Software is king for black box-free Innomate
Innomate is a fast-growing software company working in a hardware-dominated AV industry. John O’Brien speaks to chief executive Paul Yahchouchy to find out how it all works.
Products drive the AV industry. Making them, selling them, installing them. As this gear has evolved in features and complexity, so has the need for managing it. Which needs software. And that facet has been lagging in comparison to hardware developments.
Enter Innomate.
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Formed by a desire to go about AV differently, Innomate is a software-only AV integrator. Chief executive Paul Yahchouchy is candid: “We don’t procure, we don’t install, we don’t do physical stuff. We are a logical company.”
Where did they come from?
This paradigm shift in approach to integration is driven by real-world experience of key Innomate staff. Paul’s history in software development led to a role heading AV, VC & UC for Westpac. That period gave invaluable insight in how to build Innomate. Having been one himself, Paul understood what clients needed.
Hands-on experience as an AV client showed Paul gaps in existing platforms and service models: “I didn’t want to engage companies that installed products and walked away. I wanted to engage companies that provided good service outcomes,” he says.
Those learnings have underpinned the approach of Innomate ever since.
An integrator that doesn’t install hardware
In a hardware-focused industry, how does one fit in/compete with traditional box movers? By providing a service that helps manage those boxes. And it matters not which brand is on the black box to Innomate: “We are very agnostic re: hardware.”
What they sell is software and service. Paul continues: “I don’t even know if we have (direct) competitors – we are the only ones that (explicitly) provide a service. We have a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. We have a remote managed service on top of that and we have SLAs direct to our tenants. We are the only ones that do that.”
When their client does need an onsite presence, Innomate allies with selected integrators to conduct site work, which extends the service from remote to onsite.
Around Sydney and Canberra, they use UXT, a managed service provider that Paul is part owner of. Elsewhere, they find natural synergies with, as he explains, integrators who are already in the managed service space.
“If they are interested in managed services, then we are the platform that will provide them with the foundations to manage their service efficiently,” Paul says.
Multi-vendor strategy
Post-COVID, supply chain issues have necessarily changed approaches to equipment procurement. Loyalty to one or two manufacturers is gone and most service owners now need to follow a multi-vendor strategy, just to ensure that they can keep providing solutions to their business.
This market evolution is another opportunity for Innomate.
“With ecosystems becoming more and more multi-vendor, they are very hard to manage. You need one over-arching platform that sees the entire ecosystem. That platform needs to handle control, management, monitoring, automation and data,” Paul says.
“What you need is one platform that does it all.”
Innomesh provides one dashboard to replace ten, avoiding multiple digital silos in the process.
Addressing a market gap for a software platform or service is one thing, but its technical success requires a fundamental understanding of the gear and applications that it is interacting with. Paul is very aware of this: “Control is intrinsic to us. This is where we started. So, when our platform is active, you can deploy and manage native AV applications that are hosted on physical or virtual native controllers, providing user experiences native to Crestron, AMX and other vendors. We do that across the biggest control system providers in AV.”
Software that talks to any hardware
As a software company, it’s essential to Innomate that “our people are skilled in cloud, data, front-end, back-end and middleware, but they are also strong in developing native AV software on Netlinx, SIMPL Windows, SIMPL#, SIMPL#Pro, etc.., so that the platform is fully end-to-end,” continues Paul. That full stack approach is an intentional part of their business model.
“We deal with APIs, CLIs and native SDKs. An example of this is Harman and Crestron – they’ve got a lot of data that you are not going to get by simply hitting public APIs – you need to be in their native environment to get rich integration and rich data collection – so at that point, we write applications intrinsic to Crestron or Harman that open APIs to their hardware,” Paul says.
“We then connect to these APIs from the cloud, allowing us to provide cloud-native and AV-native solutions. Effectively, Innomate writes middleware applications that are native to the manufacturers and allow (them) to tap into the native world of AV.”
Being hardware agnostic, the firm covers all bases.
“We have alliances and strong relationships with many manufacturers, such as Crestron, Harman, Extron, Biamp and Q-Sys. We are continuously talking to the product managers of these organisations to continuously implement strong integrations to their native ecosystems, providing our customers with the single pane of glass they need,” he says.
“One of our design principles is to ‘always integrate to the platform rather than the endpoint’ if that is an option. If the manufacturer has a platform that manages their own family of products, we integrate platform to platform.”
