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University of Aberdeen transforms AV management and monitoring with first European deployment of SaaS cloud-based platform from Innomate

The University of Aberdeen is one of Scotland’s four ancient universities, with its origins dating back to 1495. Home to twelve different schools which deliver teaching and research on a broad range of subjects, the University has around 15,000 students from both the UK and overseas. 

As with every modern educational institution, AV technology plays a fundamental role in teaching and learning at Aberdeen. Over the last five years there has been notable growth in AV provision at the University, including significant investment in the Science Teaching Hub, as well as (in response to the Covid pandemic) the development of hybrid learning spaces to support lecture capture. In total, the University has around 350 spaces hosting AV control systems installed for many hundreds of unique types of hardware, and more than 2,500 network-connected devices requiring management and maintenance.

The University’s Directorate of Digital and Information Services recently took the decision to transform the way its AV systems are managed and monitored by deploying vendor-agnostic software-as-a-service (SaaS), to enable migration away from its existing vendor-locked solutions. Led by Head of Media Services, Mark Dunlop, the team chose an Innomesh solution from Innomate. Innomesh is a licensed, subscription, cloud-based Audiovisual and Unified Communications management platform that optimises interoperability as it monitors, controls, secures, automates, and elevates a AV/UC environment, regardless of device manufacturer, scale, or services.

In his three years at Aberdeen, Dunlop had taken an overview of the University’s provision and concluded that it was in need of significant overhaul. “We had something of a mixed bag of AV control and AV monitoring, none of which was particularly well-configured or reliable”, he says. “As part of my role I’d previously had the opportunity to visit AETM in Australia where I sat in on some presentations about the way in which many institutions there had moved to cloud-based AV control management. With that on my radar, and the fact that our existing platforms were giving us issues with cost and maintainability, it made sense to move to a more modern platform, where all the data and supportability was in one place - an ‘evergreen’ solution for which new features are regularly released.”

The Innomesh solution, available through Innomate’s exclusive UK and Ireland partner Polar, rationalises a wide range of issues for the University, with future-proofing and significant improvements in efficiency, forecast to lead to extensive and immediate cost savings. Before its installation, the University’s relatively unsatisfactory position relied on legacy platforms, multiple independent subscriptions, and expensive custom programming, which offered little insight into how its technology was being used. This was often compounded by firmware and security updates which caused unexpected issues and unstable rooms. In these cases, the resulting need for complex and time-consuming de-bugging regularly escalated to requiring manufacturer support, disrupting teaching, meetings, and other activities, as well as adding to costs.

By contrast, the rapidly deployed single platform SaaS Innomesh solution - which sees new features released in quarterly updates - offers a completely new way of operating. Improved monitoring and control of equipment means that staff can be deployed more efficiently; its data gathering and reporting provide highly detailed information on the use of each space and the components in it, thereby providing hard evidence for a data-driven approach to right-sizing and managing cost-per-room in respect of technology replacement, ongoing maintenance and utilities; improved power management delivers power saving, enhancing cost-effectiveness and sustainability, and the platform offers enhanced support by detecting issues and automatically notifying the service team, with any escalation prioritised and shown on the system’s dashboard.

“Whilst moving to Innomesh wasn’t a small investment, it will be largely offset by savings we’ll be able to make over time”, says Dunlop. “In addition to the hugely valuable data we can gather, which will help with space management, there are many other cost-saving aspects. For example, we won’t be paying programming costs to integrators on a regular basis, per-room commissioning costs will come down, and we won’t need to buy physical hardware based in a room to act as an AV controller.” 

“Over time we’ll also be able to de-couple ourselves from things like  branded touch panels and instead use secure and serviceable options for a fraction of the price”, he adds. “Things like greater flexibility for academics through more widespread use of ‘own’ devices are all made possible by a future based on our AV control and management being cloud-based.”

(Photos: Innomate)

www.innomate.io

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