Ask the Programmer
Ask The Programmer Episode 253 - Dan Ferrisi Asks About the Future of Dedicated Control Systems
15 Feb 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
From the world of AV programming and control with James King, I'm Steve Greenblatt, and this is Ask the Programmer. Hey, James, how are you? I'm looking forward to today's episode and glad to be with you.
I'm doing good, Steve.
And how are you doing? doing pretty well. We are able to welcome back our most popular and most frequented guest here at Ask the Programmer. You and I get to be the audience a little bit and get to answer some of the questions that are posed by our guest today. He's none other than Dan Farisi, group editor, commercial security with Emeralds.
And he's in charge of commercial integrator and security sales and integration. Welcome back, Dan.
Thank you so much, Steve. Thank you so much, James. I always appreciate the opportunity to see you both, to talk to you both. I'm honored to return once again and really be in the nice position of being able to share questions from our audience, from our readers who may not be able to interact with you every day.
And I can kind of be their intermediary, be their voice, and make sure their programming-related questions are being answered. It's a treat.
Thanks for being with us. And I'm sure that your title also has expanded because I know you continue to grow and evolve and take on more responsibilities. But we appreciate the time that you spend with us. And we're glad to have you on the show. And if you have heard Dan before, he was with us about a dozen times and most recently in episodes 236 and 237. So check those and then you could
also rewind back to many more. So thank you for being with us again, Dan.
Always happy to be.
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Chapter 2: Will dedicated control systems remain essential in AV systems?
So there are benefits to it if you're looking at it from standalone, isolated systems that aren't going to change a lot. I think another key element, and I think that James will agree, is the ability to
scale and manage these systems because that seems to come up awful lot is that I'm not going to just have this one, I'm going to have several and I need to be able to know that I can replicate them and then when they need to be updated, I don't have to go to every single system and update them.
So those are some of the things that come to mind for me, you know, that those are also some of the advantages of the centralized system, you know, and some of the disadvantages of the centralized system is the complexity of it, the time constraints.
that you have to put into it, the learning curve of them, not to knock what we do, but there aren't a lot of people that can just sit down at a computer and figure it out and make a system work within the first day or possibly even within the first week. So I wanted to make sure that we provided you with
as much of a well-rounded argument about this because I think that we can be biased about it, but there are different things to consider. And I think that there are very tangible qualities that we have to look at.
I think it's really, oh, go ahead. No, you go, Dan. I was just going to say, I do appreciate the objectivity you brought to it, the fact that you did kind of consider the pros and cons on each side rather than saying, well, you know, clearly this is far better, and then give a straw man presentation of the other. There are arguments on both sides.
I think the scalability argument you made is pretty compelling, though, the idea that you don't want to have to kind of
reinvent the wheel in every room you want to be able to kind of multiply these systems and have it apply at scale right yeah no one thing i would i wanted to add is that we didn't really touch on and that is going like diversity with the app you know personal devices is the security like to have a personal device communicate with the av system you've got to grant them access to it
And then that opens up security concerns and all that stuff where you have a closed system. Even if you do a centralized close, and what I mean like do a centralized AV control system where you can talk to servers and stuff and not go for personal devices. then you can control that security a little more. We can't control security on personal devices. We can set best practices.
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Chapter 3: What are the pros and cons of dedicated control systems versus apps?
Thank you for having me.
James, any final thoughts, anything you wanted to close on and how can people get in touch with you and continue some of these conversations?
Again, I want to echo what Steve said. Thank you, Dan. Thank you to the CIA listeners who are bringing these questions to Dan so that Steve and I can address them and hopefully are answering the concerns that our listeners and the CIA readers have to programming. And Dan has always done a great job of being that conduit of bringing these questions forward so we can get them addressed.
Hopefully they're in the way everyone wants to hear them. And, again, if you want to get a hold of me, Google me. You'll find me. I'm out there.
Absolutely. So one thing to add, and this would be a great place also, Dan, we welcome you to join us there. And even if you wanted to lead some of the conversation, we have a group on LinkedIn for Ask the Programmer, and we've been trying to stimulate some polls and some discussions and post these episodes. So we welcome everyone to join us in the LinkedIn group for Ask the Programmer.
For me, you could reach me at Steve Greenblatt on social platforms. LinkedIn is where I spend most of the time that I have to devote to social media these days. And it's a great place to be connecting with the AV community. My company, Control Concepts, is a supporter of this podcast, and they provide some of the building blocks that programmers need to get their projects done.
So whether you're integrating with a device or you're looking to add functionality to your system, you can find out more about that at controlconcepts.net. If you are watching this show on YouTube, you could also take us on the go and your favorite podcast player and listen to us. If you're listening, you can watch us and view this at your leisure on YouTube.
Either place, please leave us a rating, review, comment. We really like to hear from you and we'd really be honored if you would share your favorite episode and let other people know that we're out there. So thank you for listening. Thank you for watching. Until next time, this has been Ask the Programmer.
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