Working together across three continents: How the OneScreen team moves business forward using their own solution.

Challenge

As CEO, Mr. Munir was running a global company with a network of international offices doing business with hundreds of partners, distributors and resellers. Munir and his team quickly discovered the limitations of the communication and collaboration products available to facilitate the day-to-day video, audio, web conferencing and whiteboarding, most notably in ease of use.

“I’d walk into practically any conference room and try to make a video call,” said Sufian Munir, “twenty minutes later we’d still be trying to make the connection, instead of actually starting the meeting.”

Since the Company has offices across different continents they faced several difficulties while communicating with remote teams. It became obvious that what was essential, but missing in the market, was a solution that created barrier-free work flow to facilitate team integration and synergy. The team began to understand the importance of a collaboration tool that offered ease of use, flexibility, and options that promised interoperability with existing communication technologies organizations had already invested in.

The biggest challenges the OneScreen team faced:

1. Project delays from difficulty in communication amongst a globally dispersed team
2. Easy interaction, collaboration, and daily communication amongst a global team
3. Secure exchange of edited data in real time during remote meetings
4. Reducing the amount of travel required in order to have productive meetings
5. More effective sales meetings and engaging sales demonstrations

The OneScreen team crafted a customer survey to determine if their customers’ experiences with video conferencing and interactive whiteboards, mirrored their own. The results of the survey showed that 40 percent of customers were unable to use their high-end video conferencing solution regularly because it was too difficult to use and their investments were going to waste while teams became more frustrated.

Feedback from customers and Mr. Munir’s personal experience led to the creation of a better solution, one that integrates core conferencing and collaboration functionality into a single, easy-to-use product built on open platform with best brand components.

Solution

The driving force behind OneScreen was to create a device that people could easily use on a regular basis.

“Our idea was to make it as simple as possible for people to have productive meetings in a conference room ,” said  Munir. “We wanted to give them the tools for everything that they needed to do in a conference room, in one device that they felt comfortable using.”

Instead of engineering each component themselves, Munir and his team took a unique approach, which began by evaluating best-in-class technologies for video conferencing, interactive whiteboarding, video streaming, display, computing and collaboration, as identified by credible publications like PC Weekly, and forged them into single, easy to use, integrated solution called One Screen. In order to design a cost effective all-in-one solution, OneScreen partnered with Hitachi StarBoard for the interactive whiteboard component, and Logitech for the camera and wireless keyboard. Soon, the OneScreen team began using their product to overcome their inter-office challenges.

With OneScreen now the team can:

1. Effortlessly communicate with remote teams and global offices through a barrier-free work flow
2. Display, review and securely share critical information in real-time, from any location
3. Collaborate with dispersed team members frequently, which reduces the company’s travel expense while also saving time
4. Create more engaging sales meetings by demonstrating OneScreen’s capabilities along with its quality and ease of use
5. Regularly interact with teams from across the globe, strengthening employee relationships

Result

The interaction of OneScreen global offices has transformed completely, as colleagues are able to see the presence status and communicate in one click. This includes being able to exchange ideas, opinions and share crucial information.

“I feel more connected to all of the employees outside of San Diego than I used to,”said Munir.“I can walk through the demo room and call the other offices. Since our system is set up in a way that it auto answers, I can immediately see and start talking to them.”

This all-in-one solution has helped enhance sales and create more effective training demos as customers and employees alike, directly engage with OneScreen in a two-way video call. “It helps us have a longer conversation because the customer warms up to you when they actually see you. It definitely increases the opportunity for sales, ”said Munir. In addition, the installation of OneScreen has reduced the company’s travel cost tremendously by reducing the need for in person meetings. The simplistic user-friendly design of OneScreen facilitates daily use and encourages remote teams to engage in productive meetings from across the globe. It has played a crucial role in facilitating remote collaboration and establishing relationships between resellers and manufacturers. OneScreen is a cost effective and simple plug-and-play touch solution that has had a positive impact on the integration and performance of the OneScreen offices due to the increased frequency of communication amongst employees.

Conclusion

In the four years since Clary Icon sold the first OneScreen, the team has continued to hone the insights from thousands of customers looking for barrier-free work flow in conference and classrooms.

OneScreen is now the people-and-performance-centric solution that the team realized was needed by all organizations frustrated with technology that made communication and collaboration more difficult. OneScreen is the interoperable, unified, video collaboration solution significantly enhancing the efficiency and productivity of organizations around the world, including the OneScreen team.