AMX (C2902), active as always at InfoComm, offered lots of highlights to think about in keeping with the trends I’ve been watching the last couple of days. In particular, the company’s “Making Technology Green� presentation caught my eye. AMX’s approach to power monitoring and data analysis within a control interface is built on its Meeting Manager technology (version 3.28 debuted at InfoComm this week). It essentially gives administrators the ability to monitor and analyze power consumption, establish rules for power use, and receive notifications when those rules are violated—among other highlights.

AMX executive Robert Noble also emphasized the obvious—that globalization is, indeed, real. He said that AMX’s business currently is almost 50% international at this point, and that number he fully expects to grow. He confided that the Burj Dubai tower, the world’s newest tallest building, has been specked out to include, according to Noble, “hundreds of AMX systems.�

Other companies in this space that I’ve been visiting have been offering similar comments about the growth of the international market, which is interesting and a bit ironic, but not unexpected, in these challenging economic times. (Extron, for instance, recently opened a 300,000-square foot international office in the Netherlands to replace the 50,000-square-foot space it had been operating out of for quite some time.)

Noble also says that AMX is also in hot pursuit of the notion that the company, and the entire control industry, needs to get away from the stereotype of being exclusively “about control.�

“We don’t want a shotgun approach—we want to broaden the circle and look at managing all data we can route and control. We want rooms and facilities to be under one umbrella as we mine all the data flowing through them (with things like the Green Technology initiative).”

–MG