does AV have a seat at the table with what's going on in the world? And what is going on in the world is that there's a lot of change, a lot of people returning to office or still in a hybrid situation, and people are unsure of what's going on out there and they want to have an amazing experience, which AV is really good at.
But the other thing is that people need to understand how these physical places are performing and are they getting the value out of it? And all the things we're investing in… is that making an impact? And AV has a big role to play in that. If we can start to do–not just deliver the amazing experiences which our industry knows how to do–let's start to deliver on that data and information on how these places are performing. That is what is happening out there. People want to know what their investment is and how to make their places better.
Craig Durr: It's more than just boxes. And you got some great customer examples that actually have embraced this idea that you're talking about now. Tell me about some of those.
Jason Moss: Yeah. So there's a lot of great ones out there. We have a great case study with Zillow. We really looked at what they could do with a full stack AV platform and bringing all the information together is when you do, one of these platforms, it's not just the products from us–it's a whole ecosystem of things that connect into it.
So it helps people get a fuller, visible party of not just a meeting room or this space over here, but connecting the whole floor plate of the building and really understanding how that is performing. And then we have Indiana University. We have a couple other really exciting ones that are out there.
Craig Durr: I know they couldn't tell me as of yet.
Jason Moss: Really cool case studies going on. But a lot of customers are adopting this mentality of… “Well, how can I have a whole platform, have this better visibility and then replicate it in multiple buildings or multiple sites around the country, around the world? And that's where we're seeing a lot of success. No longer are people just doing one off projects. It's all about setting yourself up in your business for success by having this broader idea of what you want to base your technology off of.
Craig Durr: Okay. All right, well, both of you have used this term that I heard a lot–full stack AV. And I have to be honest with you, I'm trying to understand what this means. I know the products behind this, and I've had people ask me, is this more of a marketing positioning, or is this product positioning? Help me and the audience understand what you mean by full stack and what's behind that.
Jason Moss: You're trying to ask if it’s something I made up, making him build.
Craig Durr: No, no.
Jason Moss: Oh, he's building cool stuff, and I just put in some names around that.
Christopher Jaynes: No, no, honestly, no offense, Jason, that term itself came out of our work. If you take a step back and you ask what's necessary to deliver on that vision that we just described, right? The idea that data can flow from the local edge all the way to the cloud. How do you build that? What pieces do you need?
Well, you clearly need the sensors and the actuators in the room. That's the multimodal IO. That's the base layer of a full stack. You need on premise low latency compute where you can drive intelligence and actions and outcomes. That's the middle layer of that stack. That's intelligent OS.
And then tie that to the cloud so that you have scalability horizontally. You have all the access to compute you might need in the cloud. Now you have all the necessary pieces. So that actually came out of an engineering intentionality of how we are going to build this thing that the industry really does need.
Craig Durr: I appreciate it because we're doing more than just putting boxes on site, right? You know, you hit one part that's really exciting to me, and I want to dive in just a little deeper–the cognitive cloud part. And I know this is something you're really excited about right now because I saw when you did during your Activate launch–we’ll talk about that in a moment–it's more than just making sure lights are on, it's more than just making sure the boxes are lit, right?
Christopher Jaynes: Yeah. I mean, I've been saying that recently that it's a little bit… it's like the data has a new day and it's arrived because of the machine intelligence stuff that's just happened in the last couple of years. So that allows our data to become incredibly valuable, to drive insights and actions and new outcomes to the end users.
So there's really two categories of users you can now serve. It goes way past analytics. It's really insights and outcomes that the AI systems can now drive from the cloud. You have to have built an architecture that allows that data to get there for that. The other piece of it is that that data, as it flows through that architecture, can drive new outcomes at each layer of that stack, which I think is really exciting, right?
Craig Durr: I had a chance to see some of the previews and what you call that Horizon Suite. These are some really exciting elements. I love the fact that you’re actually sharing it with some certain customers to kind of get the understanding of the value that it's bringing to market and allows you to hone this. It's really a great close circle of a customer driven, product release cycle.
Christopher Jaynes: Yeah, and it will drive customer outcomes because we have to get the industry past this sort of red light, green light status indicator mentality of the cloud, right? It's not just status. It's not even just analytics. It's really new insights and new outcomes that AI drives.
Jason Moss: Yeah. And I want to add to it too is, as you know, Chris talked about how you can get these at all the different layers in the stack. The great thing about it is that you have a full stack architecture as a platform, but that full stack architecture kind of supports the full stack ecosystem as we connect to different devices or applications in the cloud, anywhere in that stack, we can talk to it.
