T. Rowe Price Corporate Campus

Introduction

T. Rowe Price and its affiliates manage about $179 billion in assets (as of June 30, 2000) for more than seven million individual and institutional accounts and serve as investment manager of the T. Rowe Price family of no-load mutual funds.

The firm is one of the largest providers of both investment and administrative services to corporate retirement plans such as 401(k) plans.

Founded in 1937, T. Rowe Price is one of the largest no-load fund managers in the country, offering investors more than 80 different funds, brokerage services, and a wide range of electronic services and investor assistance tools.

The Corporate Campus

T. Rowe Price maintains facilities around the country. While its headquarters are located in downtown Baltimore, T. Rowe has built a large, multi-building corporate campus in Owings Mills, Maryland just outside of Baltimore.

The T. Rowe Price campus

The latest addition to the "family of buildings" are two large facilities designed to house a large variety of activities the company performs. Among those are the training centers for the company.

General Projection was engaged by T. Rowe to design and build the high-tech training facilities throughout the new buildings. This was to include approximately 15 training rooms of various sizes and capabilities along with multi-purpose rooms for large-scale presentations and even a fitness center for T. Rowe Price employee's entertainment while exercising!

The completed fitness center contains many great media choices for employees as they exercise.

Design

While there were many goals and objectives set for General Projection during the design phase of the project, several were key:

• Flexibility in design to allow for the easy addition of new technologies as well as upgrade paths for each major subsystem.
• Connectivity throughout the buildings to allow for both video conferencing as well as corporate broadcasting company-wide.
• High-brightness, high-resolution presentation capabilities to allow for maximum lighting in the various rooms during presentations.
• Excellent sound quality and, as importantly, excellent control over ambient sounds and room-to-room sound leakage.

To meet these requirements, General Projection selected the following in its design:

For video presentation we utilized Hughes/JVC projection products. Signal conditioning and routing is handled by Extron equipment. Source equipment includes Sony professional VCR's and CATV tuners as well as Sony cameras in all video conferencing rooms.

Audio systems include Crown amplifiers, Lectrosonics equalization and Sound Advance transducers throughout the ceilings (these provide the excellent sound output as well as allowing for tight control over sound leakage).

Remote control is handled by AMX touch panels and networks. T. Rowe is in the process of having General Projection deploy an AMX network based solution that will allow for IP, WAN and internet control over their assets as they see fit.

Multimedia Teaching Station

One of the highlights of the project are teaching stations designed by T. Rowe staff, General Projection and the teaching station vendor NovaDesk. These desks can roll about the room if required (though they are large and tend to remain in place!). Each contains the electronics for the stand-alone capability of the room. This includes the source equipment, routers, remote control hub and all computer equipment and interfacing.

A trainer simply presses a few buttons on the touch panel to set the lights, close the shades, lower the screen and commence a presentation.

Centralized Control Capability

In addition to tremendous stand-alone capability, General Projection designed a centralized control center that will allow T. Rowe to produce and/or broadcast video conferences or corporate television signals to any or all rooms. This will allow the management of T. Rowe to present to every employee simultaneously.

Further, a bank of five PictureTel codecs allow any VTC-equipped room to communicate with other T. Rowe facilities around the country (as well as customers and vendors) through ISDN connectivity. The advantage provided here is that more than five rooms can perform a video conference. T. Rowe personnel simply "assign" a codec to a room thus leveraging their investment in video conferencing technology and making upgrading even easier.

Additionally, a full production facility was designed to allow for the creation of corporate videos and live broadcasts as well as interactive interviews between T. Rowe financial experts and the media (such as CNN/FN).

Multi Purpose Rooms

T. Rowe built a multi-purpose room in each building. These facilities are used for dining during the business day as well as for large (200+ persons) meetings. Very high brightness Hughes/JVC projection systems serve these rooms to allow for larger crowds. All of the sources designed to be available in a training room are also available in these impressive rooms. All source technology is housed in a VanSan lectern designed by General Projection and VanSan specifically for this project.

Success

Though only recently opened to the employees, the facility is already in regular use. The first major application for the rooms was T. Rowe's incredible efforts regarding Y2K. Few companies were as concerned or prepared as T. Rowe for the variety of predicted problems as the millennium changed. T. Rowe staffers utilized the various multimedia rooms as "command centers" that allowed the company to smoothly sail between centuries.

Additions to the system have included plasma display in the lobby and innovative networking capabilities that will allow even greater degrees of centralized control.

In short, the firm now has one of the most advanced training capabilities in the world...yet the operation of any single system is no more difficult than changing channels on a TV at home.

New!! This just in....General Projection was again selected by T. Rowe Price; this time to build T. Rowe's virtually identical campus facility in Colorado Springs. More soon....

For more information on corporate campus design and integration or other corporate multimedia communications systems, please fill out our Information Request form or email us at Solutions@genproj.com