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September Random Roundup
September 23, 2025
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Welcome to the September AV MSP newsletter!  What do you mean “there was no August newsletter”? You must be mistaken.  

A few upcoming AV MSP Things:

Industry Consolidation

There’s no Main Story this month, more of a grab bag of smaller topics that we’d like to address. The first is industry consolidation. Kinley and Yorktel merged, AVI SPL was purchased again (and then acquired some more companies), CTI continues to grow via acquisition, and we’re sure Diversified will be sold again in the next few years. Hardware manufacturers are going through a similar upheaval with companies being sold regularly. We’re mostly keyed in on the US/N. American aspect of this, but these groups all inevitably have a “global” presence, and this impacts the industry worldwide.

This article by Richard Jonker insists that this is strategic, offensive, and drives innovation, rather than being a way to eliminate competition. From the perspective of the companies doing the acquisitions, we’re sure this is a great strategy. You buy your way into new markets, claim wider reach, and can eliminate competition (sorry Richard, it’s still happening – we’ve been solicited with offers to essentially stop existing). One big issue with this strategy is our industry running out of companies to buy. Large IT MSPs regularly hold sessions at conventions and on webinars about how smaller MSPs can grow their company for acquisition. The AV industry is not putting effort into fostering growth of new companies, which makes the chances random that a company will become worth acquiring.

For customers, consolidation can make dealing with AV worse. This industry is new to the game, less than 15 years into the process of heavy consolidation with the presence of a few large firms that will inevitably be merged at some point. In researching this topic, this paper from April 2020 popped up on the consolidation happening in defense contracting. It shows that there was an increase since the 90s in non-competitive or single-bid situations and an increase in overall spending as a result. While this is another industry, it’s also been going through consolidation for a few decades more than ours. The result will be a lack of choice. Great if you’re massive and can work with the few large integrators, but otherwise there may be only one company in your market, and they set the price. Good luck! Protections against monopolies were always for the benefit of consumers/customers, but those have all but disappeared except for very large cases.

Can anything really be done? Not really, unless you have $1B sitting around. We’d say support your local and small businesses. They understand what they’re up against and are doing great work in creating innovative solutions and ideas. We love working with smaller integrators and manufacturers – they share our desire to put customers first.

Learning to Say No

If you have trouble saying “No”, you’re in luck! There is a wikiHow on this topic, go read it. What we’re talking about here, though, is one of the last portions of the IT/AV Convergence, that you have been reading about for 15 years:  IT’s ability to say “No” to their customers and users.

IT has always been a “No” group and we just expect it to the point of memorializing the rude IT guy with Nick Burns, Your Company’s Computer Guy skits. The “No” usually comes from a few places:

  • What you’re asking for is impossible
  • What you’re asking for is a lot of work and we don’t think your benefit is worth our effort
  • What you’re asking for is dangerous
  • What you’re asking for is illegal/against policies

All valid reasons (usually). Those last two are ones that the AV industry doesn’t seem to have its arms around yet. We regularly:

  • Leave unmanaged PCs on site
  • Use TELNET and FTP to communicate with devices
  • Leave devices unpatched and with out-of-date firmware
  • Leave devices with default credentials on them
  • Put devices on portions of the network they shouldn’t be on
  • Ask for exceptions because our devices can’t conform to modern security standards

We’ve always said we say “Yes” because we’re just so nice, but maybe it’s because we don’t know any better. It’s possible some of these items are going to baffle readers – “Not seeing the problem with unpatched devices, we’ve been doing that for years. Patching breaks stuff!” IT gets to say “No” because they have the knowledge to back it up. There are security standards telling us that asking for admin access to a server or your own computer is a bad idea. And that putting that weird piece of software on your computer is going to cause trouble down the road.

This is just another attempt, really, to ask AV people to learn more about IT, networks, and security. It’s integral to our work and it’s important to know what to say “No” to when a customer, integrator, or manufacturer is asking you to do something that might not be a good idea.

A CC certification is a good place to start for security. https://www.isc2.org/landing/1mcc

Search Youtube for Network+ or just basic network training. You’ll find something like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SIjoeE93lo&list=PLDQaRcbiSnqF5U8ffMgZzS7fq1rHUI3Q8

Learn a bit about ITIL, maybe get a foundations certification. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=951xIKQmols

These are the basics and will hopefully open up more interest in learning and help you find something you’d like to be more specialized in knowing. Get started!

A Note About Password Lockers and Security

In the June newsletter, we encouraged you to get a password locker. We stand by this. HOWEVER! Security researcher Marek Tóth presented a session at DefCon this year about how transparency settings on websites can hide password login fields and trick your password manager into auto-filling credentials. When it comes to software, processes, and services that are key to your security, you must be always vigilant. It’s not a bad idea to set up a news alert for those software services via Google in case they get mentioned in the news (it’s never good when that happens).

Article is here:  https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/major-password-managers-can-leak-logins-in-clickjacking-attacks/

More detailed research is here:  https://marektoth.com/blog/dom-based-extension-clickjacking/

News and Links

More acquisitions! https://avispl.com/news/avi-spl-acquires-ccs-southwest/

Hackers continue to take advantage of LLMs to attack IoT devices. Since AV is IoT, we are at risk. https://www.wired.com/story/google-gemini-calendar-invite-hijack-smart-home/

This CAPTCHA game has been entertaining, but difficult. https://neal.fun/not-a-robot/

The title image is by pixabay user tiemcuala12! Show some support for your real human artists. https://pixabay.com/users/tiemcuala12-39870602/

The Marketing

Thanks for reading, here’s the advertisements we know you so desperately want. We are AV MSP. We provide audio visual managed services directly to corporations, universities, and other organizations with large AV environments. We also provide services in collaboration with AV integrators and IT MSPs. All of this is done with modern ITSM software and standards, all underpinned by strong security standards. If you’re looking to elevate your services, please reach out to us at sales@av-msp.com to chat. You can also follow us on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/av-msp/, on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/av-msp.com, and of course on our website at https://av-msp.com.

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