RTI Dealer Training at AV Pro South

Buzz Delano

Principal Consultant, Delano Associates

AV Pro RTI training in St. Petersburg, Florida

I had the pleasure to attend a dealer training session for RTI at the AV Pro southern headquarters in St. Petersburg, Florida. AV Pro acquired RTI as an addition to their brand portfolio of solutions for integrators serving the residential smart home channel and systems integrators serving the commercial systems channel.

The focus of this two-day session was for an in-depth learning and practice session for experienced and new RTI integrators.  It was interesting to observe the “live learning” teaching moments by Vince Bova for eight students with and without prior RTI experience.  I thought this was impressive.

AV Pro has a well-appointed technical training room at St. Petersburg, housed in a rather interesting historical Florida building.  More on that later.  The training center is set-up with 12 learning workstations, each equipped with an RTI IST-10 Intelligent Surface Touchscreen with tabletop stand and a 12RU  rack loaded with an assortment of RTI, AV Pro, MX-Net and Audio Control products.  Dual projection screens provide students with a good view of the curriculum content, much of which is actual RTI programing interface and configuration scenes. RTI is in process to collaborate with Doorbird and Sonos for additional products for the racks for greater training resources.  Imagine that a smart doorbell system and the leading music and sound connection company’s products integrated with RTI and included in trainings.  These are solutions that every home needs.

Vince Bova, an Application Engineer for RTI for 8 years and previously an RTI dealer since 2004, led the training in a coherent, focused and patiently productive pace.  Each learning point was a logical progression and often included reference back to the previous learning points for context.  Vince led the teaching to effective pause points for questions and quick reviews.  The questions were focused and often seemed to be shared by most of the students.  Sometimes this would trigger some idea sharing between the integrator students. When I asked Vince how he saw the combination of AV Pro and RTI he replied “I am very pleased with the combination of AV Pro and RTI.  AV Pro brings RTI great resources that really benefit out dealers.” 

Another observation of Vince’s teaching style that I noted throughout was the phrase “everyone got it? or who needs more time?”  For the most part, ‘everyone got it’ but when someone raised their hand or spoke up for more time, the person needing more time to was on point with their need and soon confirmed success with the task. 

One additional common phrase from Vince was “let’s look at our mistakes, because that’s how we learn.”  This moment of intellectual honesty for all was effective. Mistakes happen during learning and as they were discovered; Vince and other student integrators helped each other to sort out their mistake and enable further progress to the learning project at hand. 

During the session and over lunch, the subject of AI arose more than once as it relates to RTI and AV Pro for the future. Vince explained that AV Pro is currently working on a customized AI tool. The present development phase includes preparing broad based support, documentation, manuals and educational content being entered. 

With eight integrator students in attendance, it felt as if this was a proper number of students for effective learning, teaching support and camaraderie. The room worked well for the session; AV Pro told me that there are plans to update and enhance certain aspects of the room in the future.  Of the eight students in attendance 4 were from Florida and others from Colorado, South Carolina, Massachusetts and California.  Everyone was talkative, engaged and committed to bettering themselves, their business and our profession of smart home technology integration.

The AV Pro “South” offices are in a historic section of St. Petersburg and in a historic building. Built in 1924 as the Bayboro Station power plant and serving this purpose for 50 years, drawing water from the harbor for cooling of its steam turbines. In the years since, various Florida marine research and oceanography institutions and university programs have been operated here. Currently the building houses the Tampa Bay Estuary Program and the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Southeast regional office. It is an impressive building, respectfully modernized while retraining important architectural elements. It is a great location for education sessions for all the AV Pro Global brands. Indoors, learning and collaboration abound and outdoors, the sunshine prevails with waterways and interesting restaurants and shops nearby. 

AV Pro South, St. Petersburg, Florida. A historical building from 1924