Knowing that most AV manufacturer products are best controlled natively, Innomate interfaces with the proprietary manufacturer applications which are the programs hosted on controllers in the room, or virtually.
“Those applications are also in need of management and monitoring, not just the hardware. They need to be highly configurable and highly available so that we guarantee a strong user experience in the room,” Paul outlines.
UX is key for all users
Designing a strong end user experience is of high importance but doesn’t take precedence over reliability. Regardless of how great the UX is, if the end user faces solution reliability issues, it’s a showstopper. The key decision makers/influencers of reliability are often the operational users – the AV/UC/IT managers and service owners who are assessing big-picture metrics and insights. How the gear is being used, what is working and what is not.
For Paul, Innomate “pays equal attention to both users – end and operational. The operational user – the more they are in control and aware of the state of the environment, the better the end user experience is.”
“Our platform provides very strong portals to manage the environment and be responsive, observing and continuously aware of the state of the environment.”
Paul explains that this empowers operational users to be much more proactive in managing their systems, adding that that is when you find issues, before the end user impact.
This is perfectly encapsulated in another of their company mantras: ‘solve alerts before they become tickets.’
Innomesh – the product
So, what do customers of this business actually get? The over-arching platform is called Innomesh. Inside it are three different subscription tiers – Pulse, Sight and Space. Paul expands a little on these: “Pulse is our monitoring product. It monitors entire environments and is as light as a feather. It concentrates on system vitals, such as whether your devices are alive, if their performance is good and whether they are responding fast enough.
“Followed by Sight, which is our data collection product. Sight collects data metrics from AV, UC and IoT endpoints providing rich insights, alerting and data-driven actions.
“And then Space is effectively the full stack – data collection, monitoring and integrated AV-native or cloud-native in-room user experience and control, with native AV touch panels.”
He adds that the client doesn’t have to pick one or the other and can choose based on the room. Users can have a hybrid environment of Pulse, Sight and Space as well as mix this with a hybrid environment of multi-vendor hardware.
“You can have a Harman environment mixed with a Crestron environment at the same time. The idea is to end up with a hybrid multi-vendor environment and deploy the right product in the right room,” he explains.
Innomesh then sits on top of all of this and interfaces easily with complex room solutions and timetabling.
AR Training
Alongside its core offerings, Innomate offers training and change management where they provide augmented reality room training for academics and other system users: “Effectively, an academic can walk into a room virtually, get served videos or guides and interact with touch panels and surfaces within an augmented reality space. They can learn how to use the technology in the room before they even physically go in there and start teaching.”
He says that this feature is a real hit with end users and the company has found that this relieves a lot of anxiety from teachers. There are no longer any situations where a teacher walks into a room and learns how to use the tech with 40 students watching.
Innomate – the company
Innomate has been flying under the radar for a while. Since 2017, they have stealthily deployed their package into 1,000s of installations. When they were sure it was proven, they started announcing their presence.
“It didn’t become generally available until 2020. That’s when we started going out to the market and saying: ‘this is a platform – you can buy it’,” Paul says.
In the past four years, they have grown from five to 30 staff and are advertising for more. At their current rate, they should easily see 40 by year’s end.
Paul says he’s unphased by this pace, adding that the company is growing fast but it’s organic: “We are not chasing a fast growth path. We want to grow organically but maintain our serviceability and commitment to our existing customer base.”
That growth is set to expand geographically. Already established in Sydney, Canberra, Brisbane and Hyderabad, Paul wants to keep it as is here and open new regions to cover more time zones globally. Even amidst the pandemic, they have been doubling staff numbers annually.
They might attract even more with another company idiom: ‘we build to run, not run away’.
In an industry obsessed with signoff and completion of practical projects, this is a refreshing change.
“To us, our work starts on day one. We are there for the long run. We build everything with the mindset that we are going to support and run it for at least the next five to ten years,” Paul says.
Where to next?
Software is as much a product as any physical item. For Paul “software is key. Software, cloud, automation and data are the future of our industry.”
As a “software company that operates completely remote”, Innomate is showing just how viable that type of product is.
“It’s been designed from the start to deliver projects anywhere and everywhere,” he says.
If they manage that right, there’s massive scalability in their current markets and beyond. Already strong in banking and education, they are now expanding to new sectors. Wisely, Paul sees “the platform will evolve based on that. Every vertical has its own needs as a business and the platform needs to accommodate for them.”
That approach should keep this company on the rise.
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