Also at ISE, Oblong Industries’ Mezzanine, ‘Highly Commended’ in the AV News Awards, was demonstrated as a ‘next-generation conferencing and collaboration solution’. Mezzanine offers, what Oblong describes as ‘Infopresence’ – which they say “goes beyond telepresence to bring the content and data from multiple meeting participants into a multi-surface, large format, shared digital workspace.”
Mezzanine can work remotely taking content resources from devices including laptops, tablets and smart phones. The gesture-enabled and spatially-aware properties of the Mezzanine conference room solution provide an immersive experience which Oblong says
Oblong’s Mezzanine – a sophisticated collaboration environment with Infopresence.
“is unmatched in the enterprise marketplace.”
The company cites statistics that show that the Unified Communications market in EMEA is forecast to double over the next few years. They argue that Mezzanine transcends telepresence and standard videoconferencing solutions to accelerate the ability to share content, boost productivity and unlock innovation – “transforming business and energising work teams.”
Mike Brown, Oblong’s Global VP of Sales said: “Mezzanine revolutionizes the business meeting. It enables multiple participants to share their image, voice, devices, and data simultaneously. Meetings can become so much more productive. Collaboration is easy. Your data and devices are active participants in the meeting. For example, you can create a real-time sales pipeline status war-room, sharing sales dashboard applications and data face-to-face and side-by-side with a globally distributed sales force” – hence the term Infopresence.
Oblong’s demonstration at ISE showed Mezzanine to be a sophisticated, well thought-out collaboration solution for a certain type of customer – multinationals, oil companies, banks and the like. And why not – they also need to collaborate. For us, Mezzanine seemed to hark back to PolyVision’s ill fated Thunder. Surely the market has moved in since then.
