Jupiter Systems has been doing collaboration since before this industry used it as a buzz term.
Its pioneering Canvas collaboration solution is now deployed by just about every kind of enterprise and its new huddle room targeted Canvas CRS-4K addresses the latest demand for collaboration.
Brady Bruce, VP of marketing and strategic alliances at Jupiter, speaks with CI about how the company pioneered the collaboration movement.
TL: Explain Jupiter’s history in what has become the “collaboration” category.
BB: Jupiter for a long time has been well known for its display wall processors, which allow our users to gather lots of visual inputs, video signals, data and other things and get those up onto video walls. And that really allows a room full of managers to develop a common operating picture about the enterprise they manage.
A few years ago I asked one of our customers, ‘Is there anybody who needs to see any of this material on the wall that’s not in this room today?’ The answer was yes, and I began asking the question elsewhere. What emerged was a requirement for these enterprises to access all of the visual information that surrounds the enterprise — again video, data, volumetric information — wherever they are on any device with a screen that can connect to a network. And that really led to the creation of Canvas.
TL: What led to launching the Canvas CRS-4K, which is aimed at huddle spaces?
BB: Our enterprise customers came to us [with a] requirement to light up huddle rooms. My initial reaction was you can take a laptop into those rooms and they said, ‘No, no, no. What we want is a room that is a permanent Canvas workspace for teams. We want anybody to be able to walk in, start a Canvas session with anybody else around the world.’
So the CRS-4K, which is our conference room system, is a small box. We made it small because huddle rooms are often small and we had to make it silent for the same reason … any room can become a Canvas workspace. You can walk in; you can access all of the visual information that surrounds the enterprise; you can engage people in remote places on whatever device they happen to have in front of them and begin to work.
TL: Can you explain Jupiter’s role with enterprise clients?
BB: When we took Canvas out our initial target were the Global 2000 companies. We looked at them and said, well here are a set of enterprises that span continent. They’ve got lots of manufacturing facilities of one kind or another, very complex supply chains to manage and very broad and complex distribution networks, not to mention sales and marketing operations and Canvas looked like an ideal solution.
What was interesting to us was sort of the breadth of industries that adopted it — pharmaceuticals, energy companies, oil and gas, banks, cities.
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