Money is being poured into conferencing and collaboration, and for good reason.
With the workplace evolving, there is a greater demand than ever before for enhanced communication capabilities, creating an enormous opportunity for both integrators and manufacturers to develop the next best conferencing solution.
And that demand isn’t limited to one meeting room.
Mersive is taking advantage of the demand for innovative conferencing solutions with the development of its new Solstice Multi-Room solution, part of Solstice 3.0, which will be showcased at ISE 2017.
Solstice, a collaboration solution that enables multiple users to connect simultaneously to a shared display using a range of devices over a WiFi or Ethernet network, has now extended its capabilities from in-room to room-to-room, helping to enhance collaboration across a broader area.
With Solstice Multi-Room, every pod will be able to start a multi-room session. Any user will be able to enter a session at any location where there is a pod.
Meeting Customer and Market Needs
According to Chris Jaynes, CTO of Mersive, the idea for a multi-room Solstice solution came from Mersive’s customers.
“Transparency and awareness of ongoing meetings is big. You’ll see that in our product – the idea that it’s much more egalitarian or that you may not want to have to preschedule a location and deal with resource allocation and specialized rooms. Instead, if you have a pod, you can pull in anywhere,” says Jaynes.
“We focused on those as our
first principles. How do we have the ability for real-time, on-demand meeting access and awareness? How can I, regardless of my location, find and join a meeting either by walking to the nearest room that has a pod or know where it’s actually happening and walk to the meeting itself? That stuff is all built into the product.”
Now with Solstice Multi-Room, users can have both connectivity for multiple rooms and multi-threaded content. According to Mersive, this puts content sharing on a level playing field with audio and video and dramatically improves user engagement so that meetings can become more collaborative and productive, yielding better results faster.
Solstice Multi-Room is additive to existing conferencing solutions and addresses the need for broader content sharing.
“There will not be a requirement for new hardware. If you have a pod in the room in Paris and want to talk to your offices in Ridgewood, New Jersey, you can put a pod there, and you’re off and running. There’s nothing new from a hardware standpoint. This is not going to require a different type of hardware platform from us,” says Rob Balgley, CEO of Mersive.
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While new hardware is not required, pods will require software upgrades and enterprise use.
“[Solstice] Multi-Room will become part of the enterprise product suite. We’re not changing the price. I think that’s going to surprise people because it is a considerable step up in capability,” says Balgley.
“I don’t think we’re being foolish here. We realize that there are going to be a lot of people who, if they have 18 pods today, are going to need 100 pods. What we’d rather do is have people buy more pods than try to charge them for every pod that they’re going to buy.”
Mersive also took into account the evolution of meeting culture, in addition to its customers’ feedback, when developing Multi-Room.
“What we believe is that these [pods] should be everywhere to support the kind of meeting culture that’s coming online right now. If I have 60 huddle rooms and a hundred official conference rooms, it’ll leverage those rooms. You drop a thousand-dollar pod in the room. I can dodge into that room if I’m late for a meeting and join it from that room without any additional infrastructure,” says Jaynes.
Stop by Mersive’s booth at ISE 2017 in Amsterdam, February 7-10 to see Solstice Multi-Room in action.
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