Mersive
Redefining Meeting Room Culture via Wireless Collaboration

Audiovisual collaboration solutions take many forms as both market requirements and technical possibilities have evolved rapidly. Huddle rooms and open plans are substituting traditional conference halls while mobile trends such as BYOD are gaining traction. And with mobile computing now pervasive, the need to bring digital content into the meeting room via laptops and smartphones has also become crucial. Enter Mersive, a global provider of wireless media streaming and collaboration solutions that allow multiple users to connect simultaneously to a common display from various devices over a Wi-Fi or Ethernet network.

Founded with equal parts avant-garde technology and zeal for innovative and positive change, Mersive is the brainchild of Christopher Jaynes, a renowned visionary in the space of multi-media with a Ph.D. under his belt. The firm is, in fact, an offshoot of Jaynes’ doctoral research on computer vision. Mersive has taken a results-focused approach to the collaboration problem: How can workplace solutions improve productivity of the workforce and ROI of the technology investment? Mersive pertinently answers this query through its core product suite— Solstice—designed to put digital content on a par with audio and video in the meeting room.

While conferencing solutions have been offering multi-threaded video and voice support for years, content has remained limited to non-responsive, single-threaded presentations. Solstice transforms this archetypal practice by enabling meeting participants to exchange content interactively within a meeting room or across various geographical locations on the same enterprise network with Solstice Multi-Room. This is where Solstice Pod, a turnkey appliance that integrates Solstice collaboration software with the hardware platform, comes into play. The Solstice Pod enables users to easily connect, share, and manage content on the main meeting-room display. The shared content can come from any source accessible by the users’ laptop or mobile device, including the ability to leverage online resources to enhance and render a more simplified view of their demonstration.

Complementary to Solstice Pod is the Solstice Dashboard, a centralized IT management tool for administering enterprise display infrastructure.

With Solstice in place, participants communicate better, meetings pan out faster, and the outcome proves to be more effective

"Whenever a Pod is linked to a display, it not only turns the display into a more egalitarian, universally-accessed collaboration pallet but also enables technology administrators to monitor and manage the entire process centrally,” explains Jaynes. The Solstice Dashboard is available as a free download and runs in Windows environments; hence, customers need not deploy any new hardware but easily install the Dashboard and manage all Solstice displays across various locations on a single network. With the Dashboard, Solstice provides a technology management tool to complement the end-user collaboration capabilities in order to deliver a complete, scalable solution for enterprises with up to hundreds or even thousands of meeting spaces.

With Solstice in place, participants communicate better, meetings pan out faster, and the outcome proves to be more effective. Through better meetings, organizations are able to harness the intellectual assets of their workforce and ultimately maximize productivity and ROI.

Jaynes elucidates the merits of Solstice by citing a business use case of a large manufacturing company. The client’s challenge was that they were lagging behind the curve of adopting latest technologies and their meeting culture was faltering. They started off by deploying programmable logic controller (PLC) with the intent of driving innovation and boosting meeting room productivity. Next, they employed Solstice in ten rooms alongside competing technologies and used motion sensors to detect the winning technology. The champion was Mersive Solstice’s touch user interface, built on a mobile platform, which gave access to terabytes of compelling data on the cloud. “We are now their room standard for every new building or room that gets deployed and our product is deeply integrated with their workflow,” Jaynes observes.