Situation
As one of downtown Washington, DC’s Universities expanded, the team needed reliable, easy-to-use AV for boardrooms, meeting rooms, and flexible classrooms. Clear audio was essential for high-level discussions. With continued growth and new spaces coming each year, the school required a scalable, dependable solution.

Solution
Partnering with the project architect, Cenero delivered a solution focused on simplicity and performance. The solution ensures every voice is heard and each space is easy to operate. Cenero continues to support the school’s expansion, providing responsive service and scalable technology that evolves with their needs.

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Cenero recently worked with The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania on all collaboration technology for their new Academic Research Building. The first two floors include advanced classrooms, seminar rooms, and group study rooms arranged around informal lounge and meeting spaces that overlook the campus or an internal atrium. The top two floors include the Statistics Department and Wharton Customer Analytics, with flexible spaces designed to facilitate collaborative research among faculty, post doctorate students, and staff.

 “The spaces were designed to encourage students to extend formal learning into diverse collaborative exercises and the potential for social engagement.”

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CASE STUDY: AAMI

The Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) recently partnered with Cenero to upgrade all of their collaboration technology. They now have the ability to expand education sessions to include remote participants, stream events and provide different display capabilities for presentations that they could not do before.

All meeting spaces feature room scheduling panels that are integrated with Microsoft Office 365, allowing people to walk up to a space and reserve a room on the fly. They can also immediately connect and start meetings with a single touch. In addition, Constant Connect gives AAMI confidence all technology will function flawlessly at all times with proactive testing and monitoring and on-demand 24-hour AV support.

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CASE STUDY: U.S. Naval Institute

Executive Boardroom Design and Deployment

Situation

The U.S. Naval Institute has been a fixture at the U.S. Naval Academy since 1873. As the independent platform for the sea services, they are the go to source for current technology within the Navy and its supporting industries. The Naval Institute felt it was critical to upgrade their outdated boardroom which featured very basic audio conferencing and presentation capabilities in order to promote a more collaborative environment. The project stakeholders understood it was critical to find a partner that understood their conferencing needs and could design systems that were flexible, scalable and very easy to use.

Solution

The Naval Institute interviewed several potential technology partners who could help determine the correct solution for their needs. Cenero was selected as the right partner based on their understanding of the business drivers, level of expertise and managed services available to the marketplace.

“The original boardroom at the U.S. Naval Institute was a large space with a very classic naval aesthetic but was missing the right technology elements needed to fit the client’s vision for collaboration, ” said Ernie Beck, Sales Engineer at Cenero. “When we first started the discovery process, USNI was very clear about a few things. First, the system had to be extremely simple to use, it had to preserve the historic aesthetic of the space and it had to sound great.”

The final solution consisted of professional audio and web conferencing, presentation and control elements all with minimal structural modifications to the space. Users could now connect and share from a dedicated PC, laptop or mobile device, both wired and wirelessly. The use of a wireless touch panel and table microphones meant no modifications needed to be made to the custom conference table. To maintain the aesthetics of the room, most of the AV components were discretely located in a small room outside of the boardroom or in a nearby equipment rack.

“Cenero’s comprehensive interface design and training program ensured our staff could easily operate these systems,” said Rick Woodcock, Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Naval Institute. “The follow through and attention to detail was very impressive. When I wanted to add items to the rack, a technician came right out and rewired the connectors for me. I was not expecting that level of support. From implementation to roll out, the process went very smoothly and stayed on schedule. Most importantly, the donors and board of directors were impressed with the results, which means we can continue to keep up with the latest technology for years to come.”

“Cenero had a clear grasp on all of the technology options, and made sure to take into consideration the ways we would use the room and what was the best fit based on our specific requirements. Plus they provide a great managed service called Constant Connect. At the touch of a button I can reach an experienced service engineer who can help me with any issues or questions I have – this really reduces the learning curve and makes it very easy to utilize the video conferencing technology.” 

                                                       – Chief Technology Officer, U.S. Naval Institute

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CASE STUDY: Wharton – UPENN

Telepresence Classroom of the Future

Situation

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania recently unveiled a new classroom that combines life-size visual communication via telepresence with collaboration technologies that allow for faculty, students and alumni to interact regardless of location.

 

Seminars

“Cenero played an integral part in helping develop this truly collaborative experience. With their assistance on the design, programming and installation of the rooms, we were able to create interactive classrooms that leverage Cisco TelePresence technology to enhance the way faculty, students and alumni interact.”   – Inder Sidhu, Senior Vice President, Strategy and Planning, Cisco

From providing 3D renderings of what the room would look like to designing a classroom that leveraged technology to create a collaborative environment, Cenero was an integral part of the revolutionary classroom.

