Kramer’s response to Gary Kayye’s blog post

At Kramer, we are committed to ethical transparency and honest communication. Recently, a blog post by Gary Kayye was published, containing several misleading and inaccurate statements about our company. In response, we have composed an open letter to address these claims directly and provide clarity.

We invite you to read our open letter below and gain a clearer understanding of the situation and our ongoing commitment to excellence.

An open letter to Gary Kayye

Tel Aviv, June 7^th, 2024: We at Kramer believe in ethical transparency, hence, we are obliged to start with a factual disclosure for the reading public: our company utilized your services during the years up to 2020. On or about that time, we realized there was no value in your services. Further, we believe in ethical advertising and the clear separation of paid advertising and infomercials (declared as such) from objective reporting.

We believe our technology, products and people can speak for themselves in the market. We do not see value in spending capital on mitigating our message to the market by self-proclaimed connoisseurs. 

We terminated the engagement with you and your publication. The common, ethical, and honest thing to do was for you to highlight this obvious conflict of interest in the blog post.

We demand that you disclose what other conflicts of interest were involved in formulating this blog post, a few days before the opening of Infocomm 2024.

While everyone is entitled to their own opinion, they are not entitled to their own facts. We wish to set the record straight regarding a few of the facts you articulated:

1. You note: “But then Clint left”. Mr. Clint Hoffman’s employment was terminated by the company. In the last two years we have built a strong team that blends the younger, tech-savvy generation, with industry veterans. Our customer engagement and service have expanded to reach customers across the US and north America to unprecedented levels. Our engagement with customers is based on professionalism, our strong portfolio and dedication to customer service.

2. Most of the companies in our industry are privately held, and their financial data is confidential. Our industry is notoriously opaque when it comes to market-share data. Apparently, you, Mr. Kayye, are clairvoyant! You seem to know who “number one” in the market is and who the “top five” are.
We at Kramer tend to be more modest when it comes to facts we can only, at best, estimate. It is our belief that most of the company names mentioned in your blog post currently have total global revenues lower than our US revenues. It is our estimation that we are currently the third-largest full-solution AV company in the market.

3. It seems you have formulated an opinion on our Panta Rhei ecosystem solutions based on superficial web browsing. As the industry shifts towards cloud-based solutions and IT convergence, we believe these types of superficial opinions made by industry jesters carry no weight.
Our Panta Rhei system is the most advanced audiovisual ecosystem in the industry, setting new standards for performance and integration. We are excited to have a fully packed schedule in place of existing and potential customers visiting us at Infocomm 2024 to demonstrate some of Panta Rhei’s capabilities.

Our investment in research and development is among the highest in the industry, driving continuous innovation and excellence. Over the last three years, Kramer has introduced numerous breakthrough products across various dimensions, including but not limited to: 

• AVoIP solutions: Launching the KDS-100, KDS-17, KDS-7, and an advanced management platform. 
• Series 3: Featuring state-of-the-art extenders, switchers, matrices, and more. 
• USB-C portfolio: Offering a broad range of USB-C solutions, including switchers, cables, and extenders. 

4. We agree with you that our VIA product is “perfection.” It is lamentable that you chose to demean the efforts of our team members by claiming, falsely, that “the company didn’t make themselves.” Not only has VIA undergone multiple new releases since earlier in the decade, but its functionality is embedded in Panta Rhei for a hardware-free collaboration solution!

5. Finally, you capstone the blog post with the insinuation that our company may “…soon take a bow…”. This is a laughable, baseless speculation. Our company is one of the top three full-solutions professional audio-video companies in the market. Moreover, our controlling shareholder is a multi-billion-dollar private equity enterprise.  

Contrary to the comment at the bottom of the blog post, the rAVe team did not reach out to us for comment, but instead contacted an agency we have not worked with for over seven months – another example being out-of-touch and ill-informed, Mr. Kayye. We are always approachable for media comments.

As the industry undergoes transformation and a generational shift, we can vouch to participate in the industry-wide effort to elevate our standards to new, more transparent, scalable business practices. Blogs like this are nothing but a swan song of yesteryears.

We are all excited to meet, greet, and interact with our large existing and new customers at InfoComm 2024 at booth #C8327 Central Hall.