Systems for Corporations
"Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success."
- Henry Ford

Visual information technologies go a long way towards helping people come together. Whether a video conferencing system to stay in touch with other offices and customers or a multimedia system designed to impart corporate knowledge into the employee, AV technologies and integrated systems can literally create success.

There is no doubt that communication technology is first embraced and incubated in the crucible of corporate competition.

Corporate America has learned that it takes top notch people and excellent communication among them to stay ahead of the competition and make good, sound business decisions everyday.

The flow of information from the databases and data-gathering sources at the outposts of an organization must be managed and delivered in a cohesive manner that ensures maximum intelligibility to the maximum number of people within that organization.

To do this, there simply is no better means than multimedia presentation and conferencing systems. Whether you are trying to convince board members to agree on a new acquisition or show sales people the latest strategies for success, the presentation technology of the organization is the means with which it can be efficiently accomplished.

Design for the corporate system first starts with the application at hand. Among the most likely:

• Training Room Systems
  Video Conferencing Systems
• Briefing/Presentation Systems
• Board Room Systems
• Conference Center Systems
• Campus Distribution Systems
• Wide Area Network Video Delivery
• Customer Meeting/Presentation Centers

Of course, many of these systems "cross over" to one another as more and more often specialization is tossed aside for flexibility and investment leveraging. Training rooms are used as video conferencing facilities (and distance learning centers). Conference centers are turned into customer preview facilities. Companies with facilities all over the country or world are increasingly turning to WAN's for a major source to their training and conference rooms.

General Projection has extensive experience in integrating simple conference room systems on a local level or entire corporate campus's spread out across a city, state or the nation. Whether setting up a video conference network to include New York, Paris and Tokyo or building a training system for the latest version of Windows, we've design it and built that!

Design Resources
If you are in the process of designing a new facility or upgrade, visit our AV System Design section. In this we cover a variety of design topics and considerations as well as provide resources to some excellent design information sites. Also, visit our Vendor Support page for links to vendors of products that may fit your needs.

Many corporate facilities require furniture that will support the audiovisual and video conferencing needs of the project (such as custom conference tables, smart lecterns and teaching stations). Visit our Furnishing Design considerations page for more information on that subject.

Success Stories
General Projection has built corporate board rooms for many of the Fortune 100 companies as well as briefing and conference facilities for medium and smaller business around the nation. We've built major facilities for such familiar names as IBM, AT&T, Hewlett-Packard, Texas Instruments, Pacific Bell and GTE. Our experience in corporate facilities is extensive and we understand the special constraints and challenges that businesses face when building a communications infrastructure (such as deployment and training costs, software configuration control and information security issues).

Corporate Showcases/Customer Collaboration Centers
Companies that are in the high tech industries or simply depend upon technologies to perform their roles and produce their products will often showcase their capabilities in customer-centric facilities which require significant, large-scale AV and video conferencing capabilities.

Center for Innovation.

Training Centers
Today, no one doubts the value of training. A well-trained employee base forms a keystone in the success of the organization as a whole. How to provide that training is an important question. Fortunately, today's communications technologies allow companies to install systems that are capable of training, video conferencing and general presentations as well. Change over is usually as simple as a button press. Dedicated training centers as well as those designed for several purposes is a specialty of General Projection.

T. Rowe Price Corporate Campus, Owings Mills, Maryland

Charles Schwab Headquarters, San Francisco

Heritage Foundation, Virginia

The Freedom Forum, San Francisco

Video Conferencing
The ability to communicate with other offices, customers and vendors has become the "fax machine" of the late '90's for corporate America. Video conferencing isn't justified now by the standards that were used five years ago: travel savings; but rather they are justified by the phenomenon of communication with a visual element. Being able to see the person you are talking to as well as collaborate with them on documents, computer applications and the like creates a much greater increase in productivity, intelligibility and is extremely efficient.

Entergy Corporation - Worldwide video conferencing capability for a mega-utility.

Salomon Smith Barney - Manhatten, New Jersey and Tampa facilities.

Board Rooms/Conference Facilities
Corporate America relies on the leadership capabilities of its management (Dilbert principles aside). Companies have found that when the most senior of management has access to critical information (often presented in a graphical format) they make much better and obviously more informed decisions. Technology in the board room has become essential for the successful running of a company.

Note that our MetLife project (see below) was selected for "Best in Boardrooms" by Presentations Magazine

Metropolitan Life (MetLife) - Board of Director's room.

Kimberly-Clark Corporation - the Board Room for makers of Huggies, Kleenex and other well-known products.

Storage Technologies Corporation -conference and board room facilities for a $2 billion data storage solutions company.

Wyndham Resorts - Corporate HQ, Dallas

United States Fidelity and Guaranty (USF&G) - Corporate facilities, Maryland.

Command and Operations Centers
Corporate America has recognized the need to manage emergencies as well as far-flung networks. In order for the specialists that run such a nerve center to better understand the "big picture", command centers are becoming increasingly familiar throughout the corporate landscape. Visualization is the key. Usually this means two or more large screen systems with multiple workstations oriented towards these. Operator monitors can be routed to any screen and an instant picture of every situation is available to all. The ubiquitous CNN playing on one screen or in a window on a screen!

Pacific Bell Internet Operations Center - San Francisco corporate command center.

Southern Bell Real Time Operations Center - Atlanta

Specialty
Multimedia systems are being used in so many ways today. Whether for retail operations, entertainment or other applications, the ability to use visual and audio information within greater exhibits or facilities is giving designers options they have not had before.

National Football League - retail operations in Charlotte International Airport.