Crestron Electronics’ Director of UC Strategy, Joseph Sarrasin, has always seen complete resource unification as the objective for business procurement, and with Crestron’s latest release this is becoming a reality.
Blending the office space resourcing, service provision, and technology into a single fluid experience is not without its challenges, as it means rethinking the physical environment and its features in an integrated way, with the communication and collaboration tools we are more used to defining virtually. “It’s absolutely critical for that, that those technologies all speak to each other in a clean way”, Sarrasin explained.
“To create the necessary level of simplicity — for the facilities department to say, OK we’ve standardised on Crestron for our commercial lighting infrastructure and for our occupancy sensor infrastructure and for our audio video infrastructure, in addition to collaboration, that now makes sense to have all these pieces together and be managed on the same platform.”
The blended workspace on and offline
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Joseph Sarrasin[/caption]
Integrating UC based on Microsoft Teams with facilities management sounds at first like a contrast to the trend that many are predicting towards increased remote work in the new decade, but Sarrasin maintains that, for the large enterprises and public sector organisations they work with, it’s all part of the same vision for fluidity and real-time insight for competitive advantage:
“Some companies are saying, I need to absolutely maximise my investment in real estate — so things like people counting are starting to supplant occupancy detection.” Combined with embedded UC and collaboration applications which any user can connect any device to with a single touch, wherever they are, it means that the often-disliked concept of hot-desking becomes something more flexible and scalable - “it doesn't feel like you're using a space in a WeWork for the day, right? It just feels like the environment is able to morph around you, and really bring you into the ecosystem.”
