Guest Post: Infocomm 2025 Panel Showed the Way to Future-Proof Signage

June 25, 2025 by guest author, David Keene

After seeing so many AV and digital signage hardware and software demos on the show floor at Infocomm, it’s always a challenge, when the dust has settled, to put it all in perspective. The trends, the patterns? A better understanding of the future of the market?

Perhaps the best way to approach that challenge is to start before the show floor opens, by planning to attend as many conference track sessions as you can. The first I visited was Tuesday’s “Future-Proofing Your Hardware: Strategies for Lasting Relevance” – at first glance a run-of-the-mill panel session but one I suspected might be more.

And it surprised me with its focus, given it was a one-hour panel session – a format that can easily foment wandering themes if not a parade of company pitches. My hat’s off to Avixa – the session really lived up to its promise in the course listing: a look at “best practices to ensure your hardware investments remain resilient and impactful.” The panel was moderated by Susan Wilhite, Senior Director Business Development at Bluefin International, with guests Joseph Mendonca, Director of Business Development at AVI-SPL; Kurt DeYoung, CRO from Nanolumens; Mike Leach, National Solutions Manager at Legrand; and Kelly Smith, Regional Sales Director, East, from Brightsign.

All the panelists had useful contributions toward framing new best practices for future-proofing digital signage systems. Not surprisingly, Joseph Mendonca of AVI-SPL offered the most cogent summary of a top AV integrator’s (the top integrator’s?) wish-list when trying to future-proof a digital signage ecosystem. His checklist, that he fleshed out in depth at the session? Functionality, reliability, scalability, sustainability, and security. Does it sound like a list that’s more predictable than useful? AVI-SPL did not get to their position and prestige in the market today with bullet points and platitudes. Mendonca drilled down into each category with lessons learned from the field.

Reliability may seem like a given, but Mendonca outlined what that means with today’s need for always-on digital signage systems with no routine maintenance down-time.

Scalability is a one of those words everyone peppers into everything, but today the key to scaling with confidence is often about monitoring and device management – and Kelly Smith and Susan Wilhite, whose display/media player products are now designed with remote monitoring and management top of mind, weighed in on this dynamic. (Interestingly, that theme was addressed by Florian Rotberg of invidis in his “Market Insights Breakfast” session the next day as being one of the key drivers of new digital signage ecosystem design going forward.)

Sustainability – another buzz word, but Mendonca emphasized that digital signage system design going forward is not about aspirational goals but about the need to design digital signage ecosystems that technically conform to the end user org’s sustainability mandates, period.

Security: network security that is. OK, but who isn’t aware of the need for better network security? Joseph Mendonca summed up his new go-to approach to that challenge going forward: “Bandwidth must be planned for.” What does bandwidth have to do with network security? Pretty straight-forward: We’ve now moved into a new digital signage landscape where more often than not, DS systems will not feature just replay, pushing out content to screens. Screens will increasingly be playing “real-time” content. Contextual content, that changes on the fly, responding to constantly changing input from databases, POS, video feeds – all manner of real-time data from afar or from an edge device on premise. And with all that input, higher bandwidth is needed not only for the content generation to the screens, but for IT and Info-Sec backbone, monitoring, and AI analysis for security threats.

I had a chance to ask Joseph Mendonca of AVI-SPL at the session, if you can, in addition to just building in higher bandwidth in a system, really “future-proof” for network security in general – or is that more of a moving target each year? It’s a crucial question, so I’m including his full answer below:

“It’s always a moving target,” said Mendonca. “It is something we revisit on a regular basis in order to really assess how well we’re serving the needs of the business, what has changed, and how do we tweak and refine that. So it always continues to evolve. But as for many of the systems we integrate with, in order to pull information within a workplace, and maybe pull in information from their Sharepoint sites or from their Adobe Media Manager, which features all of their content, or some other types of communication technologies they already use, and pull in that information in real time and display it, and they already have security on those systems. We’re really just creating integration to that, pulling the information and displaying it. It’s very common today to kind of do dashboards and data visualization in order to give people that visibility over what might be going on from a business standpoint to the environments. That’s all real-time stuff. In the retail side, it may be connected to their POS system or other systems in order to get information on the screen. We just finished a project where we’re displaying all of the integration to a system and just showing the different kinds of people that are waiting to get attended to. Again, these are systems that are fully integrated into the existing systems. They already have some form of structure to how they keep it secure.”

“I also want to add,” said Mendonca, “that many end users that have mature Info-Sec teams that give us like 200-question surveys for us to fill out. They assess the risk level of your solution. Then they decide that it’s an acceptable level of risk, and they deploy it. But internally, that’s going to have an expiration date coming up, and we’re going to come back in 12 months, or whatever the expiration date, to do a security review to make sure that you are still intact. It’s so important, that at AVI-SPL last year, we actually built an entire business unit just focused on network and security, because everything we do requires a discussion or an approval process through the security teams. You have to be up-to-date, know their language, know what will happen without having to talk to them – so that we can integrate our technologies into their environments, and still be in compliance to their security issues.”