"From The Top": Vertically Speaking
with Rashid Skaf, AMX president and CEO

It’s hard to imagine many activities in life that would not benefit from the integration of AMX solutions. But sure, even a few come to mind – bungee jumping a gorge, snorkeling a reef or snowboarding a glacier.

But for the most part, technology is all around us and as it becomes more a part of our daily lives, making it more pervasive and less invasive becomes critical. And as for those “non-tech” activities, just give us some time to find a way to either make them more enjoyable or give people more free time to enjoy them.

At AMX, we are developing more specialized solutions to bring control technology into the “vertical” markets where we believe people and businesses could greatly benefit from using AMX products.

Market Focus
While there are many opportunities out there and we intend to introduce all of them to AMX someday, these are the verticals that we are focusing our efforts on because we feel that each of them serve a need that is perfectly matched for AMX product support.

• Broadcasting
• Education
• Entertainment
• Government
• Healthcare
• Home (Home Theatre and Whole Home)
• Hotels
• Houses of Worship                              
• MDU (Multi-Dwelling Units) or High-End Condominiums
• NOC (Network Operations Centers)
• Presentation Facilities
• Private Transportation
• Retail
  

We also choose to support these markets because in a recent survey of AMX dealers, we discovered that 85 percent of our dealers focus their energies on one or more of these markets. For this reason, we are providing more support than ever to our dealers to ensure they have the resources they need to sell our products.

Specialized Market Support
Here are just a few examples of the many ways we support our verticals, which is crucial to ensure their growth and success.

• Vertical Market Specialists Hitting The Road
  We've recruited a team of vertical market specialists who are solely dedicated to supporting and growing our vertical markets. They regularly attend industry trade shows and association conferences to meet with prospective customers to find out how we can better support the market with customized products and solutions.
  
  For example, this month AMX will be represented at seven different shows including the Educause Western Conference, the AAM MuseumExpo, NW/MET Education Conference and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Conference and Expo. You can always find out where we'll be at the AMX Events Calendar.

• Customer Installations Featured in Brochures and Online Videos
  Customer testimonials are our greatest marketing tools, which is why we hand pick the best AMX installations and produce customer installation profiles, which are available as brochures (in print and online) and downloadable videos. These stories are powerful sales tools that give customers the confidence to choose a proven leader in control technology.
  
  I invite you to check out our Installation Station where all of our profiles are available and segmented by the verticals they support. New stories are being added every month, including three new installations featured in this month's newsletter, which support the Entertainment, Houses of Worship and Whole Home markets.

• Vertical Market Web Sites
  We will be rolling out a series of Web sites designed to educate our vertical market end users on how control and automation can simplify their lives. These sites enable the end user to see what control and automation is, examples of its applications in their markets, and what makes AMX products the best solution for any application.
  
  The first of these specialty sites supports the Hotel market and we invite you to view it at www.simplifyhotels.net. We will be unveiling several additional specialty sites soon to educate users on our other markets as well.
  

Software to Speed Installations
We’ve also developed better software to assist our dealers with installation and programming of AMX equipment. This month we released Version 1.0 of VisualArchitect™, the breakthrough software that greatly simplifies programming to a drag and drop process. Likewise, the Duet program has now grown to 40 manufacturers embedding our code into their products to speed up the installation process.

As we find more uses, applications and markets for AMX products, we will seek out more ways to specialize our products, support our dealers and improve the installation process for them.