On this episode of the Six Five In the Booth, host Melody Brue is joined by Shure‘s Sam Sabet, CTO, at InfoComm 2024, for a conversation on Shure’s latest developments in audio technology, their end-user centric design philosophy, and what the future holds for the company.
Their discussion covers:
- How Shure’s end-user centric design philosophy shapes their product development process and the overall customer experience.
- A deep dive into the Microflex MXW neXt 2, discussing its key features and versatility for various user needs.
- Insights into the Shure Cloud Beta launched at ISE, including the significance of a cloud portal for device management.
- Shure’s approach to security within its cloud portal solutions.
Learn more at Shure.
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Transcript:
Melody Brue: Hi. Welcome to Six Five In The Booth. I am Melody Brue for Moor Insights and Strategy. We are here at InfoComm Las Vegas. We are in the Shure booth, and I’m here with Sam Sabet, CTO at Shure. Today… Hi, Sam.
Sam Sabet: Hi, how are you, Melody? Nice to have you here.
Melody Brue: Great to be with you.
Sam Sabet: Yeah.
Melody Brue: There is so much going on here in Vegas. You guys have a bunch of things to introduce, a bunch of things to show in your booth, but really, I want to talk about how you design in a very user-centric way. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Sam Sabet: Absolutely. So first of all, thank you for having me. It’s great to meet you. Everything we do at Shure is really focused around the end user. One of the things we look at is both our end user from the customer perspective, we also look at our integrators who are actually provisioning the systems and deploying them, and we focus on trying to basically solve problems for both of those areas. And we extensively do market research, we do focus groups, we do interviews. We tend to try our products out with the customer in mind, both from the design all the way to beta testing at the end as well, and along that entire path.
Melody Brue: So one of the products that you have that you are showing here in the booth, the MXW neXt 2, was really designed with the end user in mind, and also with a lot of customer feedback. Tell me some of the feedback, some of the users, what people are telling you. What do people really want right now with something like that?
Sam Sabet: Absolutely. I think MXW really is one-of-a-kind kind of a product. So when we originally started out working on it, the idea was people concentrate on conferencing a lot in the enterprise, but nobody really looks at the presentation side of things. So MXW was really designed for the presenter or speaker in a conference room where they come together, and we had to concentrate on that type of a user.
And so we got an enormous amount of feedback from that area, from things like we want it to be easily configurable, we want it to be easily deployable. The amount of IO on the back of the product to be able to integrate with many different systems is just amazing. And having the ability to deploy it, make sure it’s frequency-managed automatically so that it’s reliable, rock solid, and really, it’s just a product that fits so nicely and seamlessly into that environment.
Melody Brue: Give me some examples of environments where you can use it. You could be a classroom to big presentations, right?
Sam Sabet: Absolutely. So think of anywhere where you have a conference meeting, and you introduce the aspect of a speaker, a lecturer, a training room, any kind of scenario where that comes together. It’s a very, very versatile system for there.
Melody Brue: And just plug and play.
Sam Sabet: It’s just plug and play. It works great.
Melody Brue: Okay. Let’s move on to what you’re doing in the cloud. You introduced, in January at ISE, the Shure Cloud Beta, and I think now you’re expanding that beta. Let’s talk about two things. One, how’s the beta going? What are you hearing? And then what’s the expansion of the beta? Where are you going from here?
Sam Sabet: Sure. So first let me start by saying that that same design around the end user and around the integrator is something we carried over when we start talking about our software in Shure Cloud. The idea was how do you make it easy to manage our products at scale, be able to provision, monitor, inventory, upgrade. So all of those features needed to be centralized somewhere with an ease of use in mind. So not only did we introduce the features, but to your point, we said, “Okay, we want to get feedback as soon as possible from our customers.
We want to be able to incorporate that feedback into the workflow so that we make sure we address all of the problems that they have in mind.” And so we started out with the beta in ISE in January, and we’ve continued it to now incorporating all the feedback from those customers who have started. We’ve had some amazing adoption, we’ve had a tremendous amount of feedback on what we can improve, how we can make the workflow much easier. And so that’s all been incorporated. We’ve expanded it to a larger lineup of our conferencing systems. So it’s now a much more powerful tool for all of our enterprise customers. And hopefully, within the next few months, we’ll be launching it as generally available.
Melody Brue: And so you’ve expanded the beta now. How do people get into that beta? What’s the…
Sam Sabet: So you can reach out to any of your sales rep or to Shure directly, and we will be able to onboard you on for now. At some point, once we make it generally available, of course it’ll be a much easier onboarding.
Melody Brue: Okay. So when you are in the cloud, obviously security becomes a big issue. How do you address security?
Sam Sabet: Yes. Once you start talking about cloud, actually, even to any of our enterprise customers, they want to make sure that their products are secure when they’re put on the corporate land. And obviously we take that very seriously at Shure, and we’ve implemented the whole suite of security features that are standards-based, like 802.1x, encryption of data, whether it’s at rest or in transmission. And so we bring the latest and greatest industry standards on security.
We have a dedicated team of security analysts who continuously test our products and analyze them and plan for vulnerabilities and address them. We also invested heavily into external penetration testing of our products as well, so to make sure that we are not missing anything and our customers have that comfort and that confidence that our products meet all the latest standards.
Melody Brue: So here in the booth, you’re showing a lot of different things and you guys are really very well-known for just the top-of-the-line audio solutions, but I hear you have a secret room.
Sam Sabet: Ah, the secret room.
Melody Brue: What’s happening in the secret room?
Sam Sabet: Well, it’s a secret. I can’t tell you too much, but I will share with you that some of our latest and greatest innovations are being showcased to our customers. We have obviously a number of items that are in the works. I won’t give away too much because I would like you to actually go there as well and take a look. But suffice it to say that AI is very big in that room, so you’ll want to see what we’re doing there. Shure has been heavily investing in that area as well. So I look forward to you taking a look and telling me what you think.
Melody Brue: Well, this is great Sam, I’m excited to go see the secret room. I’m also excited to just take a look around. For anybody who’s not here at InfoComm, where can they see all the products, what would you like people to do?
Sam Sabet: Again, thank you very much for having me. It was a pleasure talking with you. I would encourage people to look at our Shure.com website. You’ll see a lot of the great announcements that we make here, on the website. You’ll have a chance to look at all of our MXA lineup for ceiling arrays, our MXW neXt, and you’ll actually get a preview of our Shure Cloud software as well. So, happy to be here.
Melody Brue: And for any of you who are not here at InfoComm, thanks so much for joining us. Once again, I am Melody Brue, with The Six Five In The Booth, joined by Sam Sabet, at Shure, thanks for joining us.
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