Commercial Integrator July 2021 - 11

SPONSORED CONTENT
3 Questions with James Meredith of Wyrestorm
Commercial Integrator sat down with James Meredith of Wyrestorm to discuss the changes
in meeting spaces, trends in audio distribution, security, and more.
CI: Offices and office meeting spaces are changing - what
does WyreStorm offer for the modern corporation?
James Meredith: Over the last year, many offices have sat empty. Now
that people are getting back to them, they're going to be very different
places. They're going to be a lot more spacious because many corporations
are not planning on having full staff back at the office at all.
Businesses are looking at ways to introduce touchless meeting
spaces. The whole world got used to talking remotely and working
remotely, and we see a trend as people return to hotdesking. That
means that unified communications are going to be really important.
Wyrestorm launched our first product into this space during the
lockdown. It was ideally timed. We were planning on launching for
a long time anyway, and it just landed at the start of the pandemic.
It couldn't have been a better position to help a lot of customers get
online and start communicating, either from home or from workspaces
when people were able to come in.
We were thrilled by the success of that product. The whole way
through the pandemic we've been focusing on R&D. Many of our
customers weren't available for us to communicate with and all of
the normal events that we do were canceled, so we doubled downed
on innovation and development.
We've got a whole new range of products coming for unified
communications for new meeting spaces. They're going to go under
the Apollo brand name - Wyrestorm Apollo - and they're going
to include everything someone would need from a device in a huddle
or meeting space in order to have the best possible communication,
presentation, and collaborative experience.
Those products are going to be launching very soon, and we've
got a whole range of cameras to accompany that. We're just really
excited because we know how many of our customers are going to be
looking for these.
We've done a lot of our AV-over-IP products in offices leading up
to the pandemic. We had many corporations moving to AV-over-IP
and seeing the power of sharing information around the office to
everybody. With so many looking to get information to all of their
staff all of the time, WyreStorm's NetworkHD was a great way to do
that. Now we're going to be helping them communicate a lot more
and I think it's going to be really exciting to see the combination of
those product categories together.
CI: Do you see any trends in audio distribution that integrators
should be aware of?
Meredith: We've been seeing in video the trend of moving from traditional
AV signal distribution methods to IP, and the same is happening
in audio as well. We've been working with Audinate who makes
the Dante standard for a long time and we've started to roll that into
our products now. Our NetworkHD 400 Series was the first to have
that added and customers love that. Latency-free IP distribution
with a very simple setup and configuration, Dante just really ticks
boxes for presentation solutions but also the corporate space as well.
We're going to see that roll into more Wyrestorm products. Our
SDVoE platform will be the next to get Dante and I don't think we'll
stop there; I think there will be many more in the future as well.
CI: There is a big industry concern over security. Are WyreStorm
products secure?
Meredith: We've really taken security seriously. We've always had the
basics covered. Where many brands just had Telnet, we had passwordprotected
Telnet. But our customers were telling us that's not enough.
As everything now sits on the network, everything needs to be secure.
Earlier this year we protected all of our web interfaces. We made
sure that passwords were not sent unencrypted over the network. We
were using secure HTTP. We've now launched a huge update to the
whole of NetworkHD so that all of our internal communications are
sent using SSH. We have protected and encrypted all of the communications
internally. We've even moved our preview streams over
to secure HTTP so that those are not accessible to any third party.
It's been a very long time in development. We've been working
on it for a few years, but introducing these standards is absolutely
critical with the kind of customers that Wyrestorm is attracting
today and the importance for them to know that their data and
information is secure on their network.
That's available now. It's a free update. WyreStorm's really focused on
having any software improvements free of charge for all of our customers.
www.wyrestorm.com
http://www.wyrestorm.com
Commercial Integrator July 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Commercial Integrator July 2021
