I just had the opportunity to read an interesting analyst report that overviews new in-room technologies for collaboration, meeting room booking processes and utilization. It’s what the analyst firms are calling meeting room space management aka MRSM. And guess which company was included in the report? You got it Mersive and our Solstice Display Software.
We’re not strangers to MRSM, our Sol software solution was a pioneer in the “software defined displays” space and was instrumental for military organizations, oil and gas companies and emergency responders when setting up their “War Rooms”. These meeting rooms are essentially operation centers with video walls and multiple screens showing different feeds. (Sol is used in the White House and many other government offices today.)
White House Situation Room with Mersive solutions installed.
It was through Sol that we discovered the problem that Solstice solves: How to quickly and easily share media from lots of devices to a shared screen. In 2008 I was standing in the conference room of a customer that had just deployed a 22-million pixel wall powered by our Sol software. They were lamenting the fact that the video switching gear, even to move a few laptops onto the display, would cost over a hundred thousand dollars in hardware, and still not accomplish what they wanted. Literally on the plane ride home, Solstice as a conceptual architecture was born. As an entrepreneur and computer scientist, it was obvious to me that the 10+ billion dollar industry of video switching and control hardware needed a re-think from a software vantage point.
Solstice democratizes displays and brings professional media sharing and control to the mainstream meeting room. Recently, we’ve been introducing ways to manage your displays like any other IT resource through a centralized management dashboard. The era of the “pixel landscape” – a unified and manageable display infrastructure – has already arrived for many of our customers. Pretty exciting.
The analyst report mentions the firm is fielding questions from organizations looking to setup specialized rooms or enhance their conference rooms with technology that makes it easier to collaborate on content. These companies have realized that there are huge productivity gains to be had if meetings are faster to initiate, more collaborative and centered on the visual data and content that is stored on any of the devices that enter the room. This is exactly what I come across everyday as well in talking with our resellers, customers and partners, and I’ve blogged about the importance of visual data to decision making in the past.
A few of the things the report notes regarding what organizations are looking for in terms of smart collaborating meeting room technology include:
- Multiple steams shared wirelessly to multiple screens
- Interactive displays and gesture controls to collaborate on content. (Guess what our development team is working on Œwink’.)
- Smartphones and tables as input devices.
What types of meeting room technology are you using and which do you find the most useful?
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