President & GM of NETGEAR for Business Products, NETGEAR INC
InfoComm 2025: NETGEAR's Pramod Badjate Talks About AV-over-IP and Integrators, Partner Ecosystem
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About Pramod Badjate
At InfoComm 2025, Pramod Badjate, President and GM of NETGEAR for Business Products, discussed the company's approach to AV-over-IP technology. Badjate stated that Netgear entered the market after seeing integrators struggle with the technology, and that the company aims to make it "plug and play simple." He said Netgear has "abstracted" the technology so that installers can work in familiar terms rather than focusing on network details, and described an "engage application" that allows point-and-click profile setup. Badjate also mentioned plans for future features that would enable offline cloud management and automatic configuration of devices. Badjate noted that Netgear recently announced an acquisition in security, which he said would help ensure AV systems are secure from an IT network perspective. He also discussed a software investment strategy, including the acquisition of a team that he said now includes 40 to 50 engineers, with expectations to grow to about 100 engineers focused on switching and engage software. Additionally, Badjate said Netgear is investing in AI to further simplify workflows for integrators. He stated that the company is redesigning its website and plans to launch a new partner program portal.
Transcript (13 segments)
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Steph Beckett0:06
Thanks for watching. Hey everyone, Steph Beckett here at InfoComm 2025 at the Netgear booth. Day one and I'm joined by Pramod Badjate. First of all, how are you? How has day one of InfoComm treated you?
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Pramod Badjate0:20
It's been amazing. I'm actually tired just standing all day, but it's been going from booth to booth and the excitement... yeah, this is my first InfoComm. I come from an IT background and AV is still relatively new to me, but nine months into Netgear I have seen now this is my second show and it's very exciting what's happening in the AV.
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Steph Beckett0:44
Absolutely. Well we can learn a lot from it and so I think we are finally... I think that's pretty cool that you're in our industry now. So I'm interested to talk to you a little bit about Netgear's 400 plus partners. That's a lot of partners. Tell me a little bit about why these partnerships are important for integrators but also for end users in our industry.
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Pramod Badjate1:05
Very good question. One of the things that Netgear does very uniquely is we entered this market because we saw the need where AV over IP was something the integrators were really struggling with the technology. I think what we do is not only implement the technology and make it easy but build the ecosystem and bring that along with us. That's something which the market has really appreciated because there was a need for someone who was testing the products along with other manufacturing partners in making sure it works as a system. I can't tell you the result of that. Every booth that I have gone to with our partners, people say they love us because when they put us in the network, it just works. That thing about just making it work out of the box, that's real hard work in terms of making sure we've got the right profiles in our networks. We have tested with these systems and that's where all of these partnerships happen.
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Steph Beckett1:54
Absolutely. I'd love to dig into a little bit more about integrators, they AV over IP, it scares them. It's always going to scare them. But tell me a little bit more about what Netgear is doing to help them bring them into AV over IP and help them realize it's not as scary as it looks.
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Pramod Badjate2:12
Yeah, I think what we have done is we have taken the technology AV over IP and abstracted it out so that the installers are dealing with it in the language that they are used to. They just have to think in terms of the profile what they are connecting. They don't have to think about the nitty-gritties of the network itself. All that is abstracted out from them. Along with what I said previously where we just test and make it work along with others, that's the secret sauce. Now we are doing additional things on top of it. We've got something called an Engage application which makes it very easy, just point and click to set up the profiles. We are going to be doing more things on top of it in terms of in future we'll allow people to offline manage this in the cloud and then push it out locally so that when the devices are actually connected, configuration automatically flows to the devices. Our job is to make it plug and play simple so people can set it up and focus on what they are good at, which is powering extraordinary experiences, and the network and the infrastructure is all taken care of.
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Steph Beckett3:11
Absolutely. The last thing I want to ask you is about AV systems.
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Pramod Badjate3:17
A big part of our strategy is investing in software innovations and acquiring WAV was an important part of that. We acquired a team and we now have about 40 or 50 engineers. We are expanding, expecting it to grow to about 100 engineers, and they'll be investing in innovating on the switching software, the Engage software that I talked about before. We are also investing in AI so that we can use AI to further simplify the workflows and make it plug and play for integrators. We're very excited about that. WAV systems as well as we just recently announced last week an acquisition in security as well, and that also will be very important in ensuring that when you install AV systems, we're going to make sure that it's secure from the point of view of an IT network. All of this is part of our strategy in investing in innovations and living to our promise of making AV plug-and-play simple for our installers.
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Steph Beckett4:14
Absolutely. Last question I have for you is where can people find more information on Netgear?
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Pramod Badjate4:19
You can start with our website obviously. We are actually redoing our website to make it very focused on enhancing and making sure the case studies of how people have deployed it and all of that is available there. We're also going to be launching a new partner program portal so our partners who need information can register and then get that information from us. Our website would be a good place to start.
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Steph Beckett4:44
Thank you so much. I appreciate your time, Pramod. It was nice meeting you.
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Pramod Badjate4:48
Thank you, Steph. It was a pleasure talking to you guys. And don't forget on our side you can go to rathpubs.com/infocom for all your InfoComm news.
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Steph Beckett4:54
Again, I'm Steph Beckett and we'll see you next time.