When The Beach Company, a 75-year-old real estate development firm in Charleston, S.C. decided to relocate and modernize its headquarters, a brand new downtown mixed-use building called The Jasper presented the ideal location.
The Tech Decision
Even before global corporate culture shifted to remote work in early 2020, The Beach Company had determined that its new headquarters would leverage the latest commercial AV technologies to improve communications, support modern collaboration and present a forward-thinking atmosphere to visitors and staff.
The Beach Company conducts a lot of meetings, partner visits and virtual collaborations, so they contracted local technology integrator experts The Office People to design and install a network of displays for virtual collaboration with plug-and-play simplicity, bring your own device (BYOD) convenience and future-readiness.
The Solution
According to Jeff Hazelwood, The Beach Company’s manager of technology and information security, the finished space makes an important state-of-the-art statement to visitors, presenting a vision that matches the city’s beauty.
“We designed our AV experience at The Jasper with several goals in mind,” Hazelwood says. “It needed to be easy-to-use, with a familiar user experience from room-to-room, in addition to being future proof. Plus, we really went for the ‘wow’ factor. Thanks to the experts at The Office People, we have created a display on the inside that is as equally stunning as the views of beautiful Charleston just outside our windows.”
The full installation included a 130-inch all-in-one direct-view LED (DVLED) display, a 98-inch 4K LCD display, a 3×3 paneled LCD video wall composed of nine 55-inch 4K screens, multiple 65-inch conference room displays and a 65-inch OLED wallpaper display that is a mere 3.85mm thick, all from LG.
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With the building sitting about a block from the Ashley River and the office occupying the fifth and sixth floors, The Beach Company’s largest digital display is actually so vibrant and bright that it is clearly visible from boats passing by.
“The Jasper is one of the largest buildings in Charleston, and The Beach Company is very well known, so this is a landmark of sorts for the city,” says Sean Mummert, CEO of The Office People. “If you’re in the harbor, you can actually see the 130-inch all-in-one DVLED display from a boat, and we know that because people have commented to Jeff [Hazelwood] about it. We see DVLED as the only technology that can reliably overpower the full sunlight this room receives throughout the day, and still perform flawlessly for decades.”
Each conference and meeting room in the HQ building is named for a past development project, and any time the displays aren’t being used, they function as digital signage and run content highlighting that project.
While the majority of the meeting rooms host a 65-inch 4K display, the 130-inch DVLED and the 3×3 video wall present much larger digital canvases. These oversized displays have proven excellent tools to enable social distancing, with both rooms sometimes being used to include more people in a single meeting.
The system’s full design offers major benefits, as every digital display is connected through an AV over IP solution with a Barco wireless collaboration system that enables network-wide content distribution and automated digital signage functions.
The system design also enables a true plug-and-play BYOD atmosphere, so no matter who is running a meeting, what brand their personal devices are or what collaboration platform they use, they can connect simply and quickly in any room without instruction or assistance.
In addition to the displays, The Office People also installed new high-end pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras, microphones, speakers, tabletop tablets and a room scheduling/reservation system that uses the 365 Outlook platform.
The Impact
“Each display in The Beach Company’s new headquarters is stunning in its own right, but it’s very hard to imagine a visitor today who won’t be blown away by the LG OLED wallpaper in the CEO’s office,” Mummert says.
“LG calls it ‘wallpaper’ because that’s really the best way to describe it; at less than 4mm thick, it basically becomes one with the wall. When you’re hosting other CEOs and business leaders, that is a statement of professionalism and forward thinking that a basic TV from a big box store could never provide.”
The Office People’s Director of Technology Joshua Gale also noted that the space is saturated with digital screens, providing the company an excellent messaging platform for any internal communications they may have.
“There is virtually no space in the new HQ that lacks a top-quality digital display, making the digital signage application a crucial tool to maximize the network’s value and share news and updates with employees,” Gale says.
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