Fidelity International transforms new office with rapid Ashton Bentley AV installation

Background

Fidelity International is a global company, providing investment management services. As a global organization, Fidelity relied heavily on AV conferencing and was frustrated with its existing complex multiple vendor-based systems, that were unreliable and difficult to support over a growing and geographically diverse estate.

Fidelity moved to their new offices in Gurgaon, India, housing 2,200 employees and a range of different-sized rooms requiring AV conferencing: Meeting rooms, a boardroom, breakout areas, and configurable training/meeting rooms. It sought a better, simpler, and more intuitive solution for their new offices.

Goals

Fidelity had two goals for the project:

1. Systems should be intuitive and simple to use so that individuals can operate the technology without assistance, with a unified user experience across all rooms and global sites.
2. The new technology should be supported remotely, unlike in old offices.

Solution

After extensive evaluation, Fidelity selected Ashton Bentley for their radically different approach to room system design; a complete technology solution, including furniture.

The various room requirements were discussed and then quickly configured using Ashton Bentley’s standard off-the-shelf systems, while meeting the architect’s brief.

As all systems are pre-configured, on-site assembly was easily completed by local company Esco, with no requirement for Ashton Bentley to be present, reducing costs further. Ashton Bentley’s two-man team arrived towards the end of the project to finalize the installation and commission.

Each system takes hours rather than days to install, which enabled Fidelity to work to a short project timeline and save costs. All systems were installed and commissioned over a period of eight weeks.

The systems supplied were quantities of:

• Huddle; single 55” display with attached 4 or 5-seat table
• ab One55 (Touch and non-Touch): single 55” display
• ab Two55 (Touch and non-Touch); dual 55” display
• ab Two75 (Touch); dual 75” 4K display

Variety of table sizes ranging from 4 to 12 seats, all with integrated power, data, USB, and laptop input retractors.

Most systems were pre-wired for the customer-supplied Polycom VC and Wyse clients, as Ashton Bentley’s systems are vendor-agnostic towards the peripherals used in them

Ashton Bentley systems have only five active components that are common across all systems and are easy to swap out. So, a local spare inventory was low-cost and easy to keep on site. The training was given to Esco, the local company, to facilitate fast repairs and aid maintenance.

Reducing development and design time provided significant cost savings. Had Fidelity gone down the traditional AV multi-vendor approach, fewer rooms could have been equipped.

The outcome

Fidelity moved its staff into the completed building, and within hours, all meeting rooms were being used by staff. What is significant is that no user training was needed; those staff members intuitively understood how to make the system work, so the Gurgaon site has no dedicated AV staff; everything is self-service.

Ashton Bentley’s deployment was carried out efficiently and quickly and delivered a consistent deployment that is truly scalable. As a result, it both met and exceeded the client’s expectations.