You might think of the shift to collaboration-centric office layouts, chock full of huddle rooms, as de rigueur. But for forward-thinking companies like Prysm, that’s all already in the rearview mirror. From the software side of things, physical spaces like offices are all but inconsequential.
I caught up with Paige O’Neill, Prysm’s chief marketing officer, to discuss the company’s background, as well as where they’re pushing the collaboration category going forward.
The solution that aims to deliver this universal experience is Visual Workplace, a cloud-based platform for collaboration. After starting out as a manufacturer of energy-efficient laser phosphor displays a decade ago, it acquired the software company Anacore in 2014, and integrated it into the meeting room solution that’s Visual Workplace. And although it offers any-device, anywhere flexibility, it’s still the big-screen experience that sets it apart.
At the company’s founding, “Rojer Hajjar and Amit Jain, the company’s co-founders, had worked together previously and had a shared vision around facilitating more engagement in the office place, and they were passionate about helping evolve display technology,” O’Neill said. The solution they developed, the laser phosphor display, enabled the creation of solutions that are scalable to tremendous proportions—one of the standard sizes is 190 inches—giving the company a unique proposition in the rapidly expanding flat-panel display marketplace.
According to O’Neill, the large-screen nature of Visual Workplace enhances the ability of participants to engage creatively with content, as a wide variety of documents, images, charts, and videoconferences can be displayed simultaneously, side by side. This characteristic, combined with intuitive operation, not only creates a platform that streamlines meetings and presentations, but fundamentally changes the way users conceptualize group work.
“It’s just a completely different way to think about visually looking at and engaging with your content and other people’s content, and being able to get to a productive output that much more quickly,” O’Neill said. “It’s highly visual: the screens are all touch-enabled, everyone’s able to see it and engage with it at a much more effective pace, and it just really changes the equation and makes it much less linear and more dynamic than your typical way of conducting content sharing or meetings.
As a tightly integrated hardware and software solution, Visual Workplace has met with considerable success, with a host of Fortune 500 companies. And naturally, with such success from Prysm and others, big players like Microsoft with its Surface Hub, and Google, with its recently announced Jamboard, are coming in for a slice of the collaboration pie. Still, O’Neill sees these moves as a positive for Prysm.
In terms of the competition these tech leviathans might bring, O’Neill explained that while the Microsoft Hub might a good solution for few meeting rooms or huddle spaces, Visual Workplace is intended more as an enterprise-wide system—and one that’s not tied to any particular suite of software.