So a lot of the data we're getting, I think it's really important to know that maybe some of these different vendors have these really great solutions for a very specific use case, but they haven't built out the infrastructure like we have. But you connect it into the Q-SYS ecosystem in full stack, and it just creates this network effect of how much data you get, which just really helps us drive the insights and outcomes for the customers better.
Craig Durr: You have one of the broadest ecosystems of partners I've seen. So coming at it, for example, from the UC space, you have partnership with Microsoft and Zoom within the devices space itself. On the Pro AV, you have a broad array of cameras and devices in the rooms that you also support, besides your own product lines as well, right?
It's fantastic. But speaking of products, you guys just recently had your Activate event. Now, you've had these in the past, but this one was phenomenal. I was on edge watching it. And by the way, kudos for doing it live. I appreciate that you guys actually took the brave step and were there live doing it as well.
Jason Moss: Yeah, well I like to say like our customers do it live, so we do it.
They have to go out there. They need to make sure that that stadium is working, the theme park is up and running, that performance goes on, that board meeting happens in the moment. So we got to use our technology to try and do the same thing and share that.
Craig Durr: Well, Activate–not only was it phenomenal being live, but there were a lot of great products. There's probably more than I could list. Would you share with me some of the highlights from that product list?
Christopher Jaynes: Yeah, yeah, let me do some of that. The key points are the new lineup, of course. So think about new IO, new platforms, the Core 24f for sure brings you that. It's a big moment for us to introduce a new set because the 110 was such a stalwart member of this industry for over ten years.
Jason Moss: Yeah, it was launched in 2015. So ten years.
Christopher Jaynes: Yeah, so that's a big refresh of modernizing that technology in all kinds of ways, way more power and things. Vision Suite Accelerator is the part of that new Vision Suite hardware upgrade to have more efficiency, support, more cameras. On top of that, the Vision Suite Designer application allows you to do visual design, a way faster commissioning process to understand what's happening in your space as you deploy the system. It's quite interesting.
And then behind that, of course, we're still focused on Reflect. So that actually is really interesting with new analytics features. A lot to consume for sure on the feature side. But behind the scenes and what's probably really important about 10.0 is we have been re-architecting the infrastructure of the entire platform.
What's happened with 10.0 now is we have uncoupled the release patterns from your cloud, from all the other designer suites in your hardware suite. So now we can at any moment, when a new feature arrives in our cloud, turn it on for you to get faster access to those feeds.
Craig Durr: So you've actually kind of flipped the bit that this is a software-driven release cycle instead of a hardware-driven one. That's fantastic. What a great customer benefit.
Christopher Jaynes: Yeah. And I do want to say that the amount of energy that went into all our best practices on stability, quality, this is probably the first release that we've implemented new processes in our development cycles. This release inherited all of those. So I think it's going to probably be our most stable release.
Jason Moss: Yeah, you mentioned some of those stats on Activate.
Christopher Jaynes: Yeah, we had like 16 scrum teams were operating in parallel for like thousands of human years, you know.
Craig Durr: That's incredible. I mean, the intent that you put behind this release is fantastic. And I think it shows what you guys came out with now. And some of those customer examples are phenomenal. All right, so our audience… what should they do next to learn more about Designer 10.0 and the new products that came out as well?
Jason Moss: Well, if you're here, come visit us. Come visit the Q-SYS booth. We'll take you through all the different things that we have and demonstrations. But if you're not here, you can go to qsys.com/infocomm to learn more. If you want to go back and see Activate, go to qsys.com/activate.
Craig Durr: It's on demand. I saw that.
Jason Moss: It’s on demand. It’s a great place to engage with us. And if you're our customer out there and you know one of our sales people, reach out to them, they'll get you there. And if you don't just go to our website, we'll get you hooked up.
Craig Durr: I'm sure you will. If they are here, I do really encourage them to see the booth. It is such an experiential journey to go through that, let alone the escape room, right? Let's not forget about that fun part. Check that out.
All right, Jason, Chris, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.
Christopher Jaynes: Thank you so much. Yeah.
Craig Durr: Everyone, this is Craig Durr with another edition of Direct from the Expo at InfoComm 2025. Stay tuned, we'll bring you some more updates soon. Thank you.
Jason Moss: Thank you, Craig.
