Datapath Partner Conference Reveals Human Element Remains Essential in Booming Control Room Sector

Today’s control rooms are far more complicated than ten years ago, when the traditional large video wall looked out across individual workstations, with information collated to view on the large, single display.

Datapath recently hosted key integrators, consultants, and business partners at their annual channel partner conference in Windsor UK, where presentations from specialist Control Room consultants Emergensys and design experts MIMA revealed a valuable window on the future of the Control Room market and how these areas will be utilized as technology advances in a growing sector. 

Richard Stace, Principal and Director at Emergensys Consulting, alongside Michael O’Brien, revealed some fascinating insight into the economic position of the Control Room market, along with where their experts foresee the key areas of growth over the next few years. 

The global command-and-control systems market is expected to grow from $37.33 billion in 2023 to reach $48.45 billion in 2027 at a CAGR of 6.7%, according to their research. 

The presentation audience, which included key EMEA partners for us such as AGMultivision, Midwich Group, OneMedia and Mindstec heard Emergensys identify several key areas where they expect to see the most opportunity and growth in the Command and Control market – including different types of projects for geopolitical operations, climate monitoring, plus a large opportunity for refreshing legacy systems with more efficient and more manageable networked solutions which benefit operations, and operators, alike. 

Market trends identified by Emergencys included evolving workplace practices and expectations of staff in a post pandemic workplace, private sector growth in Emergency Operation Centre (EOC) solutions and a shift in digital spend towards more sustainable initiatives and assets. 

Richard Stace commented:

“To speak to these key integrators and distributors who operate in this space was a true pleasure and we thank Datapath for the opportunity to join them at their Channel Partner Conference. Datapath are clearly breaking new ground with what is possible with distributing video content in a Control Room environment and, in a market that continues to grow at a pace, the future is looking bright indeed.” 

He added: “As well as introducing a new generation of video processors with sustainability in mind, Datapath bring a flexibility to control room video management that has not been possible up to now.” 

Today’s control rooms are far more complicated than ten years ago, when the traditional large video wall looked out across individual workstations, with information collated to view on the large, single display. 

These days, the number of sources and feeds coming into a control room can be dozens, if not hundreds. Add the need to manage and share this content to the right people, across numerous displays and workstations, and the challenges become very real. 

Richard continues: “The importance of change management / embedding new ways of working to ensure value is achieved is a primary concern for today’s control rooms. Nearly all initiatives now demand a robust business case to ensure tangible benefits (ROI) will be realised and this requires a formal change adoption process being applied to new deployments.” 

Having such an operation running at full efficiency requires comprehensive design planning, working alongside the latest technology. 

Human-centred design agency MIMA specialize in helping control room environments be designed to benefit operations from a human perspective. Reviewing all human aspects of a control room, including seating position, line of sight, viewing distances, human interaction and many more, MIMA help some of the world’s largest organizations create optimal efficiency in their Control Room operations.  

Paul Reynolds, Principal Industrial Designer, commented: “Recent research shows that for those who invest in and use design strategically, the average output per employee is greater.” 

He adds: “MIMA work to co-design service design-led operations that are more human-focused and integrated, making them feel less rigid and complex. Our experience in some of the country’s key control room operations has shown that this process can hugely benefit functionality and overall efficiency.” 

“Today’s latest technology has added an extra layer to this efficiency, which allows for secured content to be shared to and from operators like never before. This not only breaks new ground in how a Control Room is designed, but also allows for less desk real estate as, for example, a single desktop display can now operate as an effective personal video wall.”  

It’s an area where UK-based video processing specialists Datapath have excelled. Being able to transform any videowall display, instantly, for different emergency situations is now a standard practice in many mission-critical and emergency control rooms. Having a rigid display on a video wall is underutilizing what is possible for maximum efficiency. Anything is now possible for today’s displays, from carousel windows showing security feeds, to auto source switching when emergencies happen. 

Our Aetria solution is now being deployed in control rooms across the globe, with its hardware and software used in Presidential palaces and defence hubs across the world and in businesses both large and small, in every continent. 

As well as independent market insight, the Channel Partner Conference revealed a comprehensive roadmap of our future developments, with advancement in its software and hardware offering being just around the corner. 

While full details remain confidential, these developments include additional levels on control for our Aetria solution, new processing hardware and further ambitions with networked multi-source video processing. 

David Griffiths, VP Global Sales for Datapath concluded: “We’ve enjoyed a fantastic couple of days in the company of our EMEA partners. We thank them sincerely for spending their time with us in Windsor and hope that they gained some valuable insight into Datapath technology and the key markets in which we all operate. It’s clear that the future is looking bright in the Control Room sector and Datapath will continue to work hard to bring our customers the leading solutions for these environments.”