Digital signage is an increasingly popular solution for a wide range of applications. For example, in restaurants, dynamic menus are displayed on digital signage, and pricing and availability can be changed quickly, especially useful in a moving supply environment. In offices, company announcements, promotions, social media posts, charitable drives, and important events can be put on digital signage to highlight information that may get crushed in the daily barrage of company emails and messaging. In building lobbies, digital signage can tell a story and build company brand images, and interactive versions can assist people in locating their destination in a building or campus. 

Digital signage design may be as simple as one display and one solution and person to manage the content in Tempe, AZ. But for large organizations, the complexity of deployment requires a strategy and management process. Read on below for four critical considerations in digital signage design and deployment for your enterprise or organization.

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.

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!

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.

Is hiring a managed service provider (MSP) just a euphemism for outsourcing? Outsourcing has a bit of a negative connotation, but it shouldn’t. Hiring a managed service provider to help with technology infrastructure is a business decision that must make sense strategically and financially. It is not solely about potential cost-saving through outsourcing but has everything to do with finding a better way to keep up with and manage an organization’s technology needs.

As we all know, the global pandemic created a new normal for millions of office-based workers around the world. Work moved from the office to the home, and communication and collaboration moved to digital mediums on computers, tablets, and smartphones. Now, with vaccines rising and the most dangerous health threats receding, employers are looking to bring workforces back to the office.

SaaS – Software as a Service – is a highly discussed topic in the technology world. Is there a software product on the planet that hasn’t moved to that model or is working on doing so? Even ubiquitous software with long histories like Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite have moved in that direction. If you use Zoom, Slack, Dropbox, Gmail, or a myriad of other popular applications and platforms, you are using a SaaS model.

So, what is managed software as a service (MSaaS)? In this post, we’d like to delve deeper into that subject, comparing the well-known SaaS model with this model that adds a layer of service and support. Read on to see how MSaaS builds on SaaS to provide a more customized, tailored approach to technology solutions for your enterprise, whether in Tempe, Arizona, or your worldwide locations.

Some years ago, AV systems tended to be separate projects and departments within organizations. While important, they were not tied to the computing and communication systems organizations used to run their business. The convergence of all information on digital technology has changed that. Today, collaboration platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams integrate communication, collaboration, and productivity to serve workers in offices and remote locations. This level of integration is forcing organizations to rethink AV infrastructure as an integral part of their technology strategy.