As workplaces continue to evolve, the challenges on system integrators to provide the right technology for those customers increases greatly.
Most of the companies that applied to be 2016 CI Industry Leaders expressed a proficiency in the corporate space, showing we may never truly be done bringing offices into the future. Adtech CFO Erik Waters says the company has had “increasing success focusing less on the technology itself and more on the benefits of use.
Clients are looking for an understanding of what the systems will do to increase their productivity.” Waters describes Adtech as “process- and system-focused,” noting the company “continually invest[s] in new software and process tools to improve collaboration and efficiency.
Inventory management and scheduling are two biggest challenges, especially dealing with changing customer timelines. The biggest opportunity is in service and recurring monitoring relationships.” Advance Technology president Rob Simopoulos sees the shift to open-concept workspaces going strong.
“To work with these environments we have been deploying huddle and conference room technology that provide synergy within the space,” he says.
“Our proactive service model allows our remote engineers to detect and react to hardware failures before the customer identifies that there is a problem. Once [the problem is] detected, our remote engineering team is able to diagnose and often able to repair the problem remotely without the need to roll a truck. Our customers are benefiting significantly in the limited system downtime and the quick repair we provide through this program.”
“Advanced AV marketing director Marina Gregory sees strength in the company’s ability “to join with and work in harmony with client design and implementation teams. Post-sales expertise in the AV/IT implementation, experienced project management and technical service support are all capabilities required to implement technologies across global enterprises. Managed services and our network operations center have provided operational client feedback, which allows us to design better solutions moving forward.”
Advanced AV also offers a Network Operations Center and AV as a service, including cloud-based technology, is a focus as well. Anderson Audio Visual VP of operations Chris Bosworth describes the corporate market as “robust and growing.”
“We feel we are strong in this market because we have partnered with the right customers, and built strong relationships with these customers,” he says. “Our single biggest opportunity is in our managed services offerings. We are heavily focused on growing this market segment, specifically the remote monitoring portion of managed services.”
AVI Systems marketing communications manager Kelly Perkins finds increased demand in the corporate space for UC integration within the meeting space and utilization reporting and analytics. AVI’s account base “continues to encourage AVI’s innovation in how people meet and where they meet,” she says.
“Decentralization of workgroups and the democratization of video and collaboration tools continue to drive demand for simple, pervasive, room designs that include software-based collaboration tools and platforms.”
“Additionally, enterprises are continuing to look to AV and video as a core communications infrastructure and along with the budgets come the responsibility to demonstrate the positive impact of workforce productivity and the need to lower operating costs,” says Perkins.
“More and more, AVI is being asked to address these issues with creative and comprehensive applications that streamline workflow integration and provide analytics on knowledge worker utilization, system availability and productivity analytics.”