i3 - July/August 2019 - 11

Tech

the direction should be. It makes me proud
to help contribute to change that model
and suggest people that would bring value
to help us to continue to reflect our changing customer base. The female shopper is
super powerful now.

Q How are you helping retailers
prepare for 5G?
A The SYNNEX side of the company is
deeper into 5G on the telephony side.
The benefit for us is that we don't have to
broker new relationships, we can tie into
those areas. On the consumer side we are
looking at brands that will interact with 5G
and starting to say, this is where we need
training and education to bring our staff
up to speed. The biggest problem will be
getting the antennas installed. It's a massive amount of work but the benefits will
be huge as people get video, audio and
streaming and all of the things that will
be available. The manufacturers are
excited about it.
Q Where do you see the industry in 10 years?
A Someone gave the greatest analogy

Q What is Jack of All Games?
A Jack of All Games is a company that we

acquired some years back that was also a
distributor in gaming. The traditional gaming business is very sophisticated. Sony
was the first to embrace VR out of the gate.
Now other companies on the console side
that Jack of All Games has been focused
on - we work with them providing software
and hardware to the retail community. The
computer companies have all jumped into
the gaming side so just about every brand
of computers that we sell have gaming
options and often professional teams. It is
a huge and highly competitive business in
regard to the players. They can win purses
up to $1 million in esports. And it's not just
kids that are packing stadiums. Jack of All
Games brought us into the gaming world,
C TA . t e c h / i 3

and we continue to fortify that environment
by working with all of the PC companies
and the peripheral companies. Gaming is a
very busy area for us.

Q How is the role of women changing in
the industry?

A I started to notice that my customers

were more female-centric, my vendor
community was more female-centric,
and we were opening up new channels to
stores like Kohls where the female shopper was making the decisions. I said we
have to get more females on the board. I
have to give 100% credit to CTA. It is more
advanced than other companies in being
sensitive to this issue. CTA has done a
fabulous job of representing what the standard should be and a forward look at what

about envisioning the future. They said,
"Go watch a Star Trek movie." You saw
gesturing, heard voice commands - "Beam
me up, Scotty" - and navigation commands. Obviously, we are not beaming
people up yet, but automation and robotics
came out of that. I think you are going to
see a very strong community of businesses
that will be automated. Battery life and
being able to charge over the air is going to
enable devices to be self-charged. Devices
potentially will be chipped or implanted
in people. But if somebody has a problem
- especially for medical reasons - they
could have an embedded chip to monitor them and improve their quality of life.
That is going to be huge. Even the way that
medicine will be delivered will be radically
changed and our industry will be part of
it. It is going to change so radically that
expectations are going to be greater. The
speed is going to be much better. When
you look at the intelligence of the computer systems today, IBM has this incredible computer called Watson that uses AI
to crunch massive amounts of data to help
businesses make more efficient decisions.
Our technology is building our future.

GO ONLINE: Read the entire
interview at CTA.tech/i3.
JULY/AUGUST 2019

https://cta.tech/News/i3.aspx https://cta.tech/News/i3.aspx

i3 - July/August 2019

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