Crestron Flex Delivers Seamless, Flexible Collaboration
Today we’re highlighting one of our hardware partners, a company that’s delivering stellar communications and connectivity solutions to businesses of all types and sizes. That company is Crestron, and we’ve shared before about some of the innovative collaboration solutions that Crestron offers.
Today, we’re diving deeper with an overview on one of Crestron’s most flexible family of products: Crestron Flex.
The Need for Collaboration Is Higher Than Ever
As enterprise organizations and SMBs push forward in a post-pandemic or endemic world, one thing is clear: the way work gets done has changed for most office-based companies or business units. For some, work from home is going permanent. Many others are adopting a hybrid approach, where coming into the office isn’t as automatic or required as it used to be.
The result is a much more distributed and distant workforce. And that workforce needs better and better collaboration tools and tech.
Fragmentation Isn’t the Future
One of the problems with an increase in remote collaboration is the fragmentation that defines today’s landscape. You’ve got multiple platforms to keep track of (and for employees to learn and IT departments to support), and you’ve got a wide array of hardware to deal with, too. Not all of this hardware works equally well, and it doesn’t all play nicely with others, either.
This is why we believe that, whatever the future of collaboration looks like, fragmentation isn’t it.
An AV Architecture That Supports Hybrid Work Natively (Not As an Add-On)
Businesses that started the hybrid or at-home transition due to the pandemic had to do so suddenly. There wasn’t time or resources to plan things carefully, and that’s why today’s landscape has so much fragmentation and cobbled-togetherness.
But now it’s time for businesses to plan and execute an AV model that natively supports the new way of working. If this includes greater amounts of hybrid or remote work for your business, then you need a solution that’s built to support strong collaboration, not just one that bolts on some cursory support after the fact.
And that brings us to Crestron Flex.
What Is Crestron Flex?
Crestron Flex is a little hard to describe because it isn’t just one thing: it’s first a platform, one that supports bring your own device (BYOD) with better collaborative tools, including wireless presentations, smart room control, and video conferencing. But it’s also a family of specific Crestron hardware, built to make the most out of the Crestron Flex platform and ecosystem.
Features Available in Crestron Flex
These are a few of the features available in Crestron Flex.
- 180-degree video: capture all participants in a small room within a single video shot. No more grabbing and pivoting the camera or mystery questions coming from offscreen.
- Whiteboard sharing: Crestron Flex supports several digital whiteboard technologies, allowing users in all locations to collaborate on the same whiteboard experience. Select Crestron Flex products allow for direct control, while others allow users to add to a whiteboard using their own personal device.
- Face framing: Crestron Flex cameras and systems can frame out individual faces of in-person attendees along with videos of off-site people, creating a grid system where all have a voice.
- Better room utilization data: When plugged into your calendar and reservation system, Crestron Flex can provide insights on room utilization, helping teams know where and when to meet (and helping leadership plan for expansion or space reallocation).
If your current videoconferencing solution can’t do all of these, then perhaps it’s time for an upgrade.
Crestron Flex Devices: Seamless Flexibility + Scalability
The real beauty of Crestron Flex is in its ability to deliver seamless flexibility and impressive scalability simultaneously.
With Crestron Flex, you can provision and control up to 5,000 Crestron devices from a centralized interface, allowing large organizations to roll out devices with no setup needs from local teams or at-home personnel. For your end users, this means opening the box, turning it on, and that’s pretty much it — everything works as your organization wants it to, no user intervention required.
The Crestron Flex family of devices is varied and includes:
- Crestron Flex Phone
- A range of tabletop and mini tabletop Crestron devices
- A smart soundbar (wide-angle webcam and pro-grade microphone and speaker array)
- Rapid Deployment Collaboration System
For more details on each of these devices, see our overview of the Crestron Flex hardware family.
Does Crestron Flex sound like the ideal choice for your business? Bluewater can help you plan, provision, and implement your new Crestron system. Reach out today!
