Hello, and welcome to the Ultimate Meeting Room podcast brought to you by Jabra. I'm your host, Michelle Dawn Mooney. Today, we're talking about a Starin Salamander and Jabra partnership, and you are going to learn about One Stand, which is really a one stop shop for all your meeting needs with nearly zero planning and get this zero holes in the wall that gives some major flexibility. We'll tell you which industries will benefit the most from this. To have this conversation today, I'm excited to bring on three great guests. Chris Neto is CTS market development manager for Staron. Chris Descatto is senior director of sales and business development for Salamander Designs, and Joshua Blaylock is chief evangelist for Jabber. Thank you all for being here today. Thank you. Thank you. Good job. Before we kind of get into the conversation, can I have Chris Descato starting with you? Give us a brief bio if you can. Sure. Thank you very much, and thank you for having us here, Michelle. So I've been in your technology in a in AV for over thirty years now. And we work you're through Salamander, I work with a lot of large organizations to help them to deploy meeting spaces. Right? So it started out with me and and actually home theater and surround. And then over the past ten years, really focused in on meeting spaces, meeting space design, and helping organizations to deploy those spaces construction free, which makes it a lot more adaptable for any future changes. And, of course, this space is changing as fast as it ever has. And our second Chris, and we may or may not have some issues with this because I have Chris squared today. But Chris Neto, we'd love to hear a little bio from you, please. Sure. My name is Chris Neto. I'm market development manager at Starin. We are distributor for both, Jabra and for Salamander. One thing that I can bring to this discussion and maybe a little different than your typical distributor is that I've spent about thirteen years as an on-site end user. So my time there, I understand a pinpoint that this is addressing, and I'd be more than happy to to to highlight those pinpoint points that I had many years ago that still today is an issue. So I will be able to maybe give a little bit of insight from the end user perspective, not just from the distribution and where you can get the product. And finally, Josh? Yeah. Josh Blaylock. I I, at Jabra, focus in on mostly our video solutions so that we have a rich audio heritage on the manufacturing side as well. Both of those components come forward in the conference room, and, I'm excited today to kinda be highlighting how how this comes to life with this solution and and a new way to approach deploying our devices in a room in a more pain free way. And and like Chris, I come from a background that, has a lot of experience with those pain points as a consultant, for both meeting rooms and telephony for a number of years. I've I've heard and worked through a lot of those pain points. That's why a solution like this is so exciting for me to see and talk about. Yeah. And you mentioned pain points a few times. Right? Because it can the struggle is real, I guess. Right? It it can definitely be a daunting process. So let's talk about this said product that hopefully will bring a lot of solutions to companies. Tell us about the Acadia tabletop stand. Yeah. So they came this stand came to us actually as a project for Microsoft. They have obviously rooms all across you really the globe. Right? Thousands of them. And like many large organizations, they want to video enable as many spaces as possible. And they were looking for a solution to very easily and inexpensively video enable rooms that are the small to medium type of rooms, and they challenged us to develop something that could install quickly, easily, and construction free. So with the Acadia tabletop stand, it's really the first tabletop stand that was specifically built for video communications and for a deployment of a collaboration space. It can go from in the box to a fully deployed system in really under two hours. So it's a game changer. It's completely freestanding, and it can go on a table or maybe, you know, on a your cabinet or credenza at the front of the room, and goes up to a sixty five inch display. In addition to that, it can put the Jabra camera either above or below and has a foot of travel. So so it it's height adjustable as well, so it meets a lot of, you know, different spaces and organizational needs. Wonderful. So let's talk about a little bit layering of what it does because we we've heard about the easy access, but what does this allow companies to do with this very simple approach to meetings? It's a display mount. It also is a mount for the soundbar, and it's a place, you know, to store all your codecs as well. So there's a place in the back where you can strap in your codecs, and then you can wire manage it down through a middle channel, and you can go out the back or even down right through the table. So it allows it a really clean, sleek installation of a display, of a camera, and of your codex as well, all wire managed expertly. So, Josh, let's talk about this collaboration because partnerships are so exciting. But what does this mean for what Jabra has to offer its customers? It's a bit of a game changer in terms of how these devices get deployed in the rooms. There's a number of things we see and hear from customers now, especially in the ever evolving hybrid world post COVID. What is what is, you know, the right fit for a company and the changing real estate that they're dealing with? And and the real estate is changing often. The strategy is changing often. With that means the ultimate inflexibility is needed. It is it is a risk to have to put holes in the wall for mounting things, for running wires, in a lot of cases. Right? They they're like, we right now, over the next few months, we need this room to be this purpose, but we may change that a few months from now as as things evolve. A solution that lets you have a display, because that's a lot of that's a lot of hole and impact to a wall right there. Right? Change the display and the bar and the equipment in the room without messing up the room at all. That's that's a pretty big deal. For us, we're all about flexibility and choice as well. We wanna make sure that the, whatever size room you're in, whether the table is up against the wall or not, the hundred and eighty degree field of view that we bring to the table is is front and center in all cases. It opens up every room space and having something like the Acadia tabletop stand, it it means that no matter which way you orient this, whether you have it on the table, on a credenza, wherever, having the PanaCast fifty on there front and center, again, either above or below ultimate in flexibility, you're gonna capture the whole room and all those needs. And so it it it solves a lot of the challenges we hear from customers to to say, look. We we love what you're doing with video in terms of capturing that whole room, but we need the flexibility to go beyond that. We need flexibility in our display size. We need flexibility in cable management. And the Akebia tabletop stand opens up that world to say, you've got it wherever you need it and whenever you need to move it, it's it's there in a clean, neat installation. And, Chris and Edo, I wanna get your insight here. What are your thoughts on all of this? Yeah. I I just I can't believe I'm sitting here listening to two manufacturers being very coy about what this product does. Have you not walked into the recent offices that are being built and designed? You got glass walls. Where are you gonna put nails in those glass walls? I mean, you're you're you're being very, you know, generous in saying that it's just a tabletop. There's a lot of different design possibilities that are that are now open to us as, AV people. Right? And we have a bad history of just being very functional and not being aesthetic, and this thing has an aesthetic appeal to it, which is great on telematters part because of their background from the residential side. You're not gonna put something ugly in your house. Why are you gonna do that in your office? So that's the first thing. Second of all, the years that I spent on-site designing and trying to to get more video conferencing spaces added to major corporate one hundreds that I was working at, one of the problem is is the internal funny money that's used to actually paint spackle, add backing to the wall, core drill to the table, the whole thing is a very expensive endeavor which requires specialized labor, especially when you're dealing with companies that are on union sites. Right? So that just makes and adds a expense that you have to account for in the budget. So if a room was budgeted for, say, fifty thousand dollars, right, you'd have to expense a good chunk of that right away for infrastructure that needed to be done before you even expensed it. Right? And that was in the days of the custom rooms where you had control systems and all different types things added to it. Now if you want a simple video conferencing solution, monitor, microphone, codec, camera, that kind of thing, shouldn't have to be really budgeting crazy amounts of money for this sort of stuff. I think the new style of the way that things are happening with the return to office being kind of like a stutter step. People don't understand how quickly it's gonna happen or when it's gonna happen. You have to have these flexible spaces. Something that can go from a forty two inch two person room to where you pull that forty two inch monitor off and you put a sixty five inch display and you make it a little bit bigger, add a couple microphones to it. I think it gives us the flexibility and allows designers and integrators to work closer with the customers and so that the customer, ultimately, the end user, is not gonna sit there and be totally disappointed that they just sunk all this money and effort into this project that now they have to redo six months later because guess what? They have an additional, you you know, hundred and twenty people in the office, which they were not expecting, but now they do. Right? So now they can change the capacity levels. They can change the conference rooms. And I don't know about you, but every time as a designer, when I was designing spaces, a room usually started off as just a, hey. We're just gonna put a phone there. And then it changed three months into the into the game. All of a sudden, a whole new group of people, they restacked the the the floors. Next thing, the group that comes in needs to use video conferencing because their other group is in Arizona, and I'm in New York City. Right? So now how do you do this? Right? Now you gotta go through a whole process and a whole thing of where am I gonna send this out to bid? Am I gonna put this out to bid? How big of a project is this? All these companies are getting involved. All all different groups within the company are getting involved, and this is a corporate mindset. Right? So you gotta get facilities. You gotta get the IT group. You gotta get all these people together in the same room to decide that I need a bigger monitor, and I don't need it on the wall. Right? So why aren't you going right away to something that is flexible to the get go and then you can move? I think the new wave AV is that. It is that you have to deploy quick and fast, and even internally, things are changing. We don't have the luxury of these five year wait and see what happens. You now are moving at the speed of light as people are changing. So that's my two cents. Chris, I will just add on to that very quickly that, putting aside the the functionality, the flexibility, the choice that this brings to the table. To double down on what you said earlier on that, it is an elegant solution. When when customers peep you know, people tend to think about an all in one solution, they think more of a cart based approach. It's a little more clunky. It rolls around. It can take up space. They're not necessarily bad looking, but they tend to have more of a bulky feel to them. This is truly an elegant solution that looks the way you would want it to in a nice conference room, a boardroom, wherever it needs to be. So it it's it brings the flexibility with the aesthetics that you need for these rooms. Truly a a beautiful solution come to life. And not only, you know, everything that Josh and Chris said, but the other thing is there's less trades involved. Right? So it's not just about the cost of the wall reinforcement raising electrical, you know, the spackle, the you know, all those things. It's then coordinating all those trades. So there's a cost, and then there's also that can be your problematic. Right? So this you you you really streamlines the whole process. And, you know, with Starin and with Jabber, you know, not only are we doing these rooms with the Acadia tabletop. Right? But Salamander and Starin and Jabber can scale all the way up to much larger spaces, and we even deploy direct view LED without any wall construction. Right? So, you know, with Salamander, we've been about this whole, you know, no construction, less trades involved, making it more adaptable, really for as long as we've been in the commercial space. And all these benefits scale to any size room in this particular product. We're really excited about it because it really hits that sweet spot where it's the small, you know, to medium space where companies are really trying to to deploy quickly, and they have the most adaptability needs because it can go from a huddle to a private office and back very quickly. Speaking of quickly, I've gotta wrap things up because we are almost out of time, but the big burning question, people are hearing this or saying, I'm I'm in. I wanna know more. Where do they go? Where can you send them? Well, you can come to me because I have it in stock, and I can do Of course. Send it to you guys quickly as possible. But I don't wanna throw a plug out that obvious. Right? Was that a cheap plug? No. That that sounds like a good suggestion, Chris. That sounds great. You know, it's less strange involved and actually less you purchase as well. Right? You just go to Starin, and they have the entire package. So it's a great app it's a great solution. Perfect. And, of course, we'll have all of the information you'll see on your screen and show notes as well. If you would like more information on what we are talking about here, the Acadia tabletop stand. Chris Neto, CTS market development manager for Starin, Chris Descato, senior director of sales and business development for Salamander Designs, and Joshua Blaylock, chief evangelist for Jabra. Thank you all for being here. Exciting things happening. Glad you could share more about this exciting product and hopefully help a lot of people out there. So thank you for your time today. Right. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. And I wanna thank all of you for tuning in and listening to the Ultimate Meeting Room podcast brought to you by Jabra. I'm your host, Michelle Dawn Mooney. We hope to connect with you on another podcast soon.
