Over the past several months, we’ve talked a lot about one of the largest trends overtaking the commercial AV industry: a decisive shift from owning conference room equipment to using audio-visual systems as a service. AV as a service makes sense — these days, technology systems depreciate so rapidly that owning them is no longer worth the investment.

But to truly understand the value of purchasing conference room systems on a subscription-based model, you must know what you’re getting as part of the managed services contract. It’s not just hardware on a payment — it’s 100%, fully covered, end-to-end support. Under a managed services agreement, all ownership costs and responsibilities rest in the provider’s hands, not yours.

What you get is pure service for a fixed price. So, what does that look like in your Scottsdale, AZ, or global conference room managed by Level 3 Audiovisual? Keep reading to find out.

You might say that AV technology deployment has always been a few steps behind IT deployment. The reasons for this are varied, but some of it stems from the technology itself. Information technology hardware and software shifted from purely proprietary technology islands to more standardized, interoperable platforms earlier than audio-visual technology. In that process, standards and management systems grew up around IT to help manage scaled, rapid deployment of these systems.

For better or (mostly) worse, AV technology did not benefit from the same technology standardization until much later. AV equipment and systems, for the most part, have not benefitted from management standards and technology like SNMP, which helps monitor and manage large numbers of connected devices. As a result, large-scale AV deployments have always been more difficult to manage and support. While that’s changing, many other challenges have contributed to the difficulties in AV deployment, whether it’s in a Phoenix corporate campus or around the world. Let’s examine these in more detail below and explore how managed deployment services can help.

Using simulation for medicine and healthcare education is at the forefront of healthcare technology applications in universities and training hospitals across the United States. Medical simulation labs are sophisticated educational tools that help prepare our future doctors and nurses for a safe and confident entrance to the world of medical care.   

Planning and building a new healthcare simulation lab (or remodeling an existing one) is a complex process with several moving parts. Your facility’s goals and objectives, space limitations, equipment needs, and more must be addressed early to ensure the final product meets your expectations and can fulfill your program goals.

Below, we outline key considerations to keep in mind during the planning stages of a medical simulation lab for your facility in New York, City, NY, or worldwide.

We seem to be in the age of everything as a service or subscription. Food delivery from Hello Fresh? Check. Razor blades from Harry’s and Gillette? Check. All the music you can listen to from Spotify and Apple Music? Check. More video than you can ever watch in your lifetime on Netflix? Check.

We all might be jaded and think, this is no big deal; you could see this coming. It may well be because all these services are completely mainstream with hundreds of millions or billions of users. To some extent, if you understood well the underlying technologies that enabled these transformations, you might have seen it coming. But while we all can now happily stream 50 million tracks of music from our favorite service, it’s important to understand that this model was a wrenching revolution for the music industry, all the way from the creator artists to the dominant music labels. The same has happened with SaaS (software as a service) and other sectors.

As a leading commercial AV  operating nationally out of Tempe, AZ, Level 3 Audiovisual is in a unique position to tell you about what’s coming next – AV as a service or subscription. You may have already seen it coming. Perhaps you’re investigating it or even employing some parts of this model. Why? Because once you analyze it carefully, like other subscription models, this one makes compelling sense for many companies. And it's going to be a revolution, too. Keep reading below as we make a case for commercial AV as a subscription. No, we’ll stop short of an acronym for this one!

Booking a free meeting space is one of the most common pain points workplace leaders face in the office. Often, disorganized scheduling systems lead to double-bookings that slow the flow of operations and result in lost productivity. And not only do double-bookings result in office inefficiencies but simply securing meeting space is hugely time-wasting for organizations. One research study suggests that workers spend up to 60 minutes per week searching for available conference rooms. 

Meeting room systems are incredibly costly for your organization to set up and maintain. One solution for optimizing room efficiency is conference room scheduling that gives employees complete access to when and where meeting rooms are available 24/7. Crestron’s room scheduling solutions help your organization – whether in Tempe, AZ, or across the globe – manage the flow of people and ideas. Keep reading to learn how.

Once, in the not-too-distant past, office workers all had the same meeting experiences. Participants gathered in a conference room to discuss performance data, collaborate on upcoming projects, and brainstorm new ideas together. Then the coronavirus pandemic triggered a massive paradigm shift in how and where we work, ushering in a new era of remote workforces and digital workspaces. In the post-pandemic workplace, hybrid meetings with in-person and remote participants are the new norm, and now meeting experiences aren’t the same for everyone. 

Now, the goal of modern conference room design isn’t equality, where employees have the same meeting experiences, but equity, where employees have fair meeting experiences. Simply put: how can we make the hybrid meeting experience good for everyone?

Keep reading to learn three considerations for redesigning your conference rooms in Scottsdale, AZ, or worldwide to be more equitable for all participants.

Once upon a time, there was an IT department and an AV department, and never the twain met. We jest; that’s not completely true. But they were typically separate departments, and the AV systems of the past had few dependencies on the technology stack managed by the IT department.

Over the past two decades, video conferencing started changing the paradigm. At first, video conferencing systems were expensive, proprietary solutions that depended on specific protocols needed to run inside company networks. Then, these systems started converging on standardized digital formats and protocols and becoming integrated into unified communication systems. As a result, the dependencies on IT-managed technology grew, but video conferencing was still about connecting one group of people in a meeting room to another one across a campus or the country.

Unified communications (UC) solutions make digital transformation possible in the workplace. At its core, UC requires cloud-hosted software that supports voice-over-IP telephony, audio and video conferencing, and messaging. More robust platforms like Microsoft Teams also support collaboration and information sharing tools like digital whiteboarding, file sharing, and co-authoring and editing. 

Cloud-based UC platforms make it possible for hybrid workforces to work anywhere, on any device they feel most comfortable using. And when digital communication and collaboration tools are integrated with office hardware, UC solutions create user-friendly, standardized meeting room experiences across all meeting spaces in an organization.