Learn More

Solution

• Connects Wharton’s Philadelphia and San Francisco classrooms seamlessly for one multi-presence experience
• Floor-to-ceiling screen at front of room – students can view the professor in life-size high definition
• 80″ LED monitors on side walls
• large projection screens in rear – students on the other coast appear to be seated in rows directly behind local students
• Leading experts from around the world can now teach and directly interact with students from any location 
• Reduces the need for travel and offers access to classes that would normally be unavailable to remote students
  

  

“The genesis of the idea of the connected classroom was created by Cenero. The ability and knowledge of audio visual space and how that applies to what we do as a school is something Cenero uniquely brings as a partner. Cenero provides incredible thought and innovation as we reinvent what the education process looks like through technology,” – Dan Alig, Chief Information Officer, Wharton

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CASE STUDY: St. Timothy’s School

Cenero value engineers to meet all of St. Timothy’s requirements

Situation

St. Timothy’s School, a private school for girls in Maryland, was in need of an AV partner to help with the design and build of their new Dining Commons.  The dining facility would seat 230 students and feature satellite TVs, drop down screens for presentations and a connection to the school-wide music system.  With high ceilings and many windows, maintaining excellent acoustics for the background music, teleconferencing and multimedia presentations was a top priority.

The school had recently installed an audio visual system in their lecture hall that did not work properly – speakers would fade in and out, iPads did not connect reliably and the overall installation was poorly designed. The vendor that worked on the project claimed they knew there would be issues but they were limited in what they could provide due to budget restraints.  Looking to avoid similar issues in the new dining hall, St. Timothy’s wanted to work with a new partner that would design a system that would work properly while meeting budget requirements.

Solution

St. Timothy’s interviewed five different vendors for the dining hall project.  Four of the contenders were product focused – trying to sell a particular projector or screen without first understanding the specific needs of the school.  Cenero was the only company that asked questions about what the facility was going to be used for and what needed to be accomplished in the space. By spending time understanding what St. Timothy’s wanted to achieve, Cenero could then put together a comprehensive proposal with recommendations for the best way to meet all of the necessary teleconferencing, multimedia and budget requirements.

With a thorough understanding of St. Timothy’s multi-use needs, Cenero presented a variety of solutions and allowed the school to test each option to understand the features and functionality in order to make an educated decision. “From the initial proposal to the programming and training, the quality and professionalism of Cenero was incredible,” continued Stevens. “The Cenero team took the time to make sure we were comfortable with all the systems, helped us figure out program setups for different presentations and trained us so that we felt confident we had a quality system that would work for all of our various needs. We recently had a group of alumnae in the space and they were blown away by the quality of the sound – there is not a bad spot in the room in terms of visual or sound.  I would highly recommend Cenero to anyone looking for an AV partner. They truly understood what we were trying to achieve and designed a system for our budget that would work flawlessly.”

“Cenero found ways to value engineer and develop solutions that would meet all of our needs while staying within budget, something that was greatly lacking in our experience with the other AV company we had previously worked with on the lecture hall project. Cenero presented the pros and cons of different options to help us determine the best choice for the space and budget. They challenged us regarding where to save money and what areas where quality would suffer if we were to cut back,” – Randy Stevens, Head of School

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The University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication recently needed an upgrade in their primary presentation center. After entrusting Cenero before, they once again asked Cenero to update their technology and ensure impactful high resolution solutions.

The university was looking for top quality screens to display presentations with high clarity and a powerful processor with a greater variety of possibilities. Phil McClelland, the school’s classroom technology manager, said the old wall required the school to request that presenters’ edit their presentations to have a dark background. “All of these people would come in with presentations and they wouldn’t look as good as they could,” McClelland states.

He also noted the functionality of the wall did not meet the requirements students and faculty needed. “Sometimes we do classes with other universities where we’ll have one screen with our presentation and another screen with a video conference,” says McClelland.

In order to improve the overall experience for the users, Cenero partnered with Christie to replace the room’s aging equipment with the Christie Velvet Apex Series video wall and the Christie Spyder X80. The new LED wall means no more bezels that can distract and a bright, rich color during presentations, while the Christie Spyder X80 offers more collaborative interactions for users.

“We made sure to take into consideration how the room was going to be used, the needs of the faculty, students and presenters,” Cenero’s sales engineer, Tom McElwee, says. “Then we put together a solution that would not only work well for the various requirements but would also display an excellent visual.”

McClelland says the update is much better than what they previously had. “We get a lot of compliments about how good the wall looks,” he says. “We were looking forward to doing this and the LED shows the content very well.”

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