Having a repeatable approach to setting up meeting rooms for ease of deployment, scalability, reparability, and management helps employees enjoy simpler, more flexible, productive meetings and collaborative sessions. 

Verkada, a pioneer in cloud-based physical security solutions, uses Neat devices with Zoom in all 282 of its meeting rooms across their global offices. It’s deployed Neat Bar and Neat Bar Pro, with Neat Pad as a controller and scheduler. It also uses Neat Board for open spaces and manages its Neat deployment using Neat Pulse. Verkada has designed its solutions to be simple, making them a perfect match for Neat’s simple and elegant video collaboration devices.

Driving growth with powerful collaboration capabilities  

Verkada provides simple yet powerful physical security solutions to help enterprises operate safer, smarter buildings. With over 2,000 employees in 16 offices worldwide, Verkada has standardized on Neat devices with Zoom to support its 26,000+ customers globally.  
 
Verkada employees work in the office full-time, five days a week, so meeting space is typically at a premium. With a largely open office seating plan, people usually don’t take meetings from their desks but will pop into a meeting room to connect with colleagues and customers over Zoom with Neat devices. The company culture is to “go find someone” rather than reaching out via email or Slack, so they also have a lot of ad hoc meetings, frequently using the company’s Zoom and Neat setup in the meeting rooms to share content and collaborate on a larger screen.  

People are generally in motion around our offices, working with colleagues, sharing information with other parts of the organization, and doing demos for customers. There’s always at least one meeting space in use, and typically, 80% or more of rooms are being used at a time. With that, it’s critical that our video collaboration solutions work reliably and are easy for people to use.

Zac Howe, AV Engineering Manager at Verkada.

Standardized meeting rooms simplify deployment

Verkada selected Neat for use in all its global meeting rooms because of our ease of deployment. As a fast-growing company, Verkada continues to see increased demand for collaboration space as it adds new employees and customers worldwide. Using Neat, Verkada’s small AV team can scale quickly globally, rolling out new deployments and ensuring all offices are fully supported with a unified look and feel.

We’ve taken a repeatable approach to setting up our meeting rooms for ease of deployment, scalability, reparability, and management. Neat devices are so simple to set up and just work out of the box. It gives us a real advantage to move quickly to get rooms up and running fast.

Zac Howe

Verkada’s typical meeting room uses a Neat Bar or Neat Bar Pro (for larger spaces) mounted on two 65-inch TVs as monitors. Shure microphones and Neat Bar Pro enhance audio quality in larger, more complex spaces. The company also uses a Neat Pad as a controller in the room and another as a scheduler outside the room.

In addition to using Neat Bar in traditional meeting rooms, Verkada uses Neat Board in open spaces in offices worldwide to provide even more collaboration opportunities. Some teams, such as design and finance, use Neat Board in their desk pod areas to quickly collaborate and share content without hunting for an open meeting room. Also, some of their smaller global offices have more open space than meeting rooms, so they take advantage of those spaces to ensure they can collaborate flexibly.

With a smaller AV team based at Verkada’s Californian headquarters, they use a repeatable design template for meeting rooms and have simplified their deployments to one of two approaches. For new offices or larger expansions, Howe and some of his team will go on-site to set up the conference rooms. For one-off additions or updates, they’ll engage with either a local IT team member or part of their workplace staff to send thehardware and have them set it up with remote guidance.

It’s huge for us that Neat devices are so easy to set up and manage since they make things much more efficient for my team. For smaller deployments, we can have local staff take care of unboxing and plugging it in; then, we can use Neat Pulse to remotely get the room online, all in under an hour. For a recent expansion of our London office, we went out and fully installed eight rooms in four days, all while jetlagged.

Zac Howe.

Neat Pulse maximizes room availability while simplifying management

Neat Pulse has been a key support for Zac and his team as they manage a global deployment from Verkada’s headquarters. Before using Neat Pulse, they had to manually enable the remote management tool on a room-by-room and device-by-device basis, a time-consuming and tedious process. If something went offline, it was a challenge to troubleshoot and repair, resulting in up to 20% of rooms often experiencing some issue.

Using Neat Pulse and their standardized, repeatable approach, they now have a profile created for setting up any room, making it a breeze to bring new rooms and devices online. Plus, remote monitoring and management capabilities mean they can quickly identify and fix any issues, usually before anyone realizes there’s a problem, dramatically reducing the number of AV support tickets they receive.

Neat Pulse has made managing our deployment worlds easier. But beyond that, we’ve found that even if a room does have a problem, the Neat Devices are so solid that it’s only 1 in 100 times that it’s actually a hardware problem.

Zac Howe.

Reliably connecting with colleagues and customers anywhere in the world

As a growing global company, it’s essential that Verkada reliably and easily connects with colleagues and customers anywhere in the world. Neat and Zoom make it easy for employees to enter a conference room and start a meeting immediately. The simple, familiar interface means that Howe and his team rarely, if ever, get contacted because someone can’t figure out how to use the technology.

Plus, Neat’s powerful auto framing and Neat Symmetry feature answers an essential requirement from Verkada leadership: that people don’t look like they’re in a fisheye lens. With Neat, everyone can be clearly seen up close, making collaboration more natural no matter where everyone is.

After two and a half years of using Neat devices, Verkada has developed a winning approach to ensuring it can fully support the AV needs of its global workforce and easily scale for future growth.

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