Is ‘as a service’ the next big thing in audiovisual?

Customers are starting to warm to the idea of taking audiovisual solutions on a subscription basis, along with the required consultancy, installation, software, service and support. ‘As a service’ models are everywhere in IT now. It’s much easier for everyone to manage software applications and keep them up to date when they are in the cloud. The same applies to security and network management and more organisations are also making use of IaaS and PaaS – infrastructure and platform services – to provide scalable options for compute and storage, and flexible development and testing environments. An increasing number of customers are asking SCC AVS about the option of taking audiovisual solutions on an ‘as a service’ basis. This is perfectly possible. In fact, for a lot of organisations it makes good sense. The cloud model is ideal for collaboration applications allowing businesses to flex their license agreements as usage and adoption grows. It also works well for digital signage, enabling software to be kept up to date at all times and allowing the content manager to feed new material to displays from anywhere and at any time. All-in-one package Of course, you can’t conjure-up the physical displays, cameras, microphones and speakers from the cloud. They still have to be delivered, set-up and installed in the appropriate place. But we can also offer the hardware and the services needed to support an AV installation on a subscription basis. In fact, we can offer to roll-up the entire solution – software, services, installation, training, and all the hardware and maintenance cover – into one contract, paid for on a subscription basis. This works really well for many customers, particularly those who have the need to deploy a number of video conferencing or collaboration stations, or multiple displays for digital signage, but don’t necessarily have the available capital to spend on such an extensive implementation. Being able to pay for the hardware and services, as well as the software, on a subscription basis means that they can benefit from the very latest AV solutions right away, but pay for them over the lifetime of those systems, which will typically be between three and six years. Easy to scale The other very big advantage of acquiring AV solutions on an as-a-service basis, is that it’s easier to scale-up your installation, if you need to, and to do that at fairly short notice. You can also much more easily update the hardware, if new technology comes along that could deliver significant additional benefits. It also means that there is no risk involved as you won’t be formally purchasing the equipment. It is easy enough for us to arrange the finance and roll it all into one deal through Rigby Capital, which, like SCC AVS, is part of Rigby Group, so we can offer everything required to deliver audiovisual solutions on an as a service basis. This is something that more of our customers are asking about now. If you’d like to read more about our thoughts on the current trends and developments with AV technology, please read our A better way of working together whitepaper.