AVIXA Changes CEO as AV Roles Converge

AVIXA named Marco Pardi chief executive on 4 November, effective 1 January 2027. He succeeds David Labuskes, who retires on 31 December after 14 years in the role. Pardi joins from Informa, where he was president of the Tech Events portfolio - The AI Summit, Channel Partners Expo, Data Center World and the HIMSS Global Conference among them - leading more than 200 people across North America, Europe and Asia. The appointment closed a 12-month search that considered more than 100 candidates, chaired by board vice chair Mradul Sharma with Korn Ferry supporting the process.

The background is the story. AVIXA spent two decades turning an installer trade show into an association whose influence runs through education, certification and market intelligence: by its own count it reaches more than 500,000 professionals, brings 175,000 people through events and webinars, and serves about 30,000 unique users on its learning platforms. Handing that to an events executive rather than a technologist says where growth is expected to come from - more programmes, more markets, more paid learning - rather than from a new standard or a new badge. The search committee's own language points the same way: international teams, revenue growth, and programmes that survive contact with a balance sheet.

That matters because the roles AVIXA certifies are merging. On 28 October the association launched a broadcast and pro AV convergence course, following the Audiovisual Network Professional accreditation introduced during Labuskes' tenure. The technician who once terminated HDBaseT and set a display's EDID now configures IGMP queriers, PTP domains and multicast boundaries, and frequently reports to an IT manager who has never specified a switcher. For manufacturers, the documentation that wins work has changed with it: port maps, VLAN and QoS requirements, bandwidth per stream, firmware policy, and an explicit statement of what the device does when the network is unhealthy.

What to watch in 2027 is less about the association than about procurement: whether the convergence curriculum becomes a line in tenders, whether ANP starts displacing CTS on network-heavy jobs, and how ISE and InfoComm divide the calendar. For an exporter whose route to market runs through the integrator who writes the specification, being legible to a certified network professional is now a product requirement. Amtune publishes Dante and AES67 audio modules, AV-over-IP decoders and HDMI and DVI hybrid matrices against exactly that reading list.