President's Message

Welcome to the Visual Communications Industry Group (VCI-Group). This is an exciting time to be in our Industry.  Over the years we have heard from experts that soon videoconferencing would take off.   Turn on your television and you will see advertisements for video chatting on cell phones, laptops, and even in our own living rooms.  We see the technology being blended into our daily lives. More than ever, the focus now is on the End-User Experience.

Our vision is to work to influence the development of the Industry-based standards for multimedia collaboration technologies and applications, to improve industry products and services, and facilitate the exchange of information among The Group’s membership. 

This is our second year as a vendor agnostic group. With a new Board of Directors in place we have started to make changes from last year. We have activated an Advisory Council made up of Manufacturers, Industry Analysts and Vendors that will help increase our influence in the Industry and our Alliance company memberships. We are exploring ways to do things differently; including how we deliver our conference, provide education throughout the year, and help our members become more involved in the Industry.   In the coming year there will be many new ideas and we, your Board, are very excited about the new possibilities. 

VCI-Group is your community for the sharing of thoughts, processes, ideas, and solutions. Our membership is comprised of several different industry sectors and vertical markets; Education, Healthcare, Finance, Manufacturing, and Government just to name a few. This community offers the opportunity to discuss the challenges we all have experienced and how we have worked through them. Learning from each other will help everyone save time by not re-inventing solutions, and will help improve your organization’s work processes.

The VCI-Group is a unique community of end-user members that also includes equipment resellers, integrators, and manufacturers as members. This complete community allows us to provide a single voice for the Industry. The Conferencing and Collaboration Industry needs everyone involved in order for this Industry to grow and improve. With the sharing of ideas amongst the comprehensive blend of our membership we can promote desired changes. Few organizations use a sole manufacturer for their equipment. Understanding how the different equipment connects together and improving their interoperability will help this industry grow and succeed.

We are the community that brings this all together through dialog and education. We provide education through Brown Bag sessions, Special Interest Groups, Beta Testing, an Email Discussion List, Focus Groups, and the VCI-Group Annual Conference. It is a time that we, as a community, get together in-person to network and learn from our peers and hear from Industry Experts the direction that the Industry is heading.

Together, we can help improve the quality of the end-user experience by maintaining an open dialog with the entire Conferencing and Collaboration Industry.

Thank You,

Stephen Demmings

 

VCI-Group President

Cornell University – Johnson School of Management
srd38@cornell